Return to: ATA Film & Video Festival 2008: Program 1
Sphinx on the Seine
Paul Clipson, in person - 2008, 7', Super8, San Francisco
Questions with Paul Clipson
Elizabeth Wing: Can you tell us about the creative partnership between you and Jefre Cantu-Ledesma and Tarantel -- how it came to be, what working together is like?
Paul Clipson: My collaboration with Tarentel came to be first from working with Jefre at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Our many conversations about film, music and sound led to a mutual interest to see film combined with live music. Once I began creating original pieces shot specifically for the Tarentel shows, a creative osmosis took place with Jefre and the band, where I began to film in a manner influenced by seeing their rehearsals, recording sessions and live performances. Their prolific working methods, improvisation, and ability to discover and utilize the unexpected, influenced how I began to make films.
Our partnership together is less concerned with preconceived, formalized ideas and more about creating, in an ongoing, accumulative sense. There's no discussion or planning of a project or performance in terms of images and their relation to sounds, or vice versa. Almost everything about combining these forms is left to chance, with the audience being an eyewitness to whatever occurs as the films and music meet during a performance, and the uncertainty of the outcome gives the act of making and screening the films a sense of unlimited possibility.
EW: In your films, I find observing the transformation of an identifiable object or scene into something unfocused or abstract to be pleasurable. When you are shooting, do you look for abstract visuals, or do you create them (or both, or neither)? How do you frame your sense of focus?
PC: I try to release myself from consciously looking for something, and instead start by seeing what's already there. Everything is shot on location, so what's found is something documented, but at the same time, shot without an understanding of what it is. (For example, a macro shot of a small bubble of water quivering on a lily pad filmed in black and white could in fact be an immense long shot of a vast alien intelligence communicating in light to a spaceship orbiting hundreds of miles above it. This is how an image taken from nature might strike me.) Such found images can resist immediate understanding, only beginning to suggest multiple meanings over time.
Focus is almost a narrative element to me, where all of the varying degrees of detail or lack of detail in a composition can act as conflicting perspectives in a story told by many personalities. An image is a secret door swung back and forth between the literal and the abstract by several circumstances, one being the use of focus. Camera focus is a physical adjustment, like an eye seeing, or a mind shifting its consciousness from one state of attention to another. The camera's focus can move through space, just as a figure walks across a landscape. In a film of abstractions, focus can be a character in a mystery, or a thought rummaging through a memory, or an eye lost in a dream.
EW: Do you have any projects of interest coming up here San Francisco or elsewhere?
PC: I'm working on a short that will be part of kino21's live film-music narration event, The 10,000 Mile Bike Race, at the Yerba Buena Center For The Arts, on October 16th.
Paul Clipson has shown his films internationally in various galleries, festivals and performance venues in Spain, The Netherlands, Italy, Switzerland, Japan and Russia, as well as throughout the U.S. and in the Bay Area, including at the Pacific Film Archive, the Yerba Buena Center For The Arts, Artists Television Access, and the San Francisco Art Institute. He works primarily in film, video and works on paper.
Last updated 09/22/2008.
