wees collage
TRANSCRIPT
-
5/20/2018 Wees Collage
1/11
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
PP
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,
fROM COMPILATION
TO
COLLAGE 3
-
5/20/2018 Wees Collage
2/11
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
FROM COMPILAnQN TO COLLAGE
-
5/20/2018 Wees Collage
3/11
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:
FROM
COMPILATION
TO
COLLAGE
-
5/20/2018 Wees Collage
4/11
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:
-
5/20/2018 Wees Collage
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