Images of a beauty pageant overlaid with military music. From the very start, the tone has been set. Arthur Lipsett, tormented genius and pioneer of archive footage, brings us a critical and philosophical study of the state of the modern world and post-war Western civilization with A Trip Down Memory Lane. With his brilliant use of news footage, edited and juxtaposed creatively and sometimes ironically to create new layers of meaning, Lipsett paints an existentialist and somewhat cynical picture of the human condition in the modern era. What are the major accomplishments of Western technocracy and what impacts do they have on our collective conscious or on the rest of the world? Can we really call this “progress”? If archive footage has become commonplace today—such as the work of filmmaker Adam Curtis for the BBC, among others—we have Lipsett’s crucial contributions to thank. An editor like no other, he was able to innovate by freely appropriating images pulled from news reels or the NFB’s editing rooms to use as raw material for his avant-garde and visionary works. The aesthetic qualities of his films and the questions they raise are just as relevant today as they were then, and his influence remains just as indelible.
 

Frédéric Savard
Archivist and programmer