For twenty years Center for Visual Music (CVM), a nonprofit film archive, has been dedicated to visual music, experimental animation and abstract media. CVM has preserved a significant body of at-risk Visual Music films by Oskar Fischinger, Jordan Belson, Mary Ellen Bute, Charles Dockum, Jules Engel, James Whitney and others.
Louise Bourque's œuvre is an irreducible totality in which personal and family secrets hide behind layers of photochemical emulsion. It offers an obsessive world that is both visceral and oneiric, dotted with repetitive motifs. Death and birth, fertility and decomposition. These oppositions run through Bourque's work and find an echo in her practice; she creates out of images that are "dead" (unused, discarded, forgotten) and buried (in the garden of the familial house).
The films of Arthur Lipsett are softly apocalyptic assemblages of midcentury images and sounds—documentaries, street photographs, advertisements, interviews. In the classic Very Nice, Very Nice, hundreds of purloined moments spin past the eye at a jet-age clip: crowds march, highways sprawl, an atom bomb drops, children play, wrestlers grapple, audiences guffaw. Equally magpied, the soundtracks draw heavily on dialog from psychiatric films and religious oratory, continuously circling back to existential themes, collaged with jazz, spirituals, and ritual music.
