Propelled to international attention through an Oscar nomination at the age of 25, the legendary National Film Board artist Arthur Lipsett remains an anomaly within avant-garde film histories. Uneasily oscillating between a personal, artisanal tradition and the NFB’s institutional mandate “to interpret Canada for Canadians,” he was a popular experimental filmmaker whose eccentric, satirical collage films were renowned around the world. Born in Montréal in 1936, Lipsett displayed early creative talents, winning top honours at the prestigious Museum School of Art and Design. As an artist he came of age during an era of conflict and change. The arrival of television, the communist scare, nuclear anxiety, the Vietnam War, the escalation of the civil rights movement, and Québec’s Quiet Revolution (a period of rapid social transformation and rising Francophone nationalism), all contributed to an emerging cultural style. This new spirit of approach, manifested in the individualism and challenging aesthetics of Le Refus Global and Les Automatistes, Abstract Expressionism, Beat literature, bebop and post-bop jazz, and the American avant-garde cinema, can likewise be found in Lipsett’s films of the 1960s. As the preeminent film experimentalist Stan Brakhage stated in the late-1980s, “If I had just known of Arthur Lipsett in the ‘60s! So many people would have cared in the United States to see his work, and they would have felt it vibrantly. He would have been important.”

However, during the 1960s and ‘70s Lipsett was one of Canada's best-known filmmakers. Thanks to the NFB's promotion and distribution mechanisms, his works were screened frequently at international festivals, on public television, and in university and high school classrooms. The NFB's former “boy genius” was admired by such diverse film patriarchs as Stanley Kubrick, Brakhage, and George Lucas and has been compared favourably to William Blake, J.D. Salinger, Glenn Gould, Dziga Vertov, and Bruce Conner. Despite the awards, accolades, mainstream exposure and cross-continental circulation that Lipsett’s work received in his lifetime, his films have since faded into semi-obscurity. Though once recognized and appreciated in many countries, he is now better remembered as “the ghost of experimental film in the NFB documentary machine” (Take One’s Essential Guide to Canadian Film) and proof that “experimental film-making at the NFB is an impossible proposition” (David Clandfield, Canadian Film).

There was a time when that proposition wasn’t impossible. While apprenticing with Norman McLaren in the NFB’s animation department, Lipsett developed an original method of audio-visual counterpoint. According to George Lucas, “No one understood the power of image and sound better than Lipsett.” Lipsett crafted his films from documentary outtakes, stock footage and sound extracted from cutting room trim-bins, which he combined with his own moving and still images. Humorous and darkly ironic by turns, his films encompassed many genres, blending experimental form and structure with insightful sociopolitical critique. They also revealed his growing inner turmoil. Although his films were bold, stunning and successful, bureaucratic pressures and Lipsett’s deteriorating mental health forced him to leave the Board in 1970; his filmmaking soon came to a standstill. In 1982 Lipsett was diagnosed with chronic paranoid schizophrenia and he died a few years later, just short of his 50th birthday.

The exhibition Arthur Lipsett: About Time presents the first European retrospective of Lipsett’s concise but influential career, re-assembling his dazzling collage work alongside correlative Canadian media artists from the past half-century. Always rhythmically “in time,” Lipsett’s filmmaking opened new directions and possibilities for his and subsequent generations. Seen in this context, Lipsett’s experiments, with time, assume ever richer, more abundant meanings.

Special thanks to Patrick Javault and Catherine Hubert, Musée d'art moderne et contemporain de Strasbourg; James Roberts, National Film Board of Canada; Lauren Howes and Jeff Crawford, Canadian Filmmakers Distribution Center; Wanda Vanderstoop and Erik Martinson, Vtape; Christophe Bichon, Light Cone; Valérie Perrin, Espace multimédia Gantner; Martine Markovits, École nationale supérieure des beaux-arts; Stéphanie Côté, Cinémathèque québécoise; Lois Siegel, Eric Gaucher, Astria Suparak, and Marian Arnold for their generous assistance.

Arthur Lipsett: About Time is produced by the Musée d'art moderne et contemporain de Strasbourg. Travel funding provided by The Canada Council for the Arts. The films of Arthur Lipsett are produced and distributed by the National Film Board of Canada, except for Strange Codes, which was preserved and provided by La Cinémathèque québécoise. Additional films and videos are courtesy Canadian Filmmakers Distribution Centre and Vtape.

Program I
Lost & Found: The Films of Arthur Lipsett

Arthur Lipsett recognized cinema's ability to reveal the ugly side of life, the things we don’t want to acknowledge: the refuse. By pursuing truth within the everyday, Lipsett also discovered beauty in the basic and the absurd. Utilizing found materials in concert with self-shot photos and footage, his films transform the fragmentary nature of refuse into a unified material vision. This program brings together Lipsett’s first five celluloid compositions, produced at the National Film Board of Canada across the 1960s. These films, which represent the primary arc of his artistic evolution, exemplify how pictures and sounds can be fused in a synthetic yet sincerely personal form.

Program II
Strange Codes: Canadian Collage Film & Video After Lipsett

Arthur Lipsett was working at a time when independent avant-garde filmmaking did not exist in Canada, with a few isolated exceptions – Jack Chambers in London, Ontario; David Rimmer and Al Razutis in Vancouver; Joyce Wieland and Michael Snow, who jointly relocated from Toronto to New York in 1963. In the absence of tradition, Lipsett blazed a new trail. His pioneering collage films imparted exciting possibilities for handmade, cameraless and found footage filmmaking, both in his time and in the present day. Extending upon his applications of vertical montage (the moment-to-moment juxtaposition of picture and sound), the Canadian collage film and video that follows Lipsett is marked by greater formal manipulation and layering, combined with, in some cases, autobiographical, poetic, and emotional subject matter.

Program III
Heavy Magic is Coming: Lipsett's Final Films

Celebrated for a handful of remarkable films that circled the globe throughout the 1960s, Arthur Lipsett also authored two works that have seldom screened anywhere. Recalling the Beat ethos of previous decades, N-Zone (1970) and Strange Codes (1972) have more in common with the rambling dramaturgy of the American underground cinema of Adolfas Mekas, Ron Rice, Taylor Mead, Ken Jacobs and Jack Smith, than the acerbic collage style for which Lipsett was famous. Languid, theatrical, self-conscious, and semi-autobiographical, these last films were crafted during a time of declining institutional support and advancing mental illness. “Heavy Magic is Coming” culls its title from the fragmentary notes and diagrams for Strange Codes, evincing Lipsett’s late-career, debilitating paranoia, and an urgent faith in magic.