Following a timeline that stretches from Charlie Chaplin's film debut in 1915 to the digital cinema coup of roughly a century later, film historian and restorationist Ross Lipman's Notfilm is a kind of Venn diagram in which most of the major forces of twentieth-century modernism overlap: silent comedy, Russian formalism, James Joyce's stream-of-consciousness, underground film, European art cinema and Beat poets all cross paths on a street in the Bronx in 1964. At the center of these divergent cultural streams is an obscure short film, a collaboration between an austere Nobel Prize-winning author, one of Hollywood's greatest comic talents and one of America's most adventurous publishers.…
Following a timeline that stretches from Charlie Chaplin's film debut in 1915 to the digital cinema coup of roughly a century later, film historian and restorationist Ross Lipman's Notfilm is a kind of Venn diagram in which most of the major forces of twentieth-century modernism overlap: silent comedy, Russian formalism, James Joyce's stream-of-consciousness, underground film, European art cinema and Beat poets all cross paths on a street in the Bronx in 1964. At the center of these divergent cultural streams is an obscure short film, a collaboration between an austere Nobel Prize-winning author, one of Hollywood's greatest comic talents and one of America's most adventurous publishers.…