Collected Data
"This is Lipsett’s truest gift. The ability to make us feel and see anew, and in doing so, illuminating and revealing the many mechanisms through which we usually choose to remind numb and blind."
Carolyne Weldon for NFB Blog;
Unusual and unsettling, Lipsett’s films are complex and tightly-wound. On the surface, or at first glimpse, all one experiences is chaos. The films appear disjointed, headache-inducing, even rambling. The visuals race from one thing to the next, and the sound doesn’t match.
But closer scrutiny reveals the depth and scope of Lipsett’s genius. Below the surface, things are moving. Things everyone stumbles upon once in a while: existential dread, unease, futility. Powerful feelings that most of us prefer to suppress and ignore.
Inside the Disturbed and Disturbing Collage Films of Avant-Garde Genius Arthur Lipsett
"And then, as mysteriously as it had appeared, it vanished, leaving only memories of its audacious visual imagery in its wake."
In the era we live in, ecstasy is in short supply. Escape from reality is one thing, and it’s in high demand right now, packaged and sold in a seemingly endless series of comic book and blockbuster franchise films that bludgeon audiences into submission, but that’s not what I’m talking about here. Rather, I’m examining a group of films made in the early to mid 1960s that openly celebrated life, and our connection to it, through a strategy of sensory overload that sought to make the viewer almost a participant in the film’s content, to convey, without restraint, the sheer joy of existence in world of seemingly endless possibility. Perhaps it’s impossible to make such films today; perhaps we have lost our connection to the real world to such a degree that only CGI effects and amped-up soundtracks reach mass audiences.
Ecstatic Cinema: Romantic Experimental Filmmaking in the 1960s
"Mr. Baillie creates a film that represents less the world as it seems to exist than one that’s been refracted through his being."
Manhole Dargis for the NYT;
In many respects, the image is perfectly ordinary, the kind that you chance on if you’re driving along, say, a California road, as Mr. Baillie was when he popped out of a car, seized by inspiration. Yet, as the camera continues to float left and Fitzgerald begins singing (“All my life/I’ve been waiting for you”), something magical — call it cinema — happens in the middle of the first verse. As the words “My wonderful one/I’ve begun” warm the soundtrack, a splash of red flowers on the fence suddenly appears, as if the film itself were offering you a garland.
Bruce Baillie, a Film-Poet Collapsing Inner and Outer Space
"Lipsett’s filmmaking opened new directions and possibilities"
A Trip Down Memory Lane by Arthur Lipsett, National Film Board of Canada
Brett Kashmere;
When Lipsett, fresh out of Montreal art school, was hired to work in the Unit B’s animation department in 1958, an independent avant-garde cinema did not exist in Canada. In the absence of tradition, Lipsett blazed a new trail. His pioneering collage films imparted exciting possibilities for handcrafted, personal, cameraless, and found footage filmmaking, both in his time and in the present day.
Inventing a Tradition: Arthur Lipsett and the NFB’s “Studio X”
Arthur Lipsett was a genius.
Watch: "Squarepusher Discusses his Ufabulum Live Show"
Squarepushers Damogen Furies is out today.
Surprisingly, Pitchfork didn’t hate it, but did give it a generic review.
Listen: "Damogen Furies" by Squarepusher
Andy Battaglia for NPR;
Intimations of humor are never far from Squarepusher's challenging music, which is all the better and more powerful for the unusual alliance he strikes. There's fertile middle ground between furrow-browed intensity and appreciation for the gleefully absurd, and Damogen Furies finds a sweet spot somewhere therein. Even at his most unhinged, however, Squarepusher has a knack for flashes of virtuoso control, as in the drum-run in the last half of "Exjag Nives" or the many little wiggles and shifts in "Baltang Arc." It can be hard to know how exactly to react to every moment, but making a case for fruitful confusion is Squarepusher's specialty.
First Listen: Squarepusher, 'Damogen Furies'
"You can’t rely on an industry that serves Hollywood. You need to be a technician and a filmmaker."
The decline in commercial film production, however, has been countered by a rebirth in the phenomenon of artist-run film laboratories. What in the early Nineties was limited to a handful of cooperatively owned, independent labs, mostly in France, has grown into an international network of over 30, many of them formed within the last several years. The decline of film processing created a surplus of cheap, unwanted equipment that, in the right hands, could be repurposed for the smaller-scale operation of an artist-run lab. Saved from the scrap heap, many discarded contact printers and lomo processing tanks have begun a second life as artists’ tools.
Kitchen Sink Cinema: Artist-Run Film Laboratories
Watch: "Infinite Schwarzenegger" by Rob Beschizza
Listen: "The Axiom EP" by Badawai
"Dub Step? Truth is music is made from only two things: Frequencies and choices. Once you see it that way genre has absolutely no power anymore and can be mutated into any shape imaginable." - Raz Mesinai
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