Anthology Film Archives

Film Screenings / Programs / Series

ROSS LIPMAN AND THE ARCHIVAL IMPERMANENCE PROJECT

July 8 – July 10

July 8-10, 2025

Filmmaker, archivist, researcher, and essayist Ross Lipman has been one of the under-sung heroes of film culture over the past several decades, quietly but indefatigably advancing the cause of cinema in many different ways. He is perhaps best known for his work preserving and restoring innumerable cinematic treasures (SCORPIO RISING, WANDA, THE EXILES, KILLER OF SHEEP, and many, many others), initially at the UCLA Film & Television Archive where he was the Film Restorationist for 17 years (until 2015), and for the last decade through his own company, Corpus Fluxus. Lipman was a filmmaker even before he turned to restoration work, and has continued making moving-image work in various formats up to the present day – experimental short films, as well as essay films and illustrated lectures (such as NOTFILM, his astonishing “kino-essay” on the making of FILM, the 1965 Samuel Beckett/Buster Keaton collaboration) that reflect his deep research into particular artists and underexplored corners of film history (and are informed by his long experience as an archivist and restorationist).

Lipman has also written and spoken extensively about film restoration, shedding light on its technical and practical facets, as well as the more philosophical dimensions of the field. In June, Sticking Place Books will publish a collection of these writings: “The Archival Impermanence Project: Film Restoration Poetics, Case Studies, and Histories” (2025). Bringing together a diverse array of Lipman’s essays, lectures, and rare archival documents, the book is, in the words of the publisher, “a unique work integrating detailed film restoration case studies from the dawn of cinema to the present day, in the framework of an organic theory of practice,” and one that proposes “a new way of looking at the act of film restoration within a context of the only known condition of life: impermanence itself.”

To celebrate the publication of “The Archival Impermanence Project”, we’ll be hosting Lipman for a three-program series, featuring the premiere of a new video-essay version of one of his acclaimed illustrated lectures (THE BOOK OF PARADISE HAS NO AUTHOR), as well as three of the films he has restored over the years: amateur movie-maker Sid Laverents’s THE SID SAGA (1985-89), artist and performer Eleanor Antin’s THE MAN WITHOUT A WORLD (1991), and Yiddish cinema director Josef Berne’s DAWN TO DAWN (1933).

For more info about “The Archival Impermanence Project”, visit: https://stickingplacebooks.com/the-archival-impermanence-project/ 

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