Paul Clipson

A dreamy, impressionistic 16mm film of light on water, comprised mostly of sepia tones.

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.

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.

Music by Austin Cesear, 16mm film by Paul Clipson.

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.

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.

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.

Orpheus meets the bird with the crystal plumage.

Music by Jefre Cantu-Ledesma, 16mm color film by Paul Clipson.

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.

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.

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

A black-and-white short film made in collaboration with Sarah Davachi.

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.

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.

A film by Paul Clipson.

Short film by Paul Clipson from the Celluloid Sketches & Watercolor Movies DVD

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

"Light from the Mesa" from Barn Owl's album Ancestral Star.

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.