Puzzle of pain

Arthur Lipsett, leader of some funny-sad trips down humankind's memory lane

By Dennis Harvey

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If Canadian cinema doesn't get a lot of attention or respect — admittedly, there are some legitimate reasons for that — imagine how ignored Canadian avant-garde cinema must feel. A case in point, if one well past the point of taking personal offense, is the late Arthur Lipsett. In a slim period of productivity from 1961 to 1972, he created collage films striking enough to attract praise from Stan Brakhage and Stanley Kubrick. (The latter even asked him to create a trailer for Dr. Strangelove, though in typically perverse fashion, Lipsett refused to consider it.)

But escalating mental-health problems pretty much ended Lipsett's creative output before he'd reached 40. Diagnosed with chronic paranoid schizophrenia, he committed suicide a decade later, in 1986, after several abortive attempts. The moderate fame he'd achieved as an artist-employee (albeit a disgruntled one) of the National Film Board quickly evaporated, particularly since his experimentalism didn't fit the accepted documentary-dominated profile of Canada's (and the NFB's) pre-'70s movie history. His films are now hard to come by and have spurred no major critical studies.

That silence is baffling once you've seen them — something you can do this Saturday as Other Cinema presents a program of works recently restored by Johannes and Lars Auvinen of LA's Global A. (If you wonder why Canadians didn't do it themselves, let's just say the NFB ain't what it used to be.)

Each of Lipsett's black-and-white films might serve as a time capsule of 20th-century Western life, though not a very flattering one. Their elaborate audio and visual collages of photos, news footage, entertainment errata, industrial images, interview sound bites, pageantry, and atrocity often play like a gape of horror — they could very well be what a recoiling Keir Dullea is really looking at in 2001's "trip" sequence. From 1961, Very Nice, Very Nice pays wickedly arch tribute to an empty, uninformed, short-attention-spanned, consumerist utopia. The 1963 Lipsett film 21-87 renders beauty-contest spectacle indistinguishable from political pomp and war carnage. Fluxes, released in 1968, uses banal fiction snippets ("A duchess in the morning, a milkmaid in the afternoon — a strumpet at night!") and pulp sci-fi references to bring real-life displays of military might down to the same trash-heap level.

As excoriating a worldview as these movies provide, they're also very funny, and Lipsett's juxtapositions are unfailingly genius. However, in the last film he completed, 1972's Strange Codes (not on ATA's program), you can see that discipline unraveling — showing the artist himself puttering around his studio, and the result is like a letter from an ill friend that provokes concern but little understanding. *

ARTHUR LIPSETT REVIVAL

Sat/4, 8:30 p.m.

Artists' Television Access

992 Valencia, SF

$5

(415) 824-3890

www.othercinema.com