Скачать или смотреть Arthur Lipsett's N-Zone (with introduction by Stephen Broomer)

The “n-zone” is a hypothetical plane of philosophical speculation: n is nirvana, n is nihil and none, n is nadir. As in algebra, n has a specific but concealed meaning that is revealed by inquiry, by the working out of an equation. By the poetic properties of the phoneme, n can suggest infinity. By those same properties, it is the end zone, the scoring plane at either end of a football field, the goal. For Arthur Lipsett, who had spent a decade making films about consumer society, the dense plenitude of worldly content, and Western civilization’s hunger and pitilessness, the n-zone represented something ultimate and final. The n-zone first manifested when Henry Zemel came to Lipsett’s Coronet Street apartment one day to find that Lipsett had cut out a series of letters from black and white paper. One man took a black surface, the other a white one, and they arranged and rearranged the contrasting letters until the expression appeared. Even as they settled on it, they played with the orientation of N, the n-zone becoming the z-zone and the z-none and back again, z as zero and as the end of point of the Latin alphabet. Between nowhere and eternity, the zone became host to a legion of potential meanings.

Ad Hoc is proud to present this screening of Arthur Lipsett’s longest, most controversial, and often misunderstood film, on 16mm, thanks to the gift of a print from Canadian filmmaker Rick Hancox. This screening follows our fall term screening in serving as a full retrospective of Lipsett’s filmmaking. Building from that presentation, Dr. Stephen Broomer, author of Secret Museums: The Films of Arthur Lipsett (Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2025), will give opening remarks on the film.

Program:
N-Zone (1970, 45 mins., 16mm, b&w, optical sound)

AD HOC aims to rethink what an experience of cinema can be. We seek to reposition historical landmarks and buried treasures within the on-going tradition of experimental and other non- commercial modes of filmmaking, drawing on work from Toronto, throughout Canada, and internationally. Within these parameters, we aspire to diversity in programming, as well as to multimedia and interdisciplinary screening events that bring together varied communities.