The Sprocket Society

Seattle, WA

The Sprocket Society is proud to present the Seattle debut of Los Angeles filmmaker Ross Lipman with a program featuring an excerpt from his latest original work-in-progress - performed live as a Magic Lantern / slide show - plus a selection of his earlier experimental short films and documentaries. There will also be live music by Seattle's own Ruby Thicket, plus The Philistine Liberation Orchestra.

Ross Lipman's Keep Warm, Burn Britain! is a personal memoir of the squatters movement in East London during the 1980s. It chronicles the lives of the anarchists, outcasts, and punks who lived in a small enclave of abandoned buildings south of the Thames, known as "Squatter's Paradise." Tonight Lipman performs an excerpt of this work-in-progress as a Magic Lantern / slide show; ultimately it will be a feature-length 35mm film. It features music by Thoth, the legendary NY street performer who is the subject of an Academy Award-winning documentary short.

Also showing tonight are these short films by Lipman:

10-17-88 (1989, 16mm)
A film of optically printed collage of found and archival footage, with audio collage by John Shaw on themes from Debussy and Ellington. An investigation of one's self within the sociological theater of our cultural history, breaking out to speak to archetypal memory.

Afternoon in Bottle Village (2007, DV)
A requiem for Grandma Prisbrey's cathedral of light, built entirely of glass bottles, pencils, and industrial detritus. With a score improvised on a broken piano by Jodie Baltazar (aka Monotrona).

The Gift: Michael Barrish Screen Test (1997, Super-8)
A screen test for a film that was never made, a feature-length narrative about the unbridgeable gap and connection between a father and son.

"Lipman's films chronicle the lives of men and women on the periphery of our vision; who slip through the cracks in the system, who walk invisibly by us each day. His medium ranges from photographs to Super-8, 16mm and 35mm film, and each work orchestrates light, language, and silence to create cinematic portraits that fall on a spectrum between document and story."
— Konrad Steiner, filmmaker, curator, San Francisco Cinematheque/Kino 21

ROSS LIPMAN is internationally known for his film/video and performance work, as well his writings and restorations of independent cinema. His 16mm and 35mm experimental films have screened throughout the world at venues such as London International Film Festival, Anthology Film Archives (NYC), the Los Angeles Film Forum, the San Francisco Cinematheque, Sixpackfilm/Top-Kino (Vienna), Chinese Taipei Film Archive (Taiwan), and many others. Lipman's works have been collected by institutions and museums including the Sammlung Goetz in Munich.

Lipman is also one of the world's leading figures in the restoration of independent cinema, working at the UCLA Film and Television Archive. Among the films he has restored are works by John Cassavetes, Kenneth Anger, John Sayles, Emile de Antonio, Sid Laverents, and Orson Welles. In 2007, the National Society of Film Critics gave Lipman their Film Heritage Award "for the restoration of Charles Burnett's Killer of Sheep and other independent films."

Lipman's writings on film and its preservation have been published and anthologized in the Journal of Film Preservation, Mining the Home Movie: Excavations in Histories and Memories (Univ. of California Press, 2007), Big as Life: An American History of 8mm Films (New York Museum of Modern Art/San Francisco Cinematheque, 1998), and elsewhere. Lipman has presented on film preservation topics at Association of Moving Image Archivists (AMIA) conferences, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS), the Orphan Film Symposium (New York University), and elsewhere.

On April 11, 2008 at the Pop Conference at EMP, Lipman will present his lecture "Mingus, Cassavetes, and the Politics of Improv", using film clips, texts, and still photographs to examine the complex and explosive collaboration of John Cassavetes and Charles Mingus for the film Shadows (1959) at a pivotal moment in the history of independent cinema, jazz, and race relations.

RUBY THICKET are an acoustic band from Seattle fronted by singer-songwriter John Shaw (vocals, guitar, bass, harmonica) and featuring Bob Barraza (vocals, drums, shakuhachi flute, ukulele), Jillian Graham (vocals, guitar), Robert Hinrix (vocals, mandolin, bass) and Mac McClure (vocals, bowed saw). They have self-released a CD, You Never Know What You'll See, sample MP3s of which can be downloaded from their web site.