Blinkity Blank

Blinkity Blank (1955)

A playful exercise in intermittent animation and spasmodic imagery. Playing with the laws relating to persistence of vision and after-image on the retina of the eye, McLaren engraves pictures on blank film creating vivid, percussive effects.

Date of release
1955-04-25
TMDB
6.4 / 10 (53)
Runtime
5m
Genres
Animation, Music
Director
Norman McLaren

Interesting facts

  • Awards: 3 · Nominations: 0. Including: Short Film Palme d'Or; British Academy Film Awards; Berlin International Film Festival

Blinkity Blank is a 1955 animated short film created by Norman McLaren for the National Film Board of Canada. It won, among other awards, both the Short Film Palme d'Or at Cannes and the BAFTA Award for Best Animated Film.

Production

Engraved directly onto black film leader, Blinkity Blank features a soundtrack combining improvisational jazz from composer Maurice Blackburn along with graphical sounds created by McLaren scratching onto the film's optical soundtrack.

The film features lines, dots and other abstract forms, along with fruits, trees, planets and chickens—the latter featured at length in another McLaren hand-drawn film Hen Hop—which blink in and out of existence, or merge with or modulate other shapes. McLaren also left some frames blank, which he described as "sprinkling on the empty band of time".

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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