The Lipsett Diaries, animated film, Theodore Ushev.

In late 2011, the Barbican Centre and the London International Animation Festival screened Theodore Ushev’s ‘The Lipsett Diaries’, a lavish 14min animated tribute to celebrated 1960s experimental filmmaker Arthur Lipsett.

Lipsett began his practice experimenting with with audio collages of ‘found sound’ before moving on to create elaborate montages of both audio and video and a hugely influential series of films, arguably producing his best work for the Academy Award nominated film ‘Very Nice, Very Nice’ in 1962.

Despite this promising mainstream debut, the exposure marked the start of a slow personal and professional decline which was to end in tragedy. Lipsett took his own life after suffering from years of worsening mental illness and critical reception.

Theodore Ushev’s animation career is as improbably young as Lipsett’s brightest period was short. A graphic designer by training who turned to animation just six years before his first short, Ushev already boasts an impressive array of film credits, awards and glowing reviews.

The Lipsett Diaries’ liquid, expressive visual style and compositional complexity is the outcome of a process Ushev describes as obsessive, and it’s difficult to disagree. Over a two year period of self-imposed near-isolation, Ushev painstakingly hand-painted thousands of frames of animation in gouache, and re-drew hundreds more using Lipsett’s film or staged photographs and film as reference.

The Lipsett Diaries is driven by a spoken narrative written by Chris Robinson and voiced by actor Xavier Dolan, and is a surreal blend of autobiography, biography and fiction. In fact, it’s tempting to describe Robinson’s approach as a kind of literary portrait in bricolage.

The voice-over is an array of dislocated phrases and narrative fragments, freely combining excerpts from Lipsett’s personal notebooks, lines heard spoken in films, literary quotations, the few verifiable facts about Lipsett’s reclusive personal life, and, most interestingly, raw autobiographical accounts of Chris Robinson’s own life re-purposed to fill the gaps in the available truth of Lipsett’s.

The event also featured a rare screening of three films by Lipsett himself, followed by an appropriately candid Q&A with Ushev, during which he discussed the motivation for, creative process and reception to his film.

After the Q&A I had the opportunity to briefly speak with the artist about the film’s distinctive soundtrack, produced by Oliver Calvert who in turn, amongst other musicians, drafted in David Bryant of Canadian post-rock band Godspeed You! Black Emperor to provide his familiar bombast.

For Ushev, Bryant’s input was crucial. His score is a serrated wash of swells and disquieting murmurs; a combination which proves unsettlingly effective in illustrating the unpredictable psychological episodes to which the bipolar Lipsett found his life held hostage.

The film is absolutely fantastic. It’s hugely ambitious, sensitive, deftly impressionistic and obviously the work of people for whom attention to detail and meticulous authorship is critical. I think Arthur Lipsett would approve.