Arthur Lipsett -- coming soon

[Scharphedin2]

Coming soon...

[Adam]

Maybe you can find a link to the interview with George Lucas in Wired a couple of years ago where he talks about his love of Lipsett.
And a good link to the National Film Board of Canada site for distribution.

You can actually watch a few of his films on the National Film Board of Canada site.
http://www.nfb.ca/explore-by/director/Arthur-Lipsett/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
Here's a link to Very Nice Very Nice:
http://www.nfb.ca/film/Very_Nice_Very_Nice/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[jesgrew]

Could we get some more details on this? I see that the NFB has two recent, as of two years ago, documentaries out about him. Don't know anything about their quality. And there are four shorts for sale. Two of them individually for twenty dollars a piece it looks like. What's the quality on these discs like? It's really unfortunate that it's so expensive to see Lipsett's work. I think he'd be very disappointed.

And it's a little disappointing there aren't more posts in this thread. Despite Lipsett's critical acclaim he seems to have really suffered from obscurity. That is something else Lipsett would probably find discouraging. On his first film Very Nice, Very Nice he said, “It's not just an interesting experiment…it moves people. It's not 'arty.' Ordinary people enjoy and understand it.” Kubrick responded to seeing Very Nice, Very Nice by stating it was “one of the most imaginative and brilliant uses of the movie screen and soundtrack that I have ever seen.” Lipsett later turned down an offer by Kubrick to edit together a trailer for Dr. Strangelove. Brackhage admired his abilities and George Lucas was so inspired by Lipsett's 21-87 that not only did it help spawn THX-1138 but it also influenced the concept of 'the Force'. A sample of a conversation between Warren S. McCulloch, a cybernetician, and Roman Kroitor, who later helped pioneer IMAX, was spliced into 21-87 wherein Kroiter responds to McCulloch's assertion that humans are merely complex machines with, 'Many people feel that in the contemplation of nature and in communication with other living things, they become aware of some kind of force, or something, behind this apparent mask which we see in front of us, and they call it God."

There are three shorts available on the NFB website to view for free, with decent quality too. And their are four for sale. Although if you look at NFB's online catalog and search for Lipsett under 'credits' there are nineteen results with twelve of them with Lipsett as director. Some of these appear as more standard television education shorts - The Puzzle of Pain, Animal Altruism, Animals and Psychology, while several others, with producer Tom Daly, is his work that is, “in between – neither underground nor conventional” - the visual poems of collage and essay, which include two of the three films that the NFB has uploaded. Still others show his work as editor or animator, even as an AC. One panel for television that Lipsett directed "features American film historian Herman Weinberg, film critics Clyde Gilmour and Fernand Cadieux, and NFB producer Guy Glover." Their subjects of inquiry? The films of George Dunning, Robert Breer, Jan Lenica, Wladimir Borowczyk, and Arthur Lipsett. Norman Mclaren shows up as well to speak a little about his own methods of creating films.

He's a fascinating person and it would be fantastic to have all this work out on DVD with reasonable pricing.

Edit: Ah, most of this information and more can be read here at Senses of Cinema. Also the bibliography they have at the bottom where some of the quotes are extended.