Free Fall
1964 · 9m · Canada
Directed by Arthur Lipsett
Genres: essay film, experimental, surrealism
Tones: contemplative, darkly comic, surreal
Assorted film trimmings assemble into Arthur Lipsett's surreal comment on humanity's fall from grace into banality. The experimental short dreams its way through contemporary life.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Lipsett's scrounged-footage collage should be a gimmick, but instead it commits fully to the perversity of finding profundity in garbage—and that refusal to wink at the audience is exactly what makes it work.
Free Fall sits at the precise intersection of found-footage collage and philosophical essay, establishing a formal lineage that would influence decades of experimental cinema; the rigor with which Lipsett constructs meaning from detritus deserves serious curatorial attention.
The entire film pivots on a single editorial decision—treating discarded film scraps not as raw material but as equal visual partners to the 'intentional' footage—and that choice transforms what could have been a undergraduate project into something genuinely haunting.