Jacques Drouin: In Relief

Jacques Drouin (Canada, 1943) works for the National Film Board of Canada. His career is associated with one of the rarest animation techniques in history: pinscreen. A pinscreen is a white screen filled with thousands or millions of pins, which can be moved in or out by pressing an object onto the screen. The screen is lit from the side so that the pins cast shadows. The further the pins protrude, the darker the screen becomes. The technique is extremely labour intensive, but enables a rich graphic image. Alexandre Alexeieff (1901-1982) and his wife Claire Parker (1906-1981) are the pioneers of the pinscreen. In the early 1970s, Alexeieff demonstrated the technique at the National Film Board of Canada and Drouin started experimenting with it. The Alexeieff couple’s influence on the work of Jacques Drouin’s films is obvious, but Drouin developed his own style by exploiting all possibilities of the pinscreen. The programme consists of a recent documentary about his work by the National Film Board of Canada and a couple of his films.