Directing
Two women meet at a crossroads... A chance encounter between two women struggling to stay afloat, in an era of the downsizing of dreams. Ross Lipman's one fiction film to date comes from a genre even more rare in the US than experimental work-adult drama. Printed in muted tones that conjure silent film hand-painting, and merging theater-based naturalism with an elliptical psychological encounter, "The Interview" at once utilizes and destroys mainstream narrative expectations.
Casa Loma was the unfinished dream mansion of Canadian industrial magnate Henry Pellatt. A self-made millionaire, Pellatt was derided by fellow aristocrats for nouveau-riche pretentions: the house and its décor considered by many an ornate fake. Its original contents were sold at Pellatt’s bankruptcy auction in 1924. Today the building is a museum. The movie has three sections—the first in a cellar tunnel, the next in a first-story workroom near the stables, the third in the tower’s summit.
A cultural history of ventriloquism disguised as a sci-fi TV series, integrating live actors with vintage and artist-made puppets. The Case of the Vanishing Gods is a fiction-doc hybrid that traces the phenomenon of ‘throwing voices’ from the oracles of ancient Greece to the spectacle of the modern horror film, and pushes the essay film into exciting new territory.
From Ross Lipman's "personal ethnographies" series, an informal visit with legendary filmmaker Bruce Baillie at his home on Camano Island in Washington State.
NOTFILM is a feature-length experimental essay on FILM -- its author Samuel Beckett, its star Buster Keaton, its production and its philosophical implications -- utilizing additional outtakes, never before heard audio recordings of the production meetings, and other rare archival elements.
Documentary short chronicling the process of restoring John Cassavetes' debut feature, Shadows (1959)
This documentary short takes you inside the fascinating world of film preservation and restoration.
The Prometheus Complex is second in a series of four documentary-fiction hybrid films investigating the house of mirrors of the subconscious mind. The film looks at the history of the human race’s strange attempts to create artificial life. Within the framework of a fiction, a hallucinatory kaleidoscope of archival film clips from classic works of cinema reveal a hidden history. The first film in the series, The Case of the Vanishing Gods looks at the history of ventriloquism, and premiered at the Locarno Film Festival in August 2021.
THE EXPLODING DIGITAL INEVITABLE is a live documentary essay integrating an array of movie and audio clips, still photographs, and rare archival documents that tells the story of CROSSROADS' unique production, as well as the massive cultural spectacle of the original Bikini Atoll tests themselves--the singlemost recorded event in human history.
Filmed in a decaying housing estate in east London, "Rhythm 06" renders the outer trappings of internal collapse, a choreography of layers of the real. This new reworking of "Rhythm 93" transposes Michael Whitmore's ethereal score for 10-string guitar and overtones on Carolyn Roy's original riveting hypernaturalist performance.
This short essay film looks at the star-crossed release history of J.L. Anderson and Franklin Miller's rediscovered classic SPRING NIGHT, SUMMER NIGHT. Utilizing clips from the exploitation version of the film (called MISS JESSICA IS PREGNANT), outtakes, and archival photographs, it explores the production history and the way the two films differed.
In this live cinema essay, Ross Lipman investigates the birth of the Television Spectacle. Based loosely on the classic anarchist documentary POINT OF ORDER! (a film which at once deconstructed the hearings and re-invented documentary form), the performance integrates archival movie and audio clips in chronicling the strange evolution of our understanding of McCarthy's America. The original film and its many revisions ultimately reveal an odd continuation of a hegemonic framing process begun with the original Army hearings which continues to the present day.
In this eclectic spin on the concert film, Ross Lipman transforms footage of one of his celebrated live documentary performances into a new video essay that's at once an archaeological dig and a riveting history. Its underlying subject is the origin of civilization - as comprised entirely of media clips. In the summer of 1971 Philippine dictator Ferdinand Marcos announced the discovery of a tribe of primitive cave dwellers who had lived in complete isolation for thousands of years in the rain forest of Mindanao. The Tasaday indigenous group represented a chance to witness firsthand the roots of our culture, and to explore the very essence of humanity. They also-as we learn-offered Marcos and his cronies a unique political opportunity.
Ross Lipman's new film frames an act of self-archiving within a larger, essayistic mediation on the relationship between experimental practice and independent arthouse cinema.
