Creativity Quote by Norman McLaren

McLaren’s affection for black-and-white isn’t nostalgia; it’s an argument for distance. By calling it “stylization,” he’s naming the medium’s power to declare itself artificial, to refuse the pretense that what’s on screen is simply life captured. Color cinema, especially once it became the default, sells a smooth illusion of immediacy: the world “as it is.” Black-and-white, by contrast, advertises its own mediation. It tells you, up front, that you’re watching a constructed image - a choice, not a window.

That matters coming from McLaren, an artist whose practice treated film as something you could draw, scratch, animate, and choreograph rather than merely photograph. His work sits inside a mid-century modernist ethic: abstraction isn’t an escape from reality; it’s a tool for getting at patterns beneath it - rhythm, gesture, mood, the physics of movement. Black-and-white helps that agenda by stripping away the most persuasive layer of surface detail. It turns faces into geometry, light into structure, motion into music.

The tossed-off humility - “I don’t exactly know why” - is doing work too. McLaren sidesteps theory-speak while still landing a sharp critique of realism’s cultural prestige. He’s hinting that our hunger for “actual life” on film can be a trap: the closer the image gets to the look of reality, the easier it is to forget we’re being guided. Stylization, in his framing, is honesty.