Do Not Look Away: The Life of Arthur Lipsett
"Gorgeous! Wonderful!"
- Guy Maddin, filmmaker
"You’ve performed a real service for everyone interested in Lipsett as man and artist."
- William C. Wees, film scholar
"If "life is a story told by an idiot, full of noise and emotional disturbance but devoid of meaning", it turns out that it is only a matter of music in the end, of which tone one is able to give to *a life*, to make it alive. Find the right tone: that is the imperative.Reading "Don't Look Away", the feeling is to listen to something - the life of a man, the life of Arthur Lipsett - as though a very intimate tone resounded through it. An almost secretive and precious tone, a perception of an understanding of his sensitiveness which comes out between the lines, progressively: in all the facets, in all the movements. A biography as chamber music."
-Gianluca Pulsoni, Celluloid Beatz magazine
Do Not Look Away: The Life of Arthur Lipsett is a 115 page biography about Arthur Lipsett, an Oscar-nominated experimental and documentary filmmaker employed at the National Film Board of Canada in Montreal from 1957-1970. During his lifetime Lipsett's films were screened all over the world and earned many awards. His ground breaking work continues to be studied in film schools today.
By age 22, Arthur Lipsett had already changed Canadian film history and joined the international ranks of Bruce Conner, Dziega Vertov and the Surrealist Filmmakers. He had created unique new ways to combine sound, stills and moving images into memorable experiences. In his short collage films we see new possibilities for the medium to go beyond traditional modes of story-telling. Although Lipsett himself denied being a part of an avant-garde movement, his work was of this nature, influencing countless filmmakers such as Stanley Kubrick, George Lucas and editor Walter Murch. Arthur Lipsett succumbed to mental illness in his later years. He committed suicide in 1986.
Do Not Look Away: The Life of Arthur Lipsett is a straighforward telling of Lipsett's life story, his childhood, career and the later years of his life. Author Amelia Does celebrates Lipsett's eccentric genius, endearing personality, his artistic accomplishments, and attempts to honour this unique filmmaker's place in Canadian Art and Film history.
Editors: Calvin Campbell and Brett Kashmere
Design: Mark Michaelson
Cover photo: Lois Siegel
