Free Fall
(1964)is an experimental film from Arthur Lipsett. Free Fall is an assortment of film trimmings assembled to make a wry comment on humankind in today’s world. It evokes a surrealist dream of our fall from grace into banality.
Arthur Lipsett, a Canadian filmmaker most active during the 60s, is almost unknown in the U.S., but his films rank among the most powerful experimental work I've ever seen, documents of industrial dehumanization colored by a deepening sense of personal despair. In Free Fall rapidly edited footage of sun through trees is more fragmented than lyrical, nature filtered through some infernal machine. Faces on city streets, stripped of context and frighteningly disconnected from each other, become haunting fragments, and by matching and mismatching sound and image Arthur Lipsett creates hallucinatory voices, disembodied sentences offering weird commentary on what we're seeing. Most extraordinary is the way his editing mirrors the logic of depression, each new fact reinforcing one's despair.
Source: Fred Camper
In the proposal for his next film, Free Fall (1964) Arthur Lipsett describes the film as an "attempt to express in filmic terms an intensive flow of life – a vision of a world in the throes of creativity – the transformation of physical phenomena into psychological ones – a visual bubbling of picture and sound operating to create a new continuity of experience – a reality in seeing and hearing which would continually overwhelm the conscious state – penetration of outward appearances – suddenly the continuity is broken – it is as if all clocks ceased to tick – summoned by a big close-up or fragment of a diffuse nature – strange shapes shine forth from the abyss of timelessness." (...)
In his use of superimpositions, percussive tribal music, syncopated rhythms and a brisk 'single-framing” technique at the end of 21-87, Arthur Lipsett may have been attempting to create synesthesia through the intensification of image and sound. Citing Siegfried Kracauer, Lipsett writes that, “Throughout this psychophysical reality, inner and outer events intermingle and fuse with each other – ‘I cannot tell whether I am seeing or hearing – I feel taste, and smell sound – it’s all one – I myself am the tone.’” Incidentally, Free Fall was originally intended to be a collaboration with the American composer John Cage, modelled on his system of chance operations. However, Cage later withdrew his participation fearing Arthur Lipsett would attempt to control and thereby undermine the aleatory organisation of image and sound.
Source: Senses of Cinema