Jacques Drouin
28 May 1943 – 28 August 2021
Every festival has its origin story and so many of us who work in the cultural sector recall the moment when they suddenly realised they KNEW exactly what it is they wanted to do. MIAF and I have ours.
News of the passing of Canadian animator Jacques Drouin brought back memories of the day I was running a class on Directing Theatre and trying to explain the difficulties any theatre piece has in taking the story, the cast and the audience from one place to another very different place – difficulties that approached impossibility as the complexity and imaginative parameters of the change ramped up. One attendee told me I was “working in the wrong artform dude” (he probably really wanted to say “old man”). The next day he brought in a VHS tape of “Mindscape” by Jacques Drouin.
He was right; impertinent perhaps, but right.
“Mindscape” is nothing but a non-stop caravan of changing, morphing imagery and in there somewhere is a narrative of sorts but it’s the IDEAS that take front stage – this is a quintessential example of an animated imagination at work.
Drouin made this masterpiece on a pinscreen, an arcane device originally invented by Alexandre Alexeieff in which images are painstakingly ‘carved’ into the pinscreen’s surface. They have a beautifully grainy look to them and are the perfect medium for flowing and ever-changing animated visuality.
I quit that job, abandoned theatre and talked my way into a ‘fake-it-til-ya-make-it’ film festival role programming their animation which is where I met Nag Vladermersky and Susi Allender and, together, we set up MIAF in way back in 2000.
Several years later I had the very great pleasure of spending a week with Jacques when he was the guest of the London International Animation Festival (which I co-direct). Jacques was widely regarded as one of the loveliest people working in animation and that’s exactly what I came away feeling as well. Gentle, astonishingly patient and generous with his knowledge and creative spirit.
MIAF (and me) tips our hat, Jacques – a life well lived.
Malcolm Turner
MIAF Co-Founder
Take a moment to experience genius at work… and at play
Mindscape
Take a moment to meet Jacques
Making Movie History: Jacques Drouin
Want to learn how pinscreen animation works? Amazing!
Pinscreen Documentry (1973)