Two women meet at a crossroads… Ross Lipman’s one fiction film to date comes from a genre even more rare in the US than experimental work-adult drama. Printed in muted tones that conjure silent film handpainting, and merging theater-based naturalism with an elliptical psychological encounter, “The Interview” at once utilizes and destroys mainstream narrative expectations.
Filter Films
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The filmmaker’s response to her experience of the hijacking of her city during the Toronto G20 Summit, “Ransom Notes” re-appropriates language and meaning through the act of collage. The film combines new and old media (film, newsprint, print-outs of twitter feeds) to explore social mobilization through mass media. The soundtrack of the film was created by placing letters, words and sentences directly on the optical soundtrack. “We have your …” “The ransom note, in our collective imagination, is an interesting entry point to the politics of ownership, freedom and exchange value, made by transforming mass media (newspapers) content into a personal message – the re-appropriation of language and meaning through the act of collage. ‘Ransom Notes’ explores this strange tension as a means of sorting out the filmmaker’s experience of the hijacking of her city during the Toronto G20 Summit and subsequent riots of June 2010. The film combines new and old media (film, newsprint, print-outs of twitter feeds), exploring social mobilization through mass media, culminating through the structure of a ‘waltz.’ “The soundtrack of the film is composed by placing letters, words and sentences directly on the optical soundtrack – in a sense the projector is ‘reading’ the words, and the sound that you hear is the language produced by the cinematic machine.” – Kelly Egan Festival premiere at the New York Film Festival, Views from the Avant Garde, 2011.
Ransom Notes
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“Dissolving Forest” enhances its subject as a dynamic living entity. Shot in a lightly foliaged forest, it consists entirely of tracking shots, using slow shutter speeds to create pigment-like smears and vibrant color. The location sound, sometimes ominous, places the seemingly bucolic locale near civilization. Visually, “Dissolving Forest” operates on three planes: the canvas-like background of the sky blown out to white, discernible forest in the middle ground, and foreground foliage reduced to streaming color-all tied together with frequent dissolves. As early spring progresses into the deep greens of late spring, “Dissolving Forest” becomes a painting evolving in its frame.
Dissolving Forest
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“Spiral Transition” is a candid, compelling and interwoven documentary that explores the filmmaker’s relationship with his mother and how it is changing and evolving as he transitions genders.
Spiral Transition
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A four-part study of motion, shape and colour inspired by a robin’s flight. “The aviary in the mirror, in-flight hide-and-seek, mischief on the wing.” – Mark McElhatten, Rotterdam Film Festival Consists of: “Armoire Prologue” (2:40, 2007), “Coda” (2:30, 2009) and two new episodes (2011). Selected screenings: Views from the Avant Garde, New York Film Festival, 2011; Festival du nouveau cinéma (Montreal, QC), 2011
Armoire (in 4 parts)
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A rumination on cinematic time reversals as versatile continuums. Re-discovering the outdoors as (a stage) set where the natural is made to pose as the artifice. Selected screenings: Onion City Experimental Film & Video Festival (Chicago, USA), 2011; Views from the Avant Garde, New York Film Festival, 2011
Tableaux Vivants
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The Upper West Side has some of the tallest brick apartment buildings in NYC. The orderly but deserted and aging concrete courtyards, their metal stairs and shafts, register a dramatically changing atmosphere. This is a cinema that seeks to observe, obscure, shorten and protract, and redefine, while remaining open ended. Selected screenings: Views from the Avant Garde, New York Film Festival, 2011; Off and Free Film Festival (Seoul, Korea), 2011
Back View
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A popular lesbian “commercial,” 110 images of sensual touching montages in A,B,C,D rolls of “kinaesthetic” editing. ” “The images are varied and very quickly presented in the early part of the film, introducing the characters, if you will. The second half of the film slows down measurably and all of a sudden I found myself holding my breath as I watched the images of lovemaking sensually and artistically captured.” – Elizabeth Lay, Plexus
Dyketactics
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The central image of in the nature of things is the Forest – sometimes fearful, sometimes a refuge, always mysterious, and the multiple associations and myths embedded in it – myths within which we live and which live within us – our collective history. But, unexpected moments, intensified fragments, catch us unawares – the present confronts us. For Emmanuel Levinas, the face-to-face encounter with another is a privileged phenomenon in which the person’s proximity and distance are both strongly felt. “The face opens the primordial discourse whose first word is obligation…the face speaks…the first word of the face is ‘Thou shalt not kill’; it is an order.” Emmanuel Levinas “in the nature of things” continues my examination of the oppositions played out dialectically and enmeshed in our experience of living: culture/nature, lived history /recorded, belonging/destroying, communal/individual, innocence/danger, young/old, living/dying. This is an autumnal film – twilight – a film of old age. Just as Forest is a transitional space, so Old Age is a transitional time.
in the nature of things
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Sitting by the campfire, Serigne, a young man from Dakar, tells his two friends the story of his sea voyage as a stowaway. “Melancholic and mysterious, the film urgently and elegantly addresses the perils of illegal migration” (Andréa Picard, TIFF Wavelengths). Tiger Award for Best Short Film, Rotterdam International Film Festival, 2010; No Violence Award, Ann Arbor Film Festival, 2011.
Atlantiques
