Past, Present, Future: Five 16mm Films by Paul Clipson
November 30
5 PM
Heather Edwards Theatre
Paul Clipson (1965-2018), was a San Francisco Bay area filmmaker known for his lush, multi-layered works in analogue film and his frequent collaborations with electronic musicians. His psychedelic, super-imposed, and temporally dilated compositions in Super 8 and 16mm have become synonymous with the ambient and drone music scores that accompanies them. Clipson’s films eschew narrative modes of storytelling or the use of language as a rhetorical or interpretive device. The dearth of project descriptions or synopses for his films - scant words usually pointing to dates and places - is telling, and the small role semantics play in the films bring their modality closer to the formal construction of music than literature. They operate on the level of musical composition, durationally structured around loops and repetition of forms and patterns that insist upon an openness and ambiguity, evading easy interpretation while maintaining a consistent and intrinsic logic and rhythm. Chaos is restrained by an underlying formal ordering that hides in the wash of experience doubled and tripled upon itself. The films have a human measure. A pulse in shared sympathy with our own respiration. Quintessentially lyrical, they universally position the artist as first-person protagonist with his handheld camera playing the supporting role. In these images we observe the world and are observed.
The formal mechanisms of the Super 8 and 16mm formats - camera, film and projector - delimit the boundaries of these encounters and impose a structure that allow for a folding, and refolding of the temporal dimension. A demonstration of times arrow moving in all directions at once. We are confronted by mirrors within mirrors, reflected light apprehended in pools of still water, the sheen on the surface of the eye, polished glass or metal, shimmering waves or swarming points of light emerging from a lattice-work void of silhouettes, shadows and darkness. Using his camera to mediate a playful engagement with the world, Clipson developed a sensibility that remained open to the unfolding present and a keen sensitivity to the relative nature of time and lived experience. The frenetic pace of colliding images and sounds sets the tone of each film, shifting registers from cosmic and effusive to stygian with ease. Across his oeuvre, these repeated motifs form visuals myths where the phenomena described is the artist’s consciousness dragging his filmed encounters forward to the moment of projection, propelling the past across the liminal threshold of the present and into the future of our minds eye.
Paul visited Calgary in 2013 - xenon projector and Super 8 film reels in tow - to personally present a program of his work to a small audience at the former $100 film festival. More than a decade later this program offers the rare opportunity to re-stage something like that experience, offering five of Paul’s films from that period, several of which are currently inaccessible in any other media, all projected in 16mm.
Free with registration.
Program
Sphinx on the Seine (2009) 8’
Union (2010) 14’
Chorus (2011) 6’
Another Void (2012) 11’
Light Year (2013) 10’
About MONOGRAPH
MONOGRAPH began in 2018 as an ongoing series of experimental film programs with a specific focus on analogue and handmade artist film practices. Curated by Kyle Whitehead, each program focuses on the works of a single artist, filmmaker or collective. As Calgary and Southern Alberta’s only presenter dedicated entirely to experimental and expanded cinema, the series aims to elevate the local film community, exposing audiences to film artists and their works which are otherwise at risk of oversight in the region. After a long hiatus, the series is back and beginning again with three consecutive weeks of film programs, projection performance, technical workshops and talks with visiting artists.