FI12793.010 THE CORRIDOR 16mm Ektachrome original 100 feet. Note the travelling zoom is shot backwards, although McLaren said it would be travelling forwards should he use it. So I (Don McWilliams) used it travelling forwards in CREATIVE PROCESS. It makes more sense that way. The technique of THE CORRIDOR, the travelling zoom, was invented by McLaren in the 1930s. McLaren's intention was gradually to make the corridor disappear, so that the viewer's initial imprisonment would give way to the freedom of the infinity of space. McLaren once said his fascination with space came from being accidentally locked in a cupboard when he was about seven years old. Some years after, he pooh-poohed this explanation, saying his fascination was, rather, aroused by surrealist painting and also by those cartoons in which Disney created an illusion of deep space with the multi-plane technique. McLaren's first film based entirely on this technique was the 1944 C'EST L'AVIRON. McLaren never released the test. It seems too short for a film and one feels that other material is needed. McLaren remained interested in the corridor. He thought of using the idea in his NARCISSUS. As a test, we superimposed film of a live dancer on a black and white print of Corridor. The result is strange indeed. The dancer uses all the frame but remains on one plane, though he is in the zooming tunnel. There is a similar effect near the end of BLINKITY-BLANK . N.McL: "A zoom starts. But the birds in the centre of the frame remain exactly the same size as they were before. But the peripheral little things go away into the distance. The McLaren Corridor was actually used (as it was shot, in reverse) for the main title of an NFB film 1950s series PERSPECTIVES