This evening of experimental 16mm works, projected by the filmmaker on film, showcases a variety of dynamic sound and celluloid image collaborations with musician/artists such as Grouper, Jefre Cantu-Ledesma, Sarah Davachi, Lawrence English and King Midas Sound / Fennesz.
Program includes:
UNION (2010)
Super 8mm (16mm), color/B&W, 14.5 minutes, music by Jefre Cantu-Ledesma
An exploration of movement, woven into layers of time, and photographed in natural and nocturnal urban spaces, ambig1uous within a confluence of lights, colors and darkness. Filmed in the parks of San Francisco.
Super 8mm (16mm), color, 11 minutes, music by Jefre Cantu-Ledesma
Filmed at night in San Francisco, this study of the eye in vertiginous color and darkness, broadens and intensifies an exploration into in-camera processes of handheld, small gauge filmmaking, and the rhythmic and graphic relationships of multilayered imagery to music-making and dreams.
THE LIQUID CASKET/WILDERNESS OF MIRRORS (2014)
16mm, color/B&W, 9.5 minutes, music by Lawrence English
A restless, traveling consciousness flies across lands vast and small, taking note of possible futures that hint at humankind’s folly of expansion and alienation. Filmed in London, Leeds, Glasgow and Scotland
MADE OF AIR (2015)
16mm, color/B&W,11.5 minutes, music by Grouper
A sad and fearful lament for a drowned world. Filmed in London, Zurich, San Francisco, Berkeley and Napa.
LIGHTHOUSE (2015)
16mm, color/B&W, 5 minutes, music by King Midas Sound & Fennesz
A study of surfaces, figurative and metaphysical, with various levels and planes of a city combined and superimposed to become visual echoes, suggesting an animated city of grids, graphs, geometries and lines: layers of subterranean streets and shadows evoking multiple levels of consciousness. Filmed in New York, San Francisco and Hong Kong. An unintentional homage to Saul Bass.
FEELER (2016)
16mm, color/B&W, 7 minutes, music by Sarah Davachi
An imagining of sounds, music and images, of dreams within dreams, conceived within an evolving series of environments, exploring the world: seeing, hearing and experiencing light, space, movement and sound in emotional juxtapositions, felt first, with an impact of presence, of gesture, of echo and explosion. Being experiential, multi-layered, fragmenting and fusing together, a place where there's no screen, no theatre, no darkness, only moments. Filmed in New York, Los Angeles, Hong Kong, Brisbane, Krakow, Sidney, Napa, Oakland and San Francisco.
Program running time: 58 minutes
(Conversation/Q&A to follow film program)
*All works screened on 16mm prints by the filmmaker
Paul Clipson is a San Francisco-based filmmaker who often collaborates with sound artists and musicians on films, live performances, and installations. His Super 8 and 16mm films aim to bring to light subconscious visual preoccupations that reveal themselves while working in a stream of consciousness manner, combining densely layered, in-camera edited studies of figurative and abstract environments, in a process that encourages unplanned-for results, responding to and conversing with the temporal qualities of musical composition and live performance. His work has screened around the world in festivals and at sound & film events such as the International Film Festival Rotterdam,The NewYork Film Festival and the Cinémathèque Française.
