Remembering Lipsett & Willowdale Refugees

Two magazine articles I recently wrote are now out. First, Maisonneuve’s latest has my feature on ’60s experimental filmmaker Arthur Lipsett and the excellent new documentary about his life, Remembering Arthur. Lipsett’s first short for the NFB, Very Nice, Very Nice (1961) helped revolutionize avant-garde and mainstream cinema; its non-linear editing juxtaposed faces and architecture, war machinery and pop ephemera against a cut-and-paste soundtrack to create a mind-bomb of images and sound. This re-contextualizing of largely found materials to create socio-political commentary prefigured the emergence of ironic collage as one of the dominant modes of cultural critique today. As I say in the article, “its startling, hallucinatory frisson perfectly captured the anxieties of the newly christened atomic age.” Very Nice, and subsequent films such as 21-87 and Trip Down Memory Lane, are as relevant and innovative today as there were forty years ago.

Remembering Arthur has been making the rounds of film festivals and a shorter version aired on Bravo this fall. I’ll post a note if I hear of any upcoming screenings.

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The Jan/Feb issue of Canadian Geographic features my column (“Refuge in Willowdale”) on tracking down the grave of my father’s father, who died while fighting for the Germans on the Eastern Front in WWII (or, as the Russians call it, The Great Patriotic War). The first image above is a picture of the cemetery where he is supposedly buried; as it was covered in about three feet of unblemished snow when I was there last March, it was impossible to find any markers confirming his remains were interred there. The second image shows one of the many pillbox bunkers that still line the countryside in the area where he was killed. He died when a Red Army soldier lobbed a grenade into his bunker.

I’ll link to the full text of both articles when they come online.