Remembering Arthur Lipsett

Fri.-Sat., July 24-25, 7 p.m., $7, International House, 3701 Chestnut St., 215-387-5125, ihousephilly.org.

by Shaun Brady

movies

Martin Lavutt's feature-length doc Remembering Arthur traces the Canadian filmmaker from experimental wunderkind to tragic mental case, but even without that context viewers can easily discern his downward trajectory. The chronological program of Lipsett's shorts that comprises night two of I-House's retrospective witnesses the director's bile increasing along with the length of his films, from the cynical whimsy of the seven-minute, Oscar-nominated Very Nice, Very Nice to the apocalyptic surrender of the 43-minute N-Zone. Lipsett's damning collages, pieced intricately together from original footage and oddities salvaged from the trim bins of the National Film Board of Canada, are dizzying condemnations of a rapacious species at play while civilization collapses around them, wielded with the misanthropic alarm of an "End is Nigh" picket.