Recent posts about Patrick keiller and Chris Marker
http://www.dissensus.com/showthread.php?t=2376, have made me think about films made from still images.
As a photographer I've often wondered how far the idea could be taken and when, recently, I was asked to make some sequences of images for a concert performance, I had an opportunity to explore the possibilities. I watched Marker's "La Jetee" very early on in the project (which is still ongoing) and felt that despite the obvious virtuosity of the direction the quality of the actual frames lets the narrative down. It seems like the film is mostly regarded as at best an oddity and at worst as a warning to other filmakers not to try the same thing, interesting but flawed.
[Belated thread-just-noticed response]
Hardly, most film-makers, philosophers, and cultural critics consider
La Jetee to be one of the best short narrative films ever made, a sentiment with which I agree.
Does anyone know of other still films?
Yes. The work of Arthur Lipsett.
"
He explored metaphysical aspects of the medium, occasionally beginning with refuse and producing profound experience comprised of light and sound ... "
We should start with Arthur Lipsett, one of the pioneers of found footage avant-garde filmmaking in Canada whose work was admired and quoted by such cinema luminaries as Stanley Kubrick (who wanted him to create the trailer for
Dr. Strangelove) and George Lucas (who discovered his work in film school at USC), along with many avant-garde film-makers (Brakhage, Belson, etc). Lipsett has been a too-long underground figure, despite a 1962 Oscar nomination for Best Short for
Very Nice, Very Nice.
Lipsett began collecting bits and pieces of "outs" or film discarded by other filmmakers, detombing these scraps from editing bins and garbage cans at Canada's National Film Board. Working late at night, he meshed these odd shapes and sounds together to create his greatest film,
Very Nice, Very Nice, a masterpiece of the cut and paste collagist model which stands as a cutting indictment of modern mass culture, released in 1961, just a year before Marker's
La Jetee. The film was composed almost entirely of stills and cost a mere $500.00, but Lipsett's technique was different because he was putting pictures to sound. The soundtrack came first: an assembly of disparate voices spliced together.
Visually, the film consists mainly of still photos taken by Lipsett in New York, Paris and London to accompany the soundtrack, along with magazine photographs, outtakes from NFB documentaries, and stock shots of a mushroom-cloud explosion and a space shuttle launch. To these images he married voices critical of contemporary technocratic values, including soundbites from Northrop Frye and Marshall McLuhan; by severing the words of the famous from their visual referents Lipsett renders them quasi-anonymous, shifting the focus from the speakers' identities to the ironic implications of their statements.
Very Nice, Very Nice has a sober, somber quality to it, speaking of the indifference of humankind. At one point a man's voice states: "People who have made no attempt to educate themselves live in a kind of dissolving phantasmagoria of the world, that is, they completely forget what happened last Tuesday (a series of various close-up faces dissolve one into the other). A politician can promise them anything, and they will not remember later what he has promised."
The film is filled with contradictions: (stuttering voice) "...and the game is really nice to look at." (we see a collage of wrestling photos picturing grimacing faces and hefty men tugging and pulling at each other in agony). A bomb explodes: "Everyone wonders what the future will behold." This is intercut with people having fun and smiling: smiling mouths, smiling eyes... then another shot of the bomb... (man's voice) : "This is my line, and I love it." Later we see shots of newspapers: "There's sort of a passing interest in things." (followed by a shot of a pastry-shop window and a cake in the shape of a smiling cat), "But there's no real concern." "People seem unwilling to become involved in anything..." (more collage photos of faces: a Santa Claus, pause, a shot of a dead man on the street) "I mean really involved."
After his Academy Award nomination, Lipsett received a letter from filmmaker Stanley Kubrick. The typewritten letter said, "I'm interested in having a trailer done for Dr. Strangelove." Kubrick regarded Lipsett's work as a landmark in cinema--a breakthrough, describing
Very Nice, Very Nice as "one of the most imaginative and brilliant uses of the movie screen and soundtrack that I have ever seen"” Lipsett refused the offer, but the actual trailer did reflect Lipsett's style in
Very Nice, Very Nice.
Lipsett committed suicide in 1986.
More details about his work:
[
Listen here to the soundtracks to four of his films,
21-87, Very Nice, Very Nice, A Trip Down Memory Lane, and Freefall]
Very Nice, Very Nice (1961, 7mins): Arthur Lipsett's first film. It looks behind the business-as-usual face we put on life and shows anxieties we want to forget. It is made of dozens of pictures that seem familiar, with fragments of speech heard in passing and, between times, a voice saying, "Very nice, very nice."
21-87 (1964, 9mins): A wry commentary on machine-dominated man, the man to whom nothing matters, who waits for chance to call his number. The film is a succession of many unrelated views of the passing crowd. George Lucas'
THX 1138 and
Star Wars were hugely influenced by 21-87: the phrase "the force"
originated from the film's soundtrack. This Wired article claims that Lucas has recently returned to directing the kind of experimental films like
21-87 that had originally inspired him to make films.
Free Fall (1964, 9mins): A film made from film trimmings assembled to make a wry comment on modern man and his world. It suggests a surrealist dream of mankind's fall from grace into banality.
Fluxes (1967, 24mins): FLUXES is a disturbing reflection on the world around us, amalgamating an incredible arsenal of found images and sound to effectively foreshadow the coming Vietnam war as well as comment upon everything from space travel to Buddhism.
According to
Amelia Does , "Lipsett was educated about avant-garde film, art history, and the early collage artists like Kurt Schwitters. He was particularly influenced by Joseph Cornell’s
rose hobart (1936) and Bruce Connor’s
a movie (1958). Lipsett used his own photographs, along with the contents of the waste bins of the NFB as his sculpting materials. Like the German visual artist Joseph Beuys he attempted to use garbage materials to create a new experience for his film audience. He attempted to carry the viewer to a spiritual place. In Lipsett’s collage you see a
becoming, a desire to re-arrange and to transcend ... Lipsett’s use and re-invention of film language was often revolutionary. Though he remains critically unattended and popularly obscured, he did win several significant awards in his lifetime and the admiration of many luminary filmmakers, specifically Stanley Kubrick, George Lucas and Walter Murch. Lipsett succeeded in turning film on its head, taking new image and sound-image relationships – perhaps often arbitrary ones – to create a deeply personal and dynamic form of expression. He explored metaphysical aspects of the medium, occasionally beginning with refuse and producing profound experience comprised of light and sound ... Lipsett, in his films, proposals and writings, contributed greatly to the exploration of new forms of film language that clearly impacted the era within which he produced much of his work. Furthermore, the energy and technique illustrated in his films is found throughout contemporary visual media practice. Building upon Conner’s ideas for found footage collage and his own investigation of sound collage, Lipsett’s films achieved an emotional depth and dynamism that may leave the viewer confused and speechless, but never indifferent."