Creativity Quote by Norman McLaren

“Militant” is the tell: McLaren isn’t posing as a gentle aesthete, he’s picking a fight with hierarchy. In a culture that long treated cinema as industrial product and painting as “real” art, he plants his flag in the most disarmingly basic claim imaginable: making is delight. Not prestige. Not theory. Not the museum’s approval. Pleasure in the act becomes his polemic.

The sentence works because it refuses the usual defenses artists reach for. McLaren doesn’t argue that film is as profound as painting, or as complex, or as deserving. He argues it’s as direct. That word quietly attacks the idea that movies are inherently mediated by crews, machines, budgets, and commerce. For McLaren, the medium is not the bureaucracy around it; it’s the intimate encounter between hand, eye, time, and surface. A canvas is a surface. Film is another surface, just moving.

Context matters: McLaren’s life sits inside the 20th century’s collision of craft and technology. As an animator and experimental filmmaker (and a key figure at Canada’s National Film Board), he worked in a space where film could be propaganda tool, mass entertainment, or laboratory. Calling filmmaking a “simple direct delight” is a strategic reframe: it rescues cinema from both corporate spectacle and national-institution seriousness, returning it to play, rhythm, and invention.

The subtext is democratic and slightly subversive: if cinema is as straightforwardly joyous as painting, then anyone with curiosity and a tool can claim it. The “militancy” is a defense of making against gatekeepers, and against the temptation to treat art as anything other than lived practice.