Posted in FILM with tags Paul Clipson on February 8, 2018 by dcairns
I was really shocked to the core to learn of the unexpected and much too early death of Paul Clipson, filmmaker, projectionist, cinephile, Shadowplayer and friend.
Geography meant I only got to meet Paul twice, when he was in Scotland for family reasons, but we corresponded semi-regularly and he always had nice things to say. His own films are beautiful, hand-made in-camera lightshows that transform everyday scenes — cities, forests, water — into Kubrickian tunnels of light and phantasmal dreamstuff.
There is a fund you can donate to, to support his partner, Yelena. Go here.
Too many movies — my memories of Edinburgh International Film Festival have becomes a swirling series of overlays, like the visionary multi-exposure fugues of Paul Clipson, whose MADE OF AIR screened in the Black Box strand. Saturday was the day the movies came out to get me.
On Saturday I saw an old drama, a new documentary, an experimental/performance piece and an In Person event with Jane Seymour. (On Frankenstein: The True Story — “That was the first time I had to look at a line-up of naked women and pick one as my stand-in, saying, ‘That one looks the most like me naked.'”). I had a ticket for a fifth film but I gave it back — my brain was full.
In Person With Jane Seymour featured the actress and powerhouse recounting her near-death experience, and explaining why John Gielgud never stopped working: “I’ve never missed a day on set so if I see my name in a call sheet I know I’ll be alive tomorrow.”
At the climax of IMAGINE WAKING UP TOMORROW AND ALL MUSIC HAS DISAPPEARED, musician and artist Bill Drummond gathers the cinema audience itself into one of his situational sound experiments, making us participants in the film and hence legally entitled to add our names to the credits at the doc’s website.
During TYBURNIA, the Dead Rat Orchestra left the stage during the film and tiptoed up the steeply-raked bleachers of Traverse 1 to freak us out with strange music from behind.
The inadequate air-conditioning turned THE BRAVE DON’T CRY, a 1952 Grierson-produced drama about a mining cave-in, into a fully interactive experience, as we gasped in asthmatic sympathy with the entombed workers onscreen.
This was all getting too real, so THE HOUSES OCTOBER BUILT, from the producer of INSIDIOUS, began to seem like a BAD RISK.
Will continue to report on some of my more memorable cinematic encounters over the next week, but will also resume abnormal service with a random smattering of other observations and experiences. Meanwhile, here’s my top ten American films, chosen with a few spare neurons for Scout Tafoya. They are basically movies I can rewatch endlessly — my students will recognize several.
Thanks to Gregory Robinson for a review copy of his book All Movies Love the Moon, Prose Poems on Silent Film.
Said poems are inspired by intertitles, which we like here at Shadowplay. It’s a very handsome book, though as a purist I prefer the authentic intertitles to the recreations — but I guess there’s a copyright issue there, and also a certain pleasure in being able create new versions of old title cards. As for Gregory’s additional words, they are very poetic indeed ~
HOW IT FEELS TO BE RUN OVER (1900)
It begins with an accident, the inevitable result of both ten thousand objects both real and imaginary cosmically tumbling, colliding at the nexus where silver meets secondhand meets skin. The burst of light is the birth of movies.
Before you, a dirt road. A carriage passes, then a cyclist, both stirring a cloud of dust that settles on an automobile. The car is far angrier, making mad S shapes in the road, darting forward like a shark. Logic says move, but you have grown too heavy in this dream and the car is impossibly close. It breaks out of its world into yours, a pharaoh crossing over, a moth errant unto light, and Oh! Mother will be pleased.
A pause. Here is death, an old woman whispers over popcorn. I knew it would happen like this. In movies mortality makes your acquaintance, inscripting your bones.
The one on CITY LIGHTS at the end is particularly fine.
Another plug, while I’m here. Friend of Shadowplay Paul Clipson is not just (just?) an experimental filmmaker, he’s a projectionist, and his limited-edition book of projectionist’s drawings, REEL, shows a creative solution to a practical problem: identifying approaching reel changes.
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