A Unique Process
Lipsett Diaries resulted from a meeting between writer and artistic director Chris Robinson and filmmaker and illustrator Theodore Ushev. The film grew out of Robinson and Ushev’s desire to explore the work and tormented existence of the director of Very Nice, Very Nice, a hypersensitive creative genius brought low by depression and mental illness, which drove him to take his own life.
Rather than a conventional scenario, Robinson first wrote densely layered text to serve as the film’s main thread, pasting in phrases taken here and there from Lipsett’s films, delving deep into his own life to fill in gaps in Lipsett’s biography.
Working from Robinson’s pastiche text, Ushev produced images incorporating fragments of Lipsett films, home movies borrowed from Robinson’s grandmother and visual quotes. This approach establishes Ushev as a follower of Lipsett, who “reassembled” what he called found footage—sounds and pictures borrowed from other filmmakers—to make his own movies.
Hoping to recapture the youthful, sensitive, edgy texture of Lipsett’s voice, Ushev asked actor and director Xavier Dolan, who also helped adapt Robinson’s written material, to play the part in both French and English.
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Very Nice, Very Nice (1961) -
Free Fall (1964) -
A Trip Down Memory Lane (1965)
