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Very Nice, Very Nice
Academy Awards®
Nominated for Best Live Action Short Film 1962
In 1958, twenty-two-year-old visual arts student Arthur Lipsett went to work for the National Film Board of Canada, the country’s public film producer and distributor. But what really interested the young Lipsett was collecting bits of sound and footage that NFB filmmakers had discarded.
His avant-garde work Very Nice, Very Nice exposes how we hide behind a façade in times of crisis, as if nothing is wrong. Arthur Lipsett’s first collage film mixes dozens of black-and-white photographs with audio fragments of casual conversations. Occasionally, a voice preaches: “Very nice, very nice.” The film’s subtle criticism of the 1960s zeitgeist in the United States earned it an Oscar nomination.
This avant-garde mix of photography and sound offers a look behind the business-as-usual, revealing fears we want to forget. Like other Lipsett films, Very Nice, Very Nice toys with the documentary genre’s representational and aesthetic codes. The result is a sardonic re-reading of 1950s consumerism, mass media, and popular culture. Images of the repulsive damage left by both war and technological progress give the film an enduring punch. The Shining director Stanley Kubrick called Lipsett’s film “one of the most imaginative and brilliant uses of the movie screen and soundtrack [he had] ever seen.”
Encouraged, Lipsett went on to make a fistful of similarly intense short films. Unfortunately, his mental health deteriorated rapidly during this period, and before committing suicide at the age of 49, Lipsett spent the last ten years of his life in various mental institutions. His explosive films can be seen as a dramatic insight into the artist’s deteriorating mind.
Bio Arthur Lipsett
Canadian avant-garde director Arthur Lipsett (1936–1986) mainly made short experimental films. Lipsett had a particular passion for sound and creating auditory sensations. A fine example is Very Nice, Very Nice, which was nominated for the 1962 Oscar for Best Short Film. Although the film did not win, it received much praise from critics and directors.
Pretty words about self-transformation are exploded in mushroom clouds, while becoming “really involved” reveals its outcome as a mutilated corpse, framed by a competing succession of NO’s and YES’s that never fully resolves. Nocturnally salvaged and stitched together from the Film Board’s trim bins, the verbal fragments that he recontextualizes – “And they say the situation is getting worse!”, “what the future will behold”, “If the only way you can find to express your individuality is an orange plantation in Brazil…” – leave no question that the distressed faces he strings together are victims even if they’re also perpetrators, and at the end the forces collide in a succession of disquieting photo-collages of ad imagery, a fragmentary document of the visual arts work that was his other vocation.
I was just having fun with sound at first. One day, I joined two scraps of sound together and they sounded interesting. I began collecting scraps of sound from the wastage…. It was initially a sound experiment—purely for the loving of placing one sound after another.