GME Gem 21: Paul Clipson's Immersive Cinema

An excerpt from Paul Clipson’s 2014 MADE OF AIR, a work that demonstrates that the function of the avant-garde to necessitate the furtherance of radical perception has not ceased, that it is still required. Filmed in London, Zurich, San Francisco, Berkeley and Napa. Music by Grouper.

Paul Clipson’s cinema is one of eternal recurrence. Subjects continually repeat themselves: bridges, buildings, fences, gratings, trains, airplanes, trees, suns, leaves, grass, eyes, power lines, and especially bodies of water. Clipson creates layered superimpositions of these objects through rewinding the camera and re-exposing the film stock from another iteration of the subject. In this manner, Clipson transforms material reality into otherworldly thresholds of shimmering reflections and dynamic edges into vibrations of light. In this, Clipson’s primary concern is not alluding to the properties of cinema, but rather to the properties of perception itself. Clipson’s films are among the clearest articulations since Stan Brakhage of how vision is formed through process – how sight is not a passive and inert function, but can equally shape the world.

"[Paul Clipson’s films] are a photo-chemical catalog of the visible world, charged with psychic energy, scored partly by chance, and imbued with a generosity of being.” - Otie Wheeler, MUBI Notebook

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GME distributes PAUL CLIPSON - LANDSCAPE DISSOLVES, a collection of 14 films made between 2009-2016 in the UK reflecting the rare beauty of Clipson’s cinematic vision, as downloadable DSL files and on DVD.