Experimental Film
1962 · 27m · Canada
Directed by Arthur Lipsett
Genres: documentary, essay film
Tones: contemplative
Historians, critics, and NFB producers debate experimental film, commenting on works by George Dunning, Robert Breer, Jan Lenica, Wladimir Borowczyk, and Arthur Lipsett. Norman McLaren explains how he makes his own films.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Everyone treats this like a stuffy film-school lecture, but Lipsett's actually doing something subversive—using talking heads and archive footage to *dismantle* the boundary between documentary and the experimental works being discussed, turning meta-commentary into its own weird collage.
A canonical essay film that knows exactly what it is: Lipsett positions himself within a lineage of animated and experimental innovators, using the format of debate and demonstration to argue through cinema itself, with McLaren's presence anchoring the whole meditation on what experimental practice *means*.
The edit is what makes it work—Lipsett cuts between the theorists' voices and the actual films they're describing so precisely that you stop hearing them as separate; the rhythm becomes the argument, and suddenly a 27-minute conversation becomes an experience rather than a lecture.