Arthur Lipsett transformed literal trash into cinematic treasure. Working at the National Film Board of Canada during the 1960s, he wove bits of discarded audio and film into unforgettable collages. The four films embedded below through the NFB archive, all less than 13 minutes in length, inaugurated his tragically short career. They continue to delight, confound and provoke some fifty years later.
As Brett Kashmere put it in a Senses of Cinema essay, Lipsett’s work “disrupts the representational value of documentary image and sound, moving beyond the genre’s aesthetic codes of truth and reliability”. What we see and what we hear seem at first unrelated. Sometimes the sights and sounds come to form some sort of compliment, but frequently they press against and even threaten to negate one another, creating an unresolved and unresolvable tension. Lipsett speaks through these strange sensory paradoxes, offering a fascinating commentary on modern life.
His first film, 1962’s Very Nice, Very Nice (which played before Zielinski at T/F 2011) places us in the shadow of Madison Avenue and the Atom Bomb.
Very Nice was originally conceived as an audio only experiment, in Lipsett’s words “purely for the love of placing one sound after another”. We hear a series of voices, at times threatening to speak for the film directly in samples of cultural critics including Northrup Frye and Marshall McLuhan. But just as our understanding begins to congeal, the audio melts away into incoherence and redundancy. The result looks like this:
“We’re living in a very competitive world today as compared to 30 or 40 years ago, everything is highly competitive, uh, would you like to answer that Paul? . . . people who have made no attempt to educate themselves live in a kind of dissolving phantasmagoria of a world, that is, they completely forget what happened last Tuesday, a politician can promise them anything and they will not remember later what he has promised, and ah, the . . . oh, the game is really nice to look at, for me I like football . . . in other words we are suffering from uh, everybody wondered about what the future will hold, what’s ahead of us, but if you feel well, you know inevitably whatever’s going to happen, you feel well anyway . . . warmth and brightness will return, and renewal of the hopes of men.”
And so on. Our faculty for discerning meaning in spoken language is deftly turned against us. So too, our capacity for reading expressions at a glance is frustrated and confounded by the visuals. Mismatched edits link still photographs of faces transfixed in rapture, terror, confusion, joy and sadness. Lipsett’s simultaneous tweaking of these two cognitive systems masterfully effects the “dissolving phantasmagoria of a world” promised above.
These head games also help to account for the film’s unnerving shifts in tone, an essential feature of all of Lipsett’s work. What at first reads as a brooding, somber meditation is quite suddenly a zany carnival. Late in the film a sudden parade of magazine cutouts dance before our eyes, and the soundtrack is given over to trite, jazzy music and ecstatic yelling. Tragedy and farce are indistinguishable.
Stanley Kubrick was so impressed with Very Nice, Very Nice that he approached Lipsett about directing the trailer for his own black comedy of atomic warfare, Dr. Strangelove, Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. When Lipsett declined, Kubrick directed the trailer himself, but in a style clearly indebted to Lipsett. It has always been one of my favorite trailers. The unnerving audio track fills me with a weird sort of giddy horror.
Lipsett’s second film, 1964’s 21-87, confronts humanity’s search for an essential identity.
The very first image is a forceful reminder of mortality, a leering skull letting us know the stakes. The series of film clips that follow depict modern life as either mechanized or frivolous. People are seen as actors performing roles: models in a fashion show, a man dressed in a space suit, kids gyrating to rock and roll, acrobats moving across a wire. A bombardment of faces is again essential to the film, this time as a procession on an escalator, jump cuts linking the uninterested faces moving simultaneously upwards and towards us.
After opening with an unnerving robotic grind, the soundtrack offers a diverse sampling of our religious and spiritual aspirations, “the search for the force behind this apparent mask”. These range from austere choral arrangements to soulful gospel music, from Orthodox liturgies to extemporaneous musings in a public park. By the time we reach the frightening conclusion, it appears we are content to be thought of as just a number.
Lipsett’s third film, Free Fall (1964), is his most abstract sensory overload.
A pounding jazz melee immediately sets the tempo for this cinematic blitz. Even when the film slows down, the relaxed interludes are fraught with tension. Visual and thematic motifs of the first two films reappear here, the sea of faces invoking humanity lost in the crowd, the bewildering snippets of anxious dialogue and monologue. But here they are in service of something more primal and frenzied. Human beings are juxtaposed with insects, maniacally scrambling across the frame. Our Free Fall could be from grace, either real or imagined, back into the the chaos of nature.
The final film in Lipsett’s inaugural quartet, A Trip Down Memory Lane (1965), is a chilling history lesson.
Subtitled Additional Material for a Time Capsule, the film is more formally restrained than the other three, utilizing relatively longer snippets of archival newsreel footage. Public celebrations of “achievements”, political, cultural, economic, religious, military, technological and scientific, are fed back to us as an alarming spectacle. The common aura of pomposity surrounding these events, despite their diversity, creates a nauseating sense of the grotesque. This feeling builds until it manifests as the searing audio distortion of the film’s climax. Our present search for meaning, it would seem, needs to avoid such public displays of “meaningfulness” at all costs.
For a clear example of Lipsett’s continuing influence, see Adam Curtis’s brilliant It Felt Like A Kiss (T/F 2010). Curtis describes this film as a “psycho-archaeological dig of the American Empire”. As in Lipsett’s Trip, shock edits highlight unsettling connections, and the comfortable compartmentalization of our historical memory is gleefully destroyed.
Curtis’s collage is just one example of Lipsett’s continuing relevance. His films feel perfectly at home in the age of YouTube and will no doubt continue to confound and delight far into the future.
Editorial note: this essay was originally published in July of 2011. We are sharing it again following Forbidden Lie$ screening in our retrospective series DocuMemories.
Even before I began working with the festival in any official capacity, I’d spent an undue amount of time pondering the meaning of the name David and Paul chose for it. True/False. Did they intend to ironically posit the existence of a dichotomy between the two concepts? Or is that little slash in-between indicative of their belief that something can be at once true and false: a representation of reality in search of some transcendent truth but nevertheless constructed, constrained by subjectivity, compromised? To what do documentary filmmakers possess the greatest responsibility: to the facts of the case (the truth) or to some abstract bigger picture (the Truth)? All of which is a long-winded way of saying that, at the outset of this new project, I’d like to take the opportunity to discuss what I consider the quintessential True/False film — if not its best (obviously, it has a lot of competition for that slot), at least the fullest embodiment of its thematic concerns.
Anna Broinowski’s Forbidden Lie$ is a film whose pleasures are best experienced knowing as little as possible about what’s in store, so consider this a warning to get out while you still can. Lie$ focuses on Norma Khouri, a 34-year-old Jordanian hair-stylist-cum-author with an accentless facility with English and devastatingly tragic story: Her childhood friend Dalia, with whom she ran a small unisex salon, was killed by her own father in order to preserve her honor after she initiated a relationship with a Christian man. Her friend’s terrible fate led Khouri to become a dedicated opponent of the Islamic practice of honor killings, and Lie$ initially celebrates her activism — even going to the trouble of re-enacting excerpts of Dalia’s romantic (but still entirely chaste) dalliances as depicted in Khouri’s subsequent memoir, Forbidden Love (or Honor Lost, in the States).
The film’s first half hour is an unremitting hagiography of Khouri, depicted herein as somebody approaching martyr status. It highlights her sacrifices for her noble cause; her daring stand against violent religious fundamentalism has not only resulted in threats against her life (she claims a fatwa on her head) but has also prevented her from focusing on herself (at 34 years, still a virgin!). This all culminates in a playacted montage of Dalia’s fatal tryst, accompanied by a truly terrible pop song celebrating the couple’s love. This scene, completely bewildering in its apparent tone-deaf romanticism, is the point at which I seriously contemplated abandoning the theatre during my first viewing. But then something utterly remarkable happens: The music video abruptly ends with a screech, the fake Dalia melts into sand, and the film cedes ground to Jordanian journalist and activist Rana Husseini, who systematically refutes and dismantles the claims of Forbidden Love one by one. And this is when we realize we’ve been set up, borne witness to a spectacular feat of misdirection.
As Khouri’s story begins to fall apart (and, despite Khouri’s best efforts, it begins to fly apart at the seams), it’s useful to self-reflexively examine your own reactions to this first part. In granting so much time to recreations of events that probably never happened and certainly didn’t happen as Khouri wrote they did, Broinowski implicitly acknowledges the primacy of illusion: To what extent is how we define things as “true” a product of what we visually perceive? To have Khouri narrate the story might leave a lingering doubt; to provide a visual approximation of her story erases it, so great is the privilege granted the image in the mind. I was so repulsed by the film’s lovey-dovey romanticization of Muslim-Christian miscegenation (replete with soft focus and dissolve editing) that it never even occurred to me that the entire affair might not have existed at all. In undermining her own dramatizations, Broinowski undermines the inviolable sanctimony of the image in general.
Similarly, Forbidden Lie$ invites troubling questions about the extent to which we accept narratives because they conform to our own political ideologies. Was Khouri’s story received so widely and with such scant skepticism in Western countries due to its depiction of Islamic society as ruled by oppressive moral absolutism and a violence-sanctioning patriarchy? The opening minutes of Lie$ sees Khouri making jokes about media censorship within Jordan — and it sees Western, predominantly white audiences eating her performance up. Khouri’s incessant claim that honor killings occur unnoticed within Jordanian society could be facially rejected with just the barest amount of research, and yet her stories undoubtedly resonate with Western audiences. It slowly becomes apparent that, by offering a fictionalized Jordanian society as a foil, Khouri reflects back at us the values we wish to project: freedom, justice, tolerance.
Near the beginning of F for Fake, Orson Welles pledges that “For the next hour, everything you hear from us is really true and based on solid fact” — and he begins lying through his teeth the moment the hour’s over. The point? The act of telling the truth is inextricable from the act of drawing lines, definitions of situations. And this is what makes Norma Khouri such a compelling figure as well; she has an uncanny ability to wriggle out of the most blatant prevarication, mostly because she knows precisely where the line is at all times. Rather than spewing outright lies, she allows people to make assumptions and clears the air only when her façade is in danger of utter collapse. Over the course of the film, untold damaging details come to light: She’s a U.S. citizen, she’s married with kids, she’s under investigation by the FBI — and, incredibly, nothing seems to stick.
The scary part? Khouri’s complicity throughout the whole thing. Even with Khouri almost definitively outed as a fraud, one gets the impression that she remains in sole charge of her story, that we’re still only seeing what she wants us to see. I mean, Norma’s seen blowing smoke against a black screen between the film’s chapters, and she’s far too shrewd a wit not to realize that potency of that visual metaphor. “There is no real Norma,” says a lie-detector expert at one point during the film. True to that sentiment, we cannot by film’s end say that we have a better grasp of just who Norma Khouri is than we did at the beginning; our search for truth ended the moment of its inception, and we’re left with these small, flawed pieces that, if we try to gather them, flow from our fingers like the sands of Jordan. In the end, Forbidden Lie$ represents an elegant synthesis of form and content: If Khouri is a con artist, we could very well say the same thing of her movie.
Warm weather has returned, and brought with it our national pastime, baseball. It’s time to follow the advice of little league coaches the nation over and “get your head in the game” with some baseball docs.
Of course, when it comes to baseball and documentary the elephant in the room is Baseball, Ken Burns’s recently expanded 1,338 minute opus of black and white photographs and men gushing for the camera. But do we really need all those writers going on about the smell of hot dogs? Fortunately, there are alternatives with shorter run times.
Donald Brittain and William Canning’s little known classic King of the Hill examines the 1972-73 Chicago Cubs and their right handed phenom, the soft spoken Fergie Jenkins, one of the greatest Canadian baseball players of all time. A True/False film in a very real sense, King combines footage shot over two years into a “false” narrative of a single Cubs season. Through intimate observations in the locker room, stunning photography of the action on the field, and a gently ironic take on a traditional sportscaster, King reveals a baseball season to be a long grind of momentary excitements and looming disappointments (spoiler warning: the Cubs don’t win the World Series). This film is available streaming online as part of the extensive archives of the National Film Board of Canada.
Jenkins went on to a celebrated 19-year Hall of Fame career, featuring a NL Cy Young Award and three All Star appearances. He was alluded, though, by one achievement coveted by every big league pitcher, the no-hitter. The greatest no-hitter of all, if the story can be believed, was recorded by Jenkins’s contemporary Dock Ellis on June 12, 1970. Sure, Don Larson may have thrown a perfect game in the World Series, but did he do it while “high as a Georgia pine”? James Blagden’s short Dock Ellis and the LSD No-No (T/F 2010) uses animation to present Dock’s remarkable claim, that he accidentally found himself starting a big league game for the Pittsburgh Pirates while tripping on acid, and went on to throw a no-hitter despite being uncertain about the size of the ball. Or perhaps even what sport he was playing, as he recalls making an out covering first and thinking “Ew, I just made a touchdown”.
A popular theme of baseball documentaries is the moral pitfalls of fandom. Michael Wranovics’s Up for Grabs (T/F 2005) tells the stranger than fiction story of Barry Bonds’s record setting 73rd home run ball, believed at the time to be worth in excess of one million dollars. The ball was caught, however briefly, by Alex Popov and then recovered moments later by Patrick Hayashi. Beyond that accounts vary, as multiple interviewees offer conflicting testimony and opinions about sucker balls, snow cones, and the alleged biting of a child. Popov eventually emerges as the star of the show. He files an ultimately self-destructive lawsuit against Hayashi, and gradually falls in love with the camera like one of the self-deluded optimists of a Christopher Guest mockumentary. In the end we are left with a spectacle equal parts nauseating and hilarious.
Less amusing is Alex Gibney’s Catching Hell, which presents the harrowing case of Steve Bartman. During the top of the eighth in game six of the 2003 NLCS, Cubs fan Bartman deflected a foul ball and disrupted a potential catch by Cubs outfielder Moisés Alou. In short order the Cubs blew both their 3-0 lead in the game and their 3-2 lead in the series, continuing their epic 103 year championship drought. Steve Bartman instantly became responsible in the eyes of the city and was forced into reclusion by media harassment and threats of violence. Gibney uses personal narration and multiple interviews to contextualize the incident within the long history of sports scapegoating and curses. But the film’s most powerful asset is the footage of the game 6 itself. Through a montage shaky fan videos we watch in the present tense as thousands of Cubs fans chant “asshole” in unison and throw beer at Bartman until he is smuggled to safety by stadium security.
The long season stretches out before us, and there is still time for all fans to believe that just maybe “this is our year”. Hopefully these baseball docs will help whet your appetite for a return to the ballpark.
The persuasive, political, polemical documentary film is by now a familiar genre. It has become an essential part of our discourse, and it frequently produces boring, heavy handed, and cliched results. The 2012 True/False Film Fest features Detropia, the work of two filmmakers who have succeeded in breathing new life into an often stale form. Over the course of their four films together, Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady have expanded our understanding of what a political doc should be. While their films react to our political culture’s painful open wounds, what they finally offer are powerful and poetic glimpses of human striving under the weight of profound social, political, and ideological burdens.
