I restored Arthur Lipsett's Strange Codes in 2017, in collaboration with the Cinémathèque Québécois. The film is available with a vast trove of contextualizing features from our store. This article is an attempt to address Lipsett's remarkable notebook that documents the evolution of his ideas for the film, notes that reveal the full scope of his influences and the scale of his deliberations on the forms his work was now taking.
Those who are interested in reading more about Lipsett's life and work might consider acquiring my book, Secret Museums: The Films of Arthur Lipsett, available now from Wilfrid Laurier University Press.
- S.B., September 20, 2026
ONE THING AFTER ANOTHER: ARTHUR LIPSETT AND THE STRANGE CODES NOTEBOOK
by Stephen Broomer
Arthur Lipsett made Strange Codes in Toronto in 1974, several years after he left the National Film Board. It would become his only independently produced film and the last film that he would complete. Most of it was shot inside the house he was renting at 38 Belsize Avenue, which, in addition to his home, served as a studio, stage, library and storehouse. Lipsett appears throughout in a succession of parts identified in his production notes as the Archeologist, the Mongolian, the Lab Coat, the Magician, the Monkey King and the Egyptian. He moves among books, toys, diagrams, anatomical illustrations, boxes, globes and masks, examining them through magnifying glasses and binoculars, rearranging them and opening one object to discover another. An investigation is underway, although its object keeps moving.
Among the surviving production papers is a notebook in which much of this activity was planned out. Late in the book Lipsett offers what could serve as an accurate description of the resulting film: a “game with logical moves but unknown rules.” On the same page he proposes an “add-a-part collage flow,” which in itself suggests something of a Surrealist game (i.e. the exquisite corpse), with cut-out parts pasted onto a scenic background and accumulating toward imaginary animals or a “mutation continuity.” The formulation fits comfortably among the diagrams, practical instructions, reading notes and scraps of language that otherwise fill the notebook. Ideas with enormous reach appear beside things to acquire or to build.
The notebook begins with practical aims. Its first fourteen pages are dominated by numbered setups, camera positions, zooms, props, costumes and continuity problems. Lipsett records whether the Archeologist has his jacket, whether white paper remains pinned to a board from one shot into the next, and where shots might be moved in the sequence. “GOOD” and “V. GOOD” appear in the margins. Red ink introduces substitutions, revised orders and possible openings. One occult-board setup is marked as a “POSSIBLE END SHOT OF FILM.” Nothing about these pages suggests a filmmaker simply setting a collection of objects loose and waiting to see what happens. The gestures have been broken down and prepared in considerable detail.
The Chinese tea boxes receive their own sequence of shots. The Mongolian lifts the flap of an anatomy diagram. The Monkey King spins a globe. The Archeologist examines boards and books through a magnifying glass. Lipsett knew many of the actions he wanted, and sometimes knew them down to the direction of a pan or the duration of a zoom. Shots could be moved forward, repeated or placed in a different contrasts. The notebook preserves both stages of that work: the preparation of discrete actions, and the search for a suitable continuity.
Boxes are especially suited to the film: one contains another, which produces something else; a cigar box yields letters; books open onto diagrams; flaps open bodies; closets produce costumes. Lipsett’s characters handle containers whose contents become the next available subject. The magnifying glass enlarges the evidence without doing much to settle it. The act of opening a box becomes one pathway for continuity, and in the absurd comic spirit by which Lipsett lived, what spilled out was unlikely to fit back inside.
By the early 1970s Lipsett had spent years making the diagrams and paperboard collages he called his “secret museums,” borrowing the term from The Secret Museum of Mankind, a pseudo-anthropological picture book whose assembly of secret societies, exotic rites and mysterious customs had the authority of an encyclopedia in the form of a mail-order catalogue, and was likely consumed as pornography. His own secret museums could be charts, large paper collages or walls crowded with clippings. His were working diagrams, but it was also arguably a phrase he assigned to all the bric-a-brac of his life, trunks of objects and instruments and books that composed a secret museum, an externalization of that most complex index, his own mind.
One page of the Strange Codes notebook explicitly labels a diagram “Arthur’s Secret Museum.” Elsewhere the older paper practice begins acquiring props and performers: books become objects to be handled; diagrams become scenery; objects receive gestures; gestures receive camera positions. By the time Lipsett prepares a “LIST OF BOOKS FOR FILM FOR MONKEY GOD,” the reading material has become an inventory: Secret Museum of Mankind, Codes and Coding, an Egyptian book, German books of medicine and birds, anatomy books, dictionaries, a labyrinth book, travel books, pulp books. A “tiny Latin dictionary” is singled out among them. Another page lists props: old letters, an accordion, mystery books, binoculars, a white lab coat, hats, globes, glass slides and other things waiting to be introduced into the rooms.
The distinction between research material and stage property becomes difficult to maintain. Lipsett reads about systems and then carries their images into the film. A diagram can be consulted as information and used as scenery. A dictionary belongs to language but also to a hand, a table and a shot. The books remain books, with covers, dimensions and graphic peculiarities.
Several pages diagram the controls and connections of a recorder: battery voltage, power unit, microphone, input selector, rewind key, another code to be learned. A later sheet headed “SOUND IDEAS” lists whispering, “automatic” talking, a dog-barking code, intermixed frequencies, footsteps and instructions. Elsewhere automatic writing is proposed as a way to “pull in” messages, and Lipsett sketches a “psychic apparatus” intended to receive a “universal code reaching earth.” Electronics and occult reception occupy neighbouring pages without requiring Lipsett to choose between them.
This language had been available to him for some time. Warren McCulloch had given Lipsett a vocabulary for systems in which pathways branch, meet and transmit information. In Strange Codes, that vocabulary sits among cryptography, automatic writing, magic, dictionaries and recording equipment. None provides a master key. They furnish comparable operations: receiving, transmitting, translating, storing, decoding. Lipsett can put them near one another and see what kind of traffic develops between them.
The National Film Board had trained several generations of filmmakers in a progressive-evolutionary cinema of demonstration. Processes were shown, conditions identified, causes followed toward effects. Lipsett had already made some of the institution’s least tractable films from within that culture. Strange Codes retains an odd trace of instructional cinema, at a point of sardonic parody. Its characters point, examine, open books, raise flaps, consult words and direct their attention toward objects. The gestures remain lucid after their explanatory purpose has gone missing.
Lipsett’s costumes uphold that conception of compromised expertise. The Archeologist, Mongolian, Lab Coat, Magician, Monkey King and Egyptian occupy the same house and are played by the same man, but they approach its inventory differently. Their costumes are plainly assembled rather than transformed into seamless disguises. The Archeologist brings a magnifying glass to the work. The Lab Coat is a loosely-defined archetype of scientific authority. The Magician and Monkey King move through another repertory of props and signs, an older order of spiritual, regal and mystic authority. A page devoted to an imaginary architecture of the mind proposes two rooms, an “ORDER” room and a “CHAOS” room, “both” possessing equal complexities but different natures. At Belsize, these mental rooms required no architectural construction: they were transiently assigned to the rooms that made up his own home.
The notebook is funny in ways that accounts of Lipsett’s late work have intentionally ignored. One proposed dedication reads: “THIS FILM IS DEDICATED TO WOLFGANG KOHLER WHO HELPED LAUNCH A WASHING MACHINE INTO SPACE.” Nearby are notes on an “Ode to Power,” McCulloch, Ernie Bushmiller's Nancy, codes, magic and various schemes for continuity. Grand systems have to share their pages with equipment requirements and pieces of cardboard. “Bizarre continuity” is one of Lipsett’s descriptions for what he was after. It is the continuity of the overstuffed box, it is the continuity of Nancy comics. The notebook contains too many numbered shots, continuity questions, equipment inventories, book lists, props and alternate placements for chaos to explain very much. Its rules are local.
The later pages change character. Handwritten plans give way increasingly to pasted materials: advertisements, newspaper clippings, ethnographic photographs, electronics pages, reproductions of antiquities and Japanese prints. One page preserves an advertisement promising to make patients “SEVERAL INCHES TALLER.” Another contains a magazine interior into which Lipsett has pasted a huge face. Photographs from popular anthropology and archaeology arrive beside diagrams of radio circuitry. Near the end are Japanese images removed from art books, including Utamaro and Harunobu. The notebook has begun to resemble the larger paper environments Lipsett had been constructing for years.
Some of these materials bear the habits of his sources. Egypt, Tibet, Africa, Japan and a generalized “East” recur through books, costumes, reproductions and popular anthropology. Lipsett encountered much of this already converted into Western pictures of the ancient, ceremonial or exotic. The Secret Museum of Mankind is exemplary: its supposed survey of human difference turns cultures into an inventory of mysteries. In the notebook, Lipsett can rearrange the pictures, contrast them with electronics, advertising or slapstick, and expose the absurd promiscuity with which mass culture has sorted them.
The notebook complicates attempts to read Strange Codes primarily through the lens of Lipsett’s (poorly documented) illness. It is clear from the accounts of his friends that his mental health had faced serious and recurring difficulties by the time he made the film. But the notebook's accounts of telepathy, magic, universal messages and psychic apparatuses also suit his longstanding interests in the extraordinary. Those subjects coexist with deliberate jokes, reading notes, quotations, prop inventories and exact filming instructions. On one page, Lipsett writes that he does not wish to proclaim himself “some kind of wizard,” then continues thinking about “good magicians” and the artist’s sensitivity to destructive or corrective forces.
Retrospective diagnosis can make every obscurity look like evidence. The notebook documents sustained planning alongside thoughts that expand rapidly into magic, communication, politics and cosmology. A phrase can be pursued seriously and then placed beside a joke, the work of a creative Beat thinker. Declaring the whole thing irrational is contradicted by the organization that fills it cover to cover. To make every system cohere would lose something equally evident, and would bring Lipsett into closer relation to the straight world of bureaucrats that he, an artist, had escaped.
There are moves to this game, and he has numbered them, reshot them, changed their order and marked some better than others. The rules can't be recovered because they did not need to produce a single decipherable statement. They are like the rules of a game that Michael Snow spoke of when he said that his own art involved conceiving of the rules of a game, and then changing them if you're losing. Lipsett's work was always rooted in flexible play, which is what had made him an outcast at the National Film Board of Canada.
For all of its universal codes and psychic transmissions, its apparatus remained stubbornly material. Books, boxes, paper, globes, hats, diagrams, a lab coat, binoculars, mirrors, tape recorders and whatever else Lipsett could get into position populate the notebook as a strange omen of what he would turn the house on Belsize into for the course of the shoot. One of his descriptions of Strange Codes calls it a “visual network composed of movable objects and graphic elements,” activated through ritual actions. The secret museum had acquired depth enough to enter, such that Lipsett can walk right through it, open another box, and change his clothes.
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Stephen Broomer is a filmmaker, writer, publisher, and historian of Canadian cinema. His work has focused extensively on the history of experimental and independent filmmaking in Canada, with particular attention to neglected films, archival histories, and artists working outside established accounts of Canadian film culture. He is the author of Secret Museums: The Films of Arthur Lipsett, a study of Lipsett’s cinema, working methods, and archival remains. Through Black Zero, Broomer has also been involved in the restoration and republication of Canadian experimental film, including the restoration of Lipsett’s Strange Codes in collaboration with the Cinémathèque québécoise. He is also the host of Northern Light, an ongoing video series devoted to Canadian film history, bringing renewed attention to overlooked, marginal, and independent works from across the country.