Neighbours (1952) on Netflix
Two neighbors, one on the left and one on the right, live peacefully in identical houses. A single flower appears between their homes, and each man claims it as his own.
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- Netflix4.0/5
- IMDb7.9/104,247 votes
- Rotten TomatoesNot available
Featurette
Plot summary
Identical houses appear in a suburban landscape, and two men settle into chairs outside them with pipes and newspapers. Their newspapers report that war is certain without peace and that peace is certain without war. A single flowering plant then sprouts in the ground between the two homes. Both men are drawn to it; its scent leaves them euphoric, and they fall into a shared dance of joy. Trouble comes when each man decides the flower belongs to him. They quarrel over where the property line runs and whose land the plant grows on. It was shot in pixilation, a technique that photographs live actors frame by frame.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Neighbours (1952)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- The version of Neighbours that won an Oscar was not Norman McLaren's original: he had been required to cut a scene in which the two men murder each other's wives and children to make the film palatable to American and European audiences. The scene was later reinstated, but had to be salvaged from a lower-quality print because the original negative had been destroyed.
- Norman McLaren made the soundtrack of Neighbours by scratching the edge of the film; the blobs, lines and triangles he cut were read by the projector as sound.
- Norman McLaren said a stay of almost a year in the People's Republic of China inspired Neighbours; his faith in human nature was reinvigorated there, and he returned to Quebec just as the Korean War began.
- In one brief sequence of Neighbours the two actors appear to levitate, an effect achieved by having them repeatedly jump upward and photographing them at the top of their trajectories.
