Arthur Lipsett’s first film was nominated for an Academy Award in 1962, marking the arrival of an influential new voice. The film’s dark humour and dancing rhythms had captured the spirit of his times. When Lipsett died by suicide in 1986, the humour and joy of his work was eclipsed by that sardonic darkness. It all came to feel like an omen.
Secret Museums is a study in the life and work of Canadian collage filmmaker Arthur Lipsett, whose struggles with mental illness have overshadowed his vital and innovative work. Author Stephen Broomer explores the spiritual themes and formal challenges posed by Lipsett’s films and the artist’s absurdist, comic, beatnik sensibility. As a critical biography, Secret Museums follows the trajectory of Lipsett’s life through his years as a filmmaker (1960–1975) and after, with new interpretations and analysis of his eight completed films.
In Secret Museums, Lipsett’s films are recognized as riotous comedies that reflect the artist’s resilience. This study offers a new interpretation of Lipsett and his films, positioning him as both a visionary force and a holy fool, illuminating fresh pathways through his work that reflect his understandings of his sources and his world.
Reviews
No one researches and writes on experimental film as ardently and thoroughly as Stephen Broomer. And the immortal found-footage visionary Arthur Lipsett gets the wall-to-wall, deep-pile, ultra-sensory Broomer treatment here in what will stand forever as the definitive study of the artist whose influences can be found everywhere in cinema today. Read this book! Love this book!
- Guy Maddin
A clear-eyed and patient examination of Lipsett’s enigmatic films. Stephen Broomer sensitively traces Lipsett’s trajectory from his art school days to his development as a filmmaker at the NFB, and eventually through the vicissitudes of an artist’s life and processes. Full of deeply felt descriptions of the films, Broomer unearths Lipsett’s collections of flowcharts, images, and diagrams he called his “secret museum”—a disjointed cultural scrapbook at turns comically absurd and overwhelmingly dark. Broomer’s book reminds us of Lipsett’s extraordinary mind and capacity for humour, despite the sad circumstances of his descent into schizophrenia which has long cast a pall upon his life’s work.
- Jeanne Liotta
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