A Trip Down Memory Lane
1965 · 12m · Canada
Directed by Arthur Lipsett
Genres: documentary, essay film, experimental
Tones: contemplative, darkly comic, surreal
Arthur Lipsett assembles peculiar newsreel items from the previous fifty years into a time capsule of human might, majesty and mayhem that turns grotesque and explosive in its reshuffling of once-front-page moments.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
Lipsett takes the sanctified archive—the stuff we're told *means* something—and lets it eat itself, finding the grotesque comedy in how we've always been violent and ridiculous. Most scouts would call this a historical essay; Felix calls it a time bomb.
A rigorously composed collage that inherits from the avant-garde tradition of found-footage montage while maintaining its own austere logic—each newsreel fragment interrogates the one before it, building a formal argument about how images construct history.
The genius move is the sound design: Lipsett strips away the original newsreel pomp and replaces it with silence and subtle dissonance, so what you're left watching isn't reassuring archive footage but raw visual evidence, suddenly alien and disturbing.