Arthur Lipsett @ Anthology.

"Whenever film students romance unease, irony, or postmodern self-reflexivity by mating discarded footage to narratively irrelevant yet accidentally evocative audio, they are saluting the Canadian filmmaker Arthur Lipsett, whether they know it or not," writes Bruce Bennett in the New York Sun. "Lipsett (1936 - 86), who is the subject of an essential retrospective at Anthology Film Archives this weekend, as well as an excellent documentary, Remembering Arthur, by the late filmmaker's friend and colleague Martin Lavut, also running at Anthology, did not invent the collage film, but he came close to perfecting it."

"I first came across Lipsett's work at, of all things, a Godspeed You! Black Emperor show (I know, I know, but you were 20 once, too)," recalls Reverse Shot's mjr, "where instead of having an opening band GY!BE asked Jonas Mekas to present (and herald with a bugle) a small collection of Canadian experimental films, Lipsett's among them. Along with earlier viewings of Valse Triste by the now late Bruce Conner, Scorpio Rising by Kenneth Anger, and T, O, U, C, H, I, N, G by Paul Sharits, they were some of the first experimental films I ever encountered. As an impressionable young man they arrived as revelations, and Lipsett's films, Free Fall and his most famous work, Very Nice, Very Nice, stood out most disturbingly and, therefore, profoundly."

Posted by dwhudson at August 15, 2008 2:58 PM