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WILLIAM C. WEES

R ~

COMPILATION

TO COLL.AGE:

The Found-Footage

Films

of Arthur L ipse tt

The

Mart in Walsh Memorial Lecture

2007

These fragments I have shored

against

my

ruin

....

IS . Eliot,

The Waste and

Resume:Oeuvrant l Office national du

film

du Canada pendant les annees 60,

Arthur Lipsett a transforme

Ie

documentaire de compiiation-illustre par lesseries

Canada Carries On

etWorld in

Action

produites pendant la guerre-en films de col

lage modernistes qui critiquent les valeurs et mreurs de

la

societe nord-americaioe

des annees 50 et 60.

Une

lecture attentive de certains passages de

Very Nice Very

Nice

A

Trip Down

Memory

Lane

et

Fluxes

nous permet de

voir

ses methodes en

action.

Ces

methodes partagent certaines premisses theoriques etablies par Walter

Benjamin pour son projet inacheve sur

Les

Arcades, en particulier

Ie

potentiel

revelateur des rebus et dechets t} extraits de leurs contextes originaux et juxta

poses selon les principes montage.

W

hen John Grierson returned to the National Film Board in 1 96 4 t o help

celebrate its twenty-fifth anniversary, he reportedly remarked with char-

acteristic bluntness,

I t

has come to my attention recently that the Film Board

more and

moreis

becoming infiltrated with 'arty-tarty' types who intend to use

the facilities which it offers

fOL

their own private purposes. ] Grierson did not

name names, apparently, but Arthur Lipsett could easily have been one of the

arty-tarty types he had in mind.

Born and raised in Montreal, Lipsett joined the Film Board in 1958, after

three years of study at the Montreal Museum School of Art and Design, where

he was twice named best student. 2 At the

NFB

he worked as animation artist,

photographer, cinematographer, sound and picture editor, post-production con

sultant, and director. In one capacity or another, he contributed to more than

twenty films over a dozen years,

bu t

his reputation as an innovative filmm.aker

rests on five short films:

Very Nice Very Nice

(1961),

21-87

(1964), ree

Fall

(1964), A

Trip own Memory ane

(1965), and

Fluxes

(1968). His last film for

the

NFB N Zone

a]Jpeared in 1970. It is also hislongest (at forty-five minutes)

and generally regarded as his least successful, though the film does have its

defenders.

3

After resigning from the Film Board in 1970, Lipsett made

Strange

CANADIAN JOURNAL OF FILM

STUDIES

REVUE CANADIENNE D'ErUDES CINEMATOGRAPHIQUES

VOLUME

16

N O . 2 FALL AUTOMNE 2007

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2 U

odes (1972), in which he appears in a variety of costumes and acts out what

appears to be a search for clues (or codes) that, in his words, could enable a

human being to help make transformations and connections from his inner

world

of

feeling, to the world of day to day reality systems.

4

The

film

remains

undistributed and virtually unseen, and it brought his filmmaking career to an

enigmatic and inconclusive end.

L IP SE T T A ND T H E A M ERICA N AVANT-GARDE

Regarded by some as the Film Board's boy genius during his early years at the

NFB 5 Lipsett was able to make ex]Jerimental films that were widely distributed

by

the Board and shown-and awarded ]Jrizes-at American and Euro]Jean festi

vals.

In

1964, for example, 21-87 was voted most ]Jopular film at the Midwest

Film Festival in Chicago. In the same year, at the Independent Film-Makers

Festival in Palo Alto, California, 21-87 was awarded second prize, with first ]Jrize

going to Kenneth Anger's

Scorpio Rising

and third prize to Bruce Conner 's

Cosmic Ray.

TWo years earlier,

Very Nice Very Nice

had been nominated for an

Academy Award in the Best Live Action Short category (an odd category for a

film with almost no live action).

By

the time of his death by suicide

in

1986,

however, Li]Jsett was Virtually forgotten and his films relegated to classroom

screenings in high schools, colleges and universities. In the late eighties and early

nineties his work was re-discovered by a few American critics, film ]Jrogram

mers and filmmakers. In October 1998, Li]Jsett retrospectives in New York and

Chicago expanded interest in his work within the American avant-garde

film

community and ]Jroduced extensive discussion of his films on Frameworks, the

electronic EX]Jerimental FilmDiscussion List.

6

Of the filmmakers instrumental in

preparing the ground for this revival of interest in Li]Jsett's films, the most

]Jromi

nent was Stan Brakhage. In a lecture at the University of Regina in 1988 he

had

exclaimed, IfI had known of Arthur Li]Jsett in

the

'60s

So

many ]Jeople would

have cared in the United States to see h is work , and they would have felt i t

vibrantly.

He

would have been im]Jortant.

7

Lipsett's films w r im]Jortant, but with the exception

of

Very Nice

ry

Nice

they did not circulate

Widely

in the u]Jper echelons of the American avant-garde

film scene of the 1960s. That was likely the result of the NFB's lack of connec

tions with American avant-garde film co-ops and screening venues and, on the

American side, a suspicion of the avant-garde credentials of a filmmaker em]Jloyed

by a governmental film agency.

Of

the filmmakers who were recognized as

im]Jortant in that scene, the Americans Bruce Conner and Stan Vanderbeek had

the most in common with Lipsett. All three were making found-footage films-or

collage films, as they were usually called at the time. Like documentary com

pilation films, found footage films are composed of pre-existent footage, such as

stock shots, archival materials, and extracts from previously released films, but

unlike conventional compilation films, they are not designed-for the most part,

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COLLAGE 3


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at least-to inform, educate orpersuade; nor

do

most

of them

attempt to establish

logical, coherent relationships between shots or use an authoritative voice-over

to ten us what we are seeing andwhy we are seeingit. Instead, their juxtaposition

of images and, frequently,

of

sounds and images has more in common with the

arbitrary relationships and dream-logic of Surrealism, the irony and iconoclasm

of Dadaism, and the disjunctive conjunctions of collage and photomontage-in

short, the techniques and intentions characteristic of prominent developments in

modernist avant-garde art.

While the makers of documentary compilation films drawprincipally upon

the resources of archives and stock-shot libraries, avant-garde found-footage

filmmakers range much farther afield

to

find their raw material in the bargain

bins of camera shops, thrift shops, flea markets, and yard sales; in piles of films

discarded by film libraries and other institutions; in dumpsters behind film pro

u ~ t o n

houses, labs, and television studios. As artist-archeologists

of

the film

world, found-footage filmmakers sift through the accumulated audio-visual detritus

of modern culture in search of artifacts that will revealmore about their origins and

uses than their originat makers consciously intended. Then they bring their find

ings together in image-sound relationships that offerboth aesthetic pleasure and

the opportunity

to

interpret and evaluate old material in new ways.

. By the 1980s, found footage films had become onebf the dominant forms

of experimental/avant-garde film in Europe and North America, and, thanks to

Brakhage and others in the avant-garde film world, Lipsett posthumously joined

Conner and Vanderbeek as recognizedearly masters

of

the form, to which A

IHp

Down Memory an eand Fluxes were Lipsett s principal contributions.

9

Of

course,

Conner, Vanderbeek and Lipsett mixed and matched their found materials differ

ently. Conner gives particular attention to graphic, rhythmic, and metaphorical

relationships among disparate, discontinuous images. His montage creates a formal

unity that is frequently missing in Vanderbeek s r ~ chaotic, scrapbook-like

collages

of

images and sounds. While Conner s

f ilms are

influenced by the pot

pourri of cartoons, serials, trailers, newsreels, short subjects, and features that

constituted a typical Saturday afternoon at the movies during the years he was

groWing up, Vanderbeek s seem more in tune with Marshall McLuhan s elec

tronically fabricated global village, particularly when he applies videographic

effects to newsreel and television images and brings together a profusion of

found sounds on the sound track.

In form and content, Lipsett s found-footage films fall somewhere between

those of Vanderbeek and Conner. At its best, his manipulation of images

approaches the formal complexity and metaphorical density

of

Conner s work,

but like Vanderbeek he takes advantage of the sound track to reproduce the het

eroglossia of contemporary, urban life and the mass media. All three filmmakers

address the melange

of

grandeur and inconsequence, disaster and

frivolity

heroism

WILLI MC WEES

and foolishness that constituted the human conditionin the twentieth century-or,

more precisely, the audio-visual records

of

that condition discovered by the

film-

makers and appropriated for their own films.

The one thing that most clearly distinguishes Lipsett s found-footage films

from Conner s and Vanderbeek s

is

the institutional context

of

their production.

While Conner and Vanderbeek had

to

make do with what they could find and

produce on their own, Lipsett had at his disposal the technical services

of

the

NFB

and its international network of film archives and stock shot libraries.

Consequently, while the

NFB

may have harboured other arty-tarty typesmaking

films that raised Grierson s ire, Lipsett was arguably the most subversive because

he used the facilities of the Board to radically revise and implicitly critique the

documentary compilation film, a form Grierson had energetically promoted dur

ing his tenure as GovernmentFilm Commissioner at the

NFB.

THE NFB S

COMPILATION FILMS

The compilation films in the two series Canada Carries

On

and World in Action

have been criticized as simplistic in their treatment

of

complex social, political

and economic issues, propagandistic, and sometimes intentionally misleading

about the sources and significance

of

images illustrating the film s narrative and

argument. Compounding those problems-by helping

to

hide them-was the

authoritative voice of

God

commentary

by

Lome Greene with a basso-profundo

solemnity that precluded doubts or counter-arguments. D.B. Jones s sternjudge

ment is typical

of

the criticism directed at the films. In his history

of

the Film

Board, Movies

n

Memoranda Jones writes, The sound tracks in Canada

Carries On

and World in Action overwhelm the images. The commentary is

shouted, the music shrilly dramatic. Artful the

films

may have been; art, no.

They were tracts. il

Nevertheless, the NFB s compilation films were, in

Zoe

Druick s judgement,

one of the NFB s greatest achievements during the war. ll Certainly, they

received widespread distribution and critical acclaim, including a special Academy

Award

for Churchill s Island

inthe

Canada Carries

On

series.

As

Richard Griffith

notes, Grierson shamelessly stole the format and production methods of the

March of Time but under his leadership, and with Stuart

Legg

and Stanley

Hawes as the principal supervisors of production, The forrn...developed into

something far in advance of the

March

of

Time

or of any other contemporary

informational film medium.

3

In an essay written in 1945, but publishedmany

years later, Ernst Borneman, who oversaw the production of instructional films

at the Board, recognized in the films a sense for the symbolic in the topical, and

for

the most highly condensed meaning within the shortest possible footage. 4

Of

their dependence on verbal commentary, Borneman observed, Aside from

active verbs and pseudo-quotations ( The experts say that. .:) the most important

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7 m ?

innovation here was the use of metaphors and similes created by the juxtaposition

of an incidental aspec;t ofthe visual and an incidental aspect of the commentary

in such a way that they b ecame meaningfully, though to the spectator imper

ceptibly, welded together.... 5 Borneman s examples include, from Balkan

Powder

eg 1944):

Pix: Peasant lying down in field and covering self in cloak.

Comm: [Hungary s aristocrats] still wrapping themselves and their people

in a cloak of injured pride.

From the same film:

Pix:

Ox scratching ass with horn.

Comm:

Hungary, the country whose rulers have gazed irritably backward

at the past....

From ow ThePeace 1945):

Pix: .Marching massed troops dissolve to

VHS

[Very High Shot] San

Francisco and bridge (Horizon shot).

Comm: ...that when-this time-the

men

come marching back, it may be to

a world on the march itself to new horizons

of

adventure.

.From John Bull s.Own: Island 1945):

Pix:

Surf against breakwaters; aerial shots of dark skies followed by shot

of

parting clouds and long shot of bright EnglishJandscape.

Comm: Against the walls of Britain, the tempests of the second war with

Germany have raged for nigh six years. And now-acros s the Island

Kingdom s darkened skies-the

douds

are parting at long last, as though to

promote brighter times ahead. 16

One way to analyze the welding process at work in the se cinematic

metaphors is

to

draw upon the distinction between vehicle and tenor in

I A

Richards s theorization

of

literary metaphorY In Borneman sexarnples, the vehicle

is the actual image on the screen, andthe tenor

is

the idea ascribedto the image

by the commentary.

n

John Bull s Own Island, for example, the commentary

turns the vehicle surf against breakwaters into a metaphor for England s

resistence to German aggression during

the

war In the example from

ow The

Peace the vehicle, San Francisco and bridge, directly represents the citywhere

the Charter of the United Nations was drawn up and signed by fifty countries

in 1945; the tenor arises from

the

commentary s evocation of a peaceful

nd

WILUAM

C

WEES

prosperous post-war world built upon the kind ofinternational cooperation that

produced the UN

The process

of

metaphor-making in these and other examples offered by

Borneman is fairly straightforward, as one would expect of films aimed at a mass

audience. For Grierson and his colleagues, subtlety and thought-provoking com-

plexity were aesthetic luxuries the wartime situation did not allow.

As

Grierson

wrote at the time, f webangthem out one a fortnight and

no

misses, instead of

sitting six months on our fannies cuddling them

to

sweet smotheroo, it s because

a lot of bravos in Russia and Japan and Germany are banging out things too....

18

Clearly, years later, no comparable sense

of

urgency motivated Arthur Lipsett,

whose

films depend on a comparable interplay of picture and commentary, vehicle

and tenor, but with the significant difference that Lipsett s films confront viewers

with ironic, ambiguous, even contradictory associations

of

sound and image that

challenge them to make sense out of what they are seeing and hearing, but without

the help of a commentary specifically linking vehicle and tenor.

FROM COMPILATION TO COLLAGE VERY NI E VERY NI

By

radically revising the relationship of sound to image, Lipsett makes that rela

tionship less stable, more open to interpretation. Moreover, the confident tone

and moral certainties of the earlier films were designed for the morale-building

and collective action Grierson regarded as essential

to

the war effort and a

new

post-war internationalism, but in Lipsett s films confidence and certainties give

way to doubts, skepticism, relativism, expressions of rebellious individualism,

and radical challenges to the dominant culture s mores and values. Like the

black humour of such comedians of the time as Mort Sahl and Lenny Bruce,

his films dissected the characteristic attributes

of

a post-war age

of

anxiety

. dominated, on the one hand, by consumerism, conformism, and faith in scien

tific and technological progress, and on the other hand

by

Cold War geopoli

tics and the ever-present threat

of

nuclear annihilation. I am arguing, in other

words, that Lipsett renovated the format of the Film Board s 1940s compilation

films to accommodate a modernist, collage aesthetic and an artistic sensibilityin

tune with the issues and attitudes ofthe 1950s and 1960s

While Very Nice, Very Nice

is

not, strictly speaking, a found-footage

film

it

provides n instructive introduction to Lipsett s tactics

for

juxtaposing images

and sounds. Except

for

some archival footage ofa nuclear explosion and a rock

et launching, it is composedof cut-out collages and photographs, many ofwhich

weretaken by Lipsett in New

York

London, and Paris. Most ofthe sounds were

found, ut we are leftto guess where Lipsett found them and what their orig

inal uses might have been. The film opens with the title superimposed on the

first of several photographs of the facades

of

nondescript city buildings taken

with the camera tilted up from street level (with no human figures visible) and

continues with a quick introductory collage of sounds and images:

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Figure 12. Over background

of crowd

noises,

man's

voke:

#Keep moving tight ahead, p l e a s e ~

Rl(ures 811. A wornan's voice:

And

un,

and uh, the geme, it's really

uh,

really

un,

nice to look

;It, for

me

though, I like football better than thewhole,

uh,

1

mean, baseball

Of

hockey

or

skiing,

or,1 prefer f o o t b i l l ~

figmes 67. Photos of

faces

ifl a

raVid series

of dissolves with the

\JflidentWed

yoke

of

Marshall Mcluhan:

hPeople

who

have

made flO attempt to

eduCilte

themselves jive

in

e kind

o dissolving phantasmagoria e world. That

Is,

they completely lorgel whet happened la5t

Tuesday.

A politician

call

promise them anything. aml

they

will not remember latl 'fWhat

he

has

promised,

and

uh,

t h e ~

Figure 4. onk

Figure

2, *10 the city mardles Ill' army whose

motto 1 ._

As in the wartime compilation films, the sound track evokesfiguralive readings

of

the pictmes. The metaphorical (and invisible) a r m y ~ is denied fulfilment of

its desires ( NO '), trapped in an economy of obsolescence and waste {Junked

and heedless consumerism ( 13UYT This a r m y ~ is far cry from the men

comIC' marching b a c k ~

at

the end

of

the war ,vim the prospect

of

joining

world onthe march itself to new horizons of adventure, so stirringly invoked

In

The mc e The methods may be similar, bm their iludio-visua strategies

.

aJHJiitlt.lgnci ?d effects are very different, as a few more exAmples from the same

filrttmake abundantly clear:


5/11

saw

\V{,'stem

society in the years

follOWing World

War I,a condition summed

up in,

.you Know

only/ A heap

ofbmken

images, ?>

Imerestingly,

The Waste

Land's closing benediction

from

the Upanishads,

Shantih shantih shamih, has a counterpart m Lipsett's film: the insertion of

ohmmm lnlrllwd twice about two'lhirdK of the way through

V Y ice

ice

More than im

inddentalechn

it indicates a key moment in the film, up

to it is a series of pholOs taken at a peace demonstration, including one

of

a

death's head

on

a long pole.

As

it

concludes. a male volee asks, \Vhat

is

meaning of

l ifel

What a good? Wh,lt

is

a value? The is, Obmmm,

Familiar as an aid

to

meditation, olunmm is a prolongation

of

toe sound

Ihat,

in several branches of Hinduism, sign.ifies the divine energy permeating the Ulr-

VErse

ant binding the physical

and

spiritual dimensions of

life

into a

nnily. Chanting ohmmm is a way of using the sound ofone's voice to

of thar energy and deepen a sense of tht ' unity that it creates, tn

'obmmm

is

followed by the sound of one person clapping and a man der;larmg

appreciatively, Bravol

Very

nice, very nice

The accompanying image

is a pbu

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