PAUL CLIPSON - LANDSCAPE DISSOLVES

"[Paul Clipson’s films] are a photo-chemical catalog of the visible world, charged with psychic energy, scored partly by chance, and imbued with a generosity of being.”

- Otie Wheeler, MUBI Notebook

Paul Clipson (1965-2018) was a San Francisco-based filmmaker and experimental film artist whose work involves projected installation and live collaborative performances with sound artists and musicians, including Tarentel, Jefre Cantu-Ledesma and Joshua Churchill. Their methods of experimenting with sound and instrumentation, incorporating improvisation, mistakes and accidents into live performances and recordings, greatly influenced Clipson’s approach to his moving image work.  Over time, shorter film pieces were carefully created by Clipson from these performances, utilizing the accidental, unexpected juxtapositions of sound and image that have been discovered live.  Working in the experimental film vein, Clipson cites as his influences Stan Brakhage (ANTICIPATION OF THE NIGHT), Marie Menken (NOTES ON MARIE MENKEN), Bruce Baillie (CASTRO STREET), and Bruce Conner.

Clipson’s cinema is one of eternal recurrence.  Subjects continually repeat themselves:  bridges, buildings, fences, gratings, trains, airplanes, trees, suns, leaves, grass, eyes, power lines, and especially bodies of water.  Clipson creates layered superimpositions of these objects through rewinding the camera and re-exposing the film stock from another iteration of the subject.  In this manner, Clipson transforms material reality into otherworldly thresholds of shimmering reflections and dynamic edges into vibrations of light.  In this, Clipson’s primary concern is not alluding to the properties of cinema, but rather to the properties of perception itself. Clipson’s films are among the clearest articulations since Stan Brakhage of how vision is formed through process – how sight is not a passive and inert function, but can equally shape the world.  According to the filmmaker,

"My approach to making films is to bring to light subconscious preoccupations that begin to reveal themselves while filming in an improvised, stream of consciousness manner. Aspects of memory, dreams and recordings of the everyday are juxtaposed with densely layered, in-camera edited studies of figurative and abstract environments vast and small, all within a flowing formal and thematic experimental aesthetic that encourages unplanned-for results. Maintaining a predominantly intuitive process in conceiving and creating films, where improvisation, utilizing mistakes, and "wrong" images (for example images that are overexposed or out of focus) are part of my filmmaking methodology, I’m less concerned with a preconceived end result and more with being immersed in a visual exploration of the moment. 

I employ a mainly handheld camera, often set at the two extremes of the focal spectrum, macro and telephoto (extreme macro close-up, extreme long shot), which maximizes the saturated textures of Super 8mm, the format I most frequently shoot in.”