Northwest Film Forum

Paul Clipson is a San Francisco-based filmmaker who often collaborates with sound artists and musicians on films, live performances, and installations. His Super-8 and 16mm films aim to bring to light 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. His work has screened around the world in festivals and at sound and film events such as the International Film Festival Rotterdam, The New York Film Festival, and the Cinémathèque Française.

 

“Paul Clipson proves once again to have a keen eye and a wonderful gift for lyricism.” -- Tony Pilolo, Art Forum

 

 

 

SPHINX ON THE SEINE (2009, 16mm*, color/B&W, 7.5 min)

A series of brief, but enigmatic images taken from around the world. Images suggesting the first moments of dream-sleep, following one after the other, but geographically spanning thousands of miles and large passages of time between each cut. Filmed in New York, Moscow, Paris, Toronto, San Francisco and many places in-between.

 

CHORUS (2010, 16mm*, color, 7 min)

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.

 

UNION (2011, 16mm*, color/B&W, 14.5 min)

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. Filmed in the parks of San Francisco with Anya Kamenskaya.

 

ANOTHER VOID (2012, 16mm*, color, 11 min)

An almost entirely in-camera edited film: there are six splices in roughly ten minutes of hundreds of images. An attempt to re-appropriate the city and its signs into a more personal landscape, or subjective collage of visual and sonic experiences. Filmed in downtown San Francisco.

 

LIGHT YEAR (2013, 16mm, color, 10 min)

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.  

 

DISPORTING WITH A SHADOW (2015, 16mm, color/B&W, 4 min)

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, and San Francisco.

 

THE LIQUID CASKET / WILDERNESS OF MIRRORS (2014, 16mm, color/B&W, 7.5 min)

A restless, traveling consciousness flies across lands vast and small, taking note of possible futures that hint at humankind’s folly of expansion and alienation. Filmed in Zurich, Glasgow, Leeds and San Francisco. 

 

MADE OF AIR (2014, 16mm, color/B&W, 11 min)

A dream lament for a drowned world. Filmed in London, Zurich, San Francisco, Berkeley and Napa.

 

LIGHTHOUSE (2015, 16mm, color/B&W, 5 min)

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 unconscious homage to Saul Bass.