Secret Museums: The Films of Arthur Lipsett

At the age of 25, Arthur Lipsett became one of the most celebrated 'underground' filmmakers in North America. His first film, Very Nice, Very Nice (1961), received an Academy Award nomination, and with that, achieved a standing of significant influence within North American film schools and screening societies. Lipsett's commercial success marked him as the wunderkind of Canada's National Film Board. Over the next decade, Lipsett's superiors, often acting in a producer role on his films, found his work increasingly difficult to understand. It didn't fit the propagandistic drive of most NFB films, and Lipsett's individualism-and his refusal to root and rationalize his work in social messages-created rifts with his colleagues. These conflicted relationships, the dark soul of his work, and his devotion to difficult forms of aesthetic experience all combined to make him more of an outcast within the NFB, and this influenced his growing depression and mental illness.

Secret Museums is the only comprehensive critical biography of Lipsett to date. What is more, it is the only work about Lipsett that combines historical detail with a unique critical argument, premised largely on the notion that Lipsett's aspirations toward difficult forms were not a symptom of his mental illness, nor even related to his illness, but a brave, radical vision that didn't fit into the corporatist myths of the National Film Board of Canada.