Two Films by Lipsett
1968 · 28m · Canada
Directed by Donald Rennick
Genres: documentary, essay film, experimental
Tones: contemplative, surreal
Teenagers who have just screened Arthur Lipsett's experimental films debate what the works mean and what they suggest about humanity's past and future.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A film about teenagers debating experimental cinema sounds like the kind of meta-recursive premise that should be insufferable, but Rennick using Lipsett's own avant-garde work as the object of earnest scrutiny creates this genuinely disorienting hall of mirrors—it's the rare essayistic move that actually earns its own self-awareness.
Rennick positions this 1968 piece squarely in the lineage of essayistic documentary and the expanded cinema debate of its moment, using the teenagers' voices as a formal device that respects both Lipsett's radical vision and the tradition of cinema-about-cinema that legitimizes such inquiry.
The coup here is using non-professional teenagers as interlocutors—their genuine uncertainty and halting articulation around Lipsett's fragmented imagery creates an almost documentary honesty that could've been cloying in other hands, but becomes the structural spine that makes the whole thing breathe.