Mar
6
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Films
by Ross Lipman
Filmforum
is delighted to host Ross Lipman, Los Angeles-based filmmaker and film
preservationist extraordinaire.
Filmmaker/curator Konrad Steiner writes, “Lipman’s films chronicle
the lives of men and women on the periphery of our vision; who slip through
the cracks in the system, who walk invisibly by us each day. His medium
ranges from photographs to Super-8, 16mm and 35mm film, and each work
orchestrates light, language, and silence to create cinematic portraits
that fall on a spectrum between document and story.” This special
screening features a sampling of Lipman’s work spanning a period
of over fifteen years, including his early collage work, film portraits
from the ‘90’s, and the Los Angeles premiere of his 35mm psychological
drama The Interview, shot by the extraordinary Babette Mangolte (and printed
in muted colors and silent film tones.) It also includes a sneak preview
of his work in progress Keep Warm, Burn Britain!, a personal memoir of
London’s squatting movement in the 1980’s, and a live performance
by Michael Whitmore of Listing Ship accompanying Lipman’s award-winning
Rhythm 93.
1) 10-17-88 (Chicago, 1989, 11 min., 16mm, sd.)
Optically printed collage of found and archival footage, with audio collage
by John Shaw on themes from Debussy and Ellington. An investigation of
one’s self within the sociological theater of our cultural history,
breaking out to speak to archetypal memory.
2) Rhythm 93 (London/San Francisco, 1994, 9 min., 16mm)
With live musical accompaniment by Michael Whitmore of Listing Ship
A silent portrait of a winter morning in Clerkenwell, London. Set in England’s
bleak post-Thatcher years, Rhythm 93 is a narrative stripped of plot.
It offers no explanations for the actions depicted—they are intended
to depict a pure psychological state. An exploration of the boundaries
of visual story-telling, the film breaks with conventional notions of
cinematic continuity by varying exposure and focus; inviolate tropes of
classical match cutting. But it is no formal exercise—the driving
force is natural light, which mirrors the character’s shifting inner
states.
3) The Gift—Michael Barrish screen test (San Francisco,
1999, 3 min., Super-8 sd.)
“A project that never was. As a test for my unrealized filmscript
The Gift, I asked my friend Michael Barrish--now author of the “Oblivio”
weblog--to tell the camera a story about a recent exchange with his father;
a subject at the core of The Gift. This film, shot in Super-8 sound, is
the story he told, and all that exists from that project...” --
RL
4) Keep Warm, Burn Britain! (London/Los Angeles, 12 min. excerpt
of work-in-progress, slide show/performance)
Lipman’s memoir of the squatting movement in England in the mid
1980s. It chronicles the lives of the anarchists, outcasts, and punks
who lived in a small enclave of abandoned buildings south of the Thames
in East London; an area known in the anarchist community as “Squatter’s
Paradise”. After a brief outsider renaissance the buildings were
destroyed and their dwellers dispersed; a forgotten moment in the broadscale
gentrification of Docklands Development. Featuring an original score by
legendary NY street musician and Academy Award winning documentary subject
THOTH.
5) The Interview (San Francisco/Los Angeles, 2004, 32 minutes,
35mm)
The tale of a chance encounter between two women struggling to stay afloat,
in an era of the downsizing of dreams. A taut psychological narrative
printed in muted colors and silent film tones, shot by Babette Mangolte.
Starring Julie Queen, Lisa Black, and Elektra Ditto.
Ross Lipman is an independent filmmaker whose work has screened throughout
the world at venues ranging from the London International Film Festival
to the Chinese Taipei Film Archive, and collected by institutions and
museums including the Sammlung Goetz in Munich. He is a former member
of Budapest’s celebrated Bela Balazs Studios and Chicago’s
infamous Theater Oobleck. His recent film The Interview is currently touring
Europe as part of the Best of the Oberhausen International Film Festival
travelling program.
Lipman is also one of the world’s leading figures in the restoration
of independent cinema, having restored works by John Cassavetes, Charles
Burnett, Shirley Clarke, Emile de Antonio, and many others. He has lectured
internationally and his writings on film history, aesthetics and technology
have been published in numerous books and journals.
--The Cinema of Absence
Lipman’s films and cinematic performances combine a technical mastery
of diverse media with a rigorous sparcity of content to create cinematic
spaces that are at once ethereal and riveting. Looking back to classical
notions of form, these works utilize carefully controlled sensations of
absence to point outwards to the fullness of lived experience. Spanning
his collages of the 1980’s, through portraiture in the ‘90’s,
to his current narratives and pictorial essays, Lipman’s oeuvre
both utilizes and challenges conventional notions of the boundaries of
cinema art.
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