FACTORY WORKS!
Gallery Screening Series
Remembering Arthur
(Martin Lavut, 2006, Canada) 90 Minutes
Friday November 10, 9 p.m.
(part of the James St. North Gallery Crawl)
“In terms of understanding the power of sound and picture relationships, there’s no one better than Arthur Lipsett.”– George Lucas
Remembering Arthur is as much about the man behind the lens as what he put in front of it. Filtered through the memories of such longtime Lipsett confidantes as Judith Sandiford, filmmaker Tanya Tree, artist Christopher Nutter, animator Ryan Larkin and NFB producers Colin Low and Donald Brittain, Remembering Arthur is an intimate portrait of a visionary, his body of work and the troubled last years of his life. Although Lipsett’s movies are exhilarating, it’s the personal interviews that elevate Remembering Arthur beyond a normal biography. Sandiford recalls the early years, when she and Lipsett would comb Montreal second-hand stores for odd items to fuel his imagination; Low remembers the excitement generated by his early films.
But there was another side to Lipsett that has remained elusive since his suicide in 1986, and it’s this aspect of the artist that is revealed. The honesty and access of the film is a result of director Martin Lavut’s friendship with Lipsett and those of his inner circle, who recall the painful final years when the man who crafted a cinema from disparate influences was overcome by mental illness. Remembering Arthur is a passionate, intimate and unflinching journey through the life of one of Canada’s most innovative creative minds.
The ghost of experimental film in the National Film Board documentary machine, Arthur Lipsett was one of Canadian cinema’s most original artists and a key figure in the development of experimental cinema.
Colin Low described Lipsett’s films as cubist, and Lipsett, who once said his films were about “holding time together,” considered himself to be essentially a sculptor of images. In films depicting the alienation inherent in modern society as it rushes towards banality, Lipsett’s technique was as chaotic as the world he attempted to portray; his goal, as he put it, was to create “an intuitive expression which potentially could contain unexpected discoveries.”
“Remembering Arthur Lipsett” will be preceded by a screening of Short films by Arthur Lipsett, beginning at 7 p.m. (programme length: 80 min)
The James Street North Arts Crawl took on a sinister air as a capacity crowd settled into our Production Space on Friday the 13th for The Factory’s special screening of 
October 16, 2006 7:00pm