Paul Clipson
Birth : 1965-01-01, UK
Death : 2018-02-03
History
Paul Clipson was a San Francisco-based filmmaker who often collaborated with sound artists and musicians on films, live performances, and installations. His work has been exhibited and performed both nationally and internationally at such festivals as the New York Film Festival, Edinburgh Film Festival, and the Rotterdam International Film Festival. 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. He recently premiered Hypsosis Display, a feature-length sound/16mm film collaboration with Grouper in the United Kingdom.
[bio courtesy of the filmmaker]
Director
Inspired by the “psychic and physical toxicity of life in late capitalism,” Evan Caminiti’s Toxic City Music utilizes sounds sourced from daily life in NYC. These found sounds are heavily processed and woven into instrumentation ranging from electronically treated guitar to modular synthesizers. Toxic City Music evolved over the course of several years, resulting in a wealth of material which will be re-processed and uniquely presented in an improvisatory manner in live performance. The Wire describes the new work as "The sound of things falling apart with unbearable slowness…[with Caminiti] reporting his observations with acuity, integrity, and artfulness."
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Music by Jefre Cantu-Ledesma, 16mm color film by Paul Clipson.
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Music by Jeremy Young and Shinya Sugimoto, 16mm film by Paul Clipson.
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Music by Byron Westbrook, 16mm film by Paul Clipson.
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Music by Lawrence English, 16mm film by Paul Clipson.
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A dreamy, impressionistic 16mm film of light on water, comprised mostly of sepia tones.
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A black-and-white short film made in collaboration with Sarah Davachi.
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Filmed in the Botanical Gardens of Golden Gate Park and the San Francisco Bay. 16mm scope / anamorphic film, Color / B&W . Music by Jefre Cantu-Ledesma.
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16mm film by Paul Clipson, and music by Sarah Davachi. Filmed in New York, Los Angeles, Hong Kong, Brisbane, Krakow, Sidney, Portland, Napa, Oakland and San Francisco.
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16mm | color | filmed in San Francisco | music by Young Moon
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Mayrah is a film made from a time last summer while in Sidney, Brisbane and Melbourne. Australia was such an intense flurry of impressions, movements and environments, that the film took the form of a stone skipping across moments of this time: a series of visual memories, the surface of which both reflected some brief abstract and literal elements of my experience.
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Water, fire and oil mix into an anxious premonition read across the surface of an eye, a pond and an expressway. Filmed in Los Angeles, San Francisco and Oakland. Music by Alex Cobb 16mm color and B&W film by Paul Clipson
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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 surface 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 homage to Saul Bass. Music by King Midas Sound / Fennesz.
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Director Paul Clipson's 16mm black-and-white video for "Come On" by Ilyas Ahmed uses double exposure to lay street lights over sidewalks, make leaves look as if they were printed on silver gelatin, and layer shadows upon shadowy figures in puddles and windows.
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A dream lament for a drowned world. Filmed in London, Zurich, San Francisco, Berkeley and Napa. Music by Grouper.
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Exploring impressionistic, emotional and sensory environments found within the vast natural and urban landscapes of America. Neither image nor sound takes precedence: the two interact and combine preserving a raw sense of the discovery that field recordings and in-camera edited film rushes often yield.
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Clipson, like some reckless traveller driven by a Mabusian force, takes us on a journey, hypnotically guiding us through a realm of dreams that seems to consist solely of light, shapes and colours. Shot on and screened from film. Soundtrack by sound artist and composer Lawrence English.
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Paul Clipson puts us on the beach, just before fall, when summer is still present—a time we have a hard time realizing is still here because we know what comes next.
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Music by Austin Cesear, 16mm film by Paul Clipson.
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A commission for the San Francisco Exploratorium, this film-collage studies the water systems and architecture of the San Francisco waterfront, in abstract and formal contexts.
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Tracking shots of streets, alleys, walls, fences, and city landscapes are superimposed on top of each other moving in opposite directions - a moving collage of spaces passing themselves by.
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The video, for a track by Jefre Cantu-Ledesma, was directed by Paul Clipson, who interprets the stuttering ambient composition with busy, bursting edits of a young woman walking on a sun-drenched beach.
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A nervous portrait of a Zagreb train station filmed from the tracks. The imminent impact leads to seeing stars. Super 8mm film with music by Barn Owl.
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Music By Jefre Cantu-Ledesma, Super 8mm Film By Paul Clipson.
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A film by Paul Clipson.
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'As for Paul’s case, what fascinated him through his camera—moving through space, often with a macro lens and the rack focus, the focus is shifting non-stop as his gaze moves along—his perception of the world itself became the subject of his film. Everything in his films has an equal presence; it is an animistic world. The nature of his reality is nothing but flux, and everything flows in the space. It is not a dream but the hyper-reality of his gaze and mind dissolving boundaries between the internal and external.' - Aki Onda
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An attempt through improvised in-camera multiple exposure, to capture a heightened, altered state, whether it be anxiety attack, hallucination or vision of madness. Shot in New York and San Francisco.
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Taped live at Queens Nails Projects, San Francisco, CA
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Short experimental film by Paul Clipson
Cinematography
The Crystal Text is a fleeting, poetic impression of the the fragmented emotional world of Young Moon's music. Amazingly, all of the visual effects are created within the camera, rather than through digital manipulation. The resulting film explores the rhythms inherent in the combination of music and film, as it evokes both memory and gesture to create an audio and visual dialog with the audience.
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The Crystal Text is a fleeting, poetic impression of the the fragmented emotional world of Young Moon's music. Amazingly, all of the visual effects are created within the camera, rather than through digital manipulation. The resulting film explores the rhythms inherent in the combination of music and film, as it evokes both memory and gesture to create an audio and visual dialog with the audience.
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Music by Jefre-Cantu Ledesma. Film by Paul Clipson with Trevor Montgomery.
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Orpheus meets the bird with the crystal plumage.
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A film by Paul Clipson.
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A film by Paul Clipson.
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Commissioned by the Exploratorium in San Francisco, Paul Clipson's five-part COMPOUND EYES cycle delves into the otherworldliness of the natural world. In training his Super-8 camera on insects and other "minor" invertebrates, Clipson draws the eye into an unseen realm, one so delicate as to simultaneously tempt and refuse the touch. Following the surrealist desire to make the familiar strange and the strange familiar, Clipson relates this micro-landscape to the built environment. Electronic musical motifs supplied by frequent Clipson collaborator Jefre Cantu-Ledesma add another layer of inquiry, one tuned to the unspoken space between wonder and terror. This first entry in the series keys the viewer's vision to a single drop of dew on a blade of glass. Wisps of eyelashes, dandelions and insect limbs seem to brush against the lens in a trembling intimation of seeing.
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"Ephemeris" (2011) is a conversation of image and sound, between filmmaker Paul Clipson and electronic musician Aki Onda, rendered as if from a fragmented journey of landscapes and memories. Clipson and Onda each investigate very personal, intuitive spaces, through their favored technologies of Super 8mm film and cassette Walkman. Both artists base a significant emphasis of their work on performance environments, where their visual and sonic field recordings interact to create sensory collages born out of the subjective impressions of the audience.
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Where the other films in Paul Clipson's COMPOUND EYES cycle relate natural and constructed environments through cutting, the liquid CARIDEA AND ICHTHYES uses superimpositions to float various fish and crustaceans in a brilliant neon sea. Like TAXI DRIVER crossed with a Jean Painlevé film, CARIDEA AND ICHTHYES serves as a beautiful articulation of the essential fluidity of film projection. - Max Goldberg
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Fully exercising the transformative potential of the close-up, Paul Clipson brings us face-to-face with the beguiling strangeness of a bee drawing nectar and a butterfly working its wings. The so-called "butterfly effect" (in which a single theoretical butterfly flapping its wings can result in a hurricane across the globe) seems freshly tangible after this installment of the COMPOUND EYES cycle. - Max Goldberg
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Paul Clipson's Super-8 study of dragonflies draws close enough to grasp their carnivorousness (as "odonata" is rooted in the Greek word for "tooth"). Then, suddenly, a bifurcation: the intense cross-species gaze yields to an equally alien facade of skyscrapers, a shift in scale revealing the imaginative aspect of environment. - Max Goldberg
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Filmmaker Paul Clipson's underlying attraction to things that elude the touch finds its apotheosis in the translucent thread of the spider's web, contrasted here against the grey solidity of a factory building. Pitched on the lip of nightmare, ARANEAE accesses the sublime in the very small. - Max Goldberg
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"Light from the Mesa" from Barn Owl's album Ancestral Star.
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Paul Clipson unexpectedly exchanged his court sound engineer, Jefre Cantu-Ledesm, for a promising artist named Kadet Kuhne, who presents herself in this experimental film with ambient meditation drawing on the theme in Barake from 1992. Cadet is a very interesting creature who not only makes music but audiovisual art, sculpture, photography and canvas.
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An exploration of movement, woven into layers of time, and photographed in natural and nocturnal urban spaces, ambiguous within a confluence of lights, colors and darkness. Sound by Jefre Cantu-Ledesma and directed by Paul Clipson.
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A hallucinatory synthesis of nightscapes, focusing on colors, textures, and forms of light, viewed and traversed in several rhythmic movements. Using multiple exposures of neon signs, traffic lights and reflections in water shot in cities such as San Francisco, New York and Amsterdam, this film study transforms urban spaces into a unique nocturnal metropolis, suggesting a timeless, euphoric experience of visual memory. (Light Cone)
Cinematography
SPHINX ON THE SEINE is a film poem: the beginning of a metaphysical journey, musing on a series of brief, but enigmatic images taken from around the world. These images follow one after the other, but geographically span thousands of miles and large passages of time between each cut. Notions of time, space, and memory collide within a visual fabric of abstractions, landscapes, textures, superimpositions and graphic forms, to suggest the first moments of dream-sleep.
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Three cities by night become one in this nocturnal journey through images and sounds in which space, color and light pass through the eye of the camera to create thoughts visualized before their conception. Filmed in San Francisco, New York, and Rotterdam.
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SPHINX ON THE SEINE is a film poem: the beginning of a metaphysical journey, musing on a series of brief, but enigmatic images taken from around the world. These images follow one after the other, but geographically span thousands of miles and large passages of time between each cut. Notions of time, space, and memory collide within a visual fabric of abstractions, landscapes, textures, superimpositions and graphic forms, to suggest the first moments of dream-sleep.
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Super 8mm, 21 min., color and b&w, music by Jefre Cantu-Ledesma
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Film by Paul Clipson. Music by Jefre-Cantu Ledesma.
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Super 8mm, 21 min., b&w, music by Jefre Cantu-Ledesma.
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A film by Paul Clipson.
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A short avant-garde film by Paul Clipson.
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Short film by Paul Clipson.
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Propulsive in-camera editing sends this nature collage deep into the embraces of dandelions.
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Automatic-writing on film, using double exposures, macro imagery, dissolves, and in-camera editing to create a dream collage of Los Angeles, from the perspective of a plane and an arachnid dancing between water and sun.
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Latest installment from the on-going collaboration between filmmaker Paul Clipson & musician Jefre Cantu-Ledesma. Paul's Super8 films, shot entirely in New York City, channel the blissed out states of color drenched psychadellia explored by Brakage as well as lovely black and white still life's that reminisce on Ozu's 'pillow shots' & Chantel Akermans monumental portrait of Pre-Giuliani New York 'Letters Home'. Jefre's music is culled from the same sessions that launched his 2007 release on Students Of Decay 'Shinning Skull Breath', (the two share a track in common). Billowy clouds of distorted guitar expand out into long passages of muffled static and fuzzed out melody.
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A film by Paul Clipson.
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A film by Paul Clipson.
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Short film by Paul Clipson from the Celluloid Sketches & Watercolor Movies DVD
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Short film by Paul Clipson from the Celluloid Sketches & Watercolor Movies DVD
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The light and water of wintertime, viewed at 35,000 feet, over the U.S., somewhere between the East and West coasts.
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Film by Paul Clipson. Music by Jefre Cantu Ledesma.
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Super 8mm by Paul Clipson. Sound by Jefre Cantu Ledesma.
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Super 8 films by Paul Clipson. Sound by Jefre-Cantu Ledesma.
