New on 16mm: Paul Clipson’s Another Void

Posted November 15th, 2012 in Announcements, New Acquisitions, New Films, News / Events

Another Void (Paul Clipson, 2012)

16mm, color, 10.5 minutes
Music by Jefre Cantu-Ledesma, violin by Tony Cross. Featuring Trevor Montgomery and Anya Kamenskaya

Orpheus meets the bird with the crystal plumage. Filmed in the Tenderloin night of San Francisco, this study of the eye in vertiginous color and darkness, part drip painting, part contour drawing, part cubist collage, broadens and intensifies an on-going exploration into the various in-camera processes of handheld, small gauge filmmaking in the optic field, and the rhythmic and graphic relationships of multilayered imagery to music-making and dreams.

ANOTHER VOID is the result of a continuing practice of working in Super 8mm film, utilizing all of the format’s limitations and benefits to maximum effect. The process of in-camera editing, in this case, the layering of a progression of hundreds of shots over each other, at any moment up to five or six images at a time, yields an array of unexpected, collaged compositions, largely unplanned for specifically, but achieved with a particular design in mind. There are six splices in the film, the rest of the edits and all of the superimpositions being performed in-camera. The film mirrors the sculptural soundtrack by Jefre Cantu-Ledesma. Similar to the buried rhythms and layered phrases of his composition, which suggests a far-reaching but indistinct space, the film#s visual superimpositions describe a world through gesture and repetition, an act of filming before one sees. The obscure space of urban night provides a saturated palette of colors, of ATM machines, neon signs and garish alcohol advertisements. All of these found objects cluster and converge within a series of overlapping compositions, constructing new environments, and creating alternative views of the city at night. A city where the eye not only records, but inhabits crosshatched streets like a floating sphere within a celestial metropolis.

Super 8mm film transferred to 16mm by Bill Brand.

For more information about Paul Clipson and to rent this film…