Paul Clipson’s films haven’t been seen very much in Los Angeles yet (his film Sun Place was seen at Echo Park Film Center a couple of months ago but otherwise I don’t think he has shown any work here). It’s only a matter of time before he makes a trip down to Los Angeles to present his work himself.
I had been hearing about Clipson’s work with increasing frequency, and finally had a chance to see him project his work with live music by Joshua Churchill and Colin McKelvey on my last trip to San Francisco at Sight School in Oakland. The films surpassed any expectations I had of them. To put it very simply, his work is everything and nothing simultaneously. Through repetition, heavy layering and elliptical editing, Clipson creates metaphors — with fluorescent lights, headlights on cars, ripples across the surface of water, leaves, branches — that somehow encapsulate everything one could ever hope to say about the nature of existence through the medium of film. Collapsing disparate imagery through the lens of the camera into these magnificent equivalencies he treats every object, surface, color and light equally. The result is films of an otherworldly beauty with the experience akin to gazing at a starry sky or light playing across the surface of water. The experience that is empty enough to include everything that exists. It’s almost unfair to the musicians he so frequently collaborates with, such as Tarentel, Jefre Cantu-Ledesma, Sun Circle, Gregg Kowalsky and numerous others. Clipson’s work is overwhelming in its breadth and beauty that any music accompanying is, for me, relegated to a distant background.
Another filmmaker whose work is rarely ever seen in Los Angeles, or anywhere for that matter, is Luther Price. One of my favorite artists, his work is ambiguous in meaning in an entirely different way from Clipson’s films, though they both share the medium of Super 8 mm. Whereas Clipson’s films celebrate all of existence, Price’s films are a negation of all of existence through obsessive, ritualized destruction — a destruction so deeply personal it becomes virtually impenetrable. Whether using found footage (home movies, pornography, commercial films) or his own — often filming himself in a variety of costumes enacting bizarre and extremely repetitive performances— Price creates his own metaphors of decay, rupture and mutilation, both physical and psychological. Price treats the film strip itself to all manner of mutilation — tearing it apart and putting it back together, letting all of the scars and accumulated layers of filth shine through on projection.
Still from Luther Price’s film ‘Meat’
A recent showing of Price’s hour-long film A at the Mandrake Bar was something I greatly anticipated. Unfortunately the work was shown from what felt like a bootleg-quality DVD, draining all the destructive vitality out. The film became something so lifeless, so completely castrated, that I can’t imagine how it must have seemed to anyone previously unfamiliar with his work.