In 1936, Arthur’s birth year, Arthur’s parents Solomon George Lipsett and Norma Goldberg were living in an apartment on Queen Mary Road in Montreal.
From telephone book listings in Montreal, here are two buildings, across the street from each other, at Queen Mary and Lemieux:
•1934-36: Lipsett Solomon G, MD. chemist J T Donald & Co apt 12, 4935 Queen Mary Rd
•1937-39: Lipsett Solomon G, M.D. chemist J T Donald & Co apt 12a, 4970 Queen Mary Rd
13 May 1936: birth of Arthur Harold Lipsett
1939: birth of Marian
Three years after Arthur’s birth, sister Marian was born. We cannot find a birth record.
In 1939 the family was living at 4970 Queen Mary Rd., an apartment building across the street from the previous address 4935 Queen Mary.
From 1939 to 1944 the Lipsett family lived at 5106 Lacombe Av., a four-plex building five short blocks north of the Queen Mary addresses. [image below]
9 Oct 1943, grandmother Helen’s visit
Grandmother Helen Lipsett came for one last visit to her son Solomon and his young family.
The address is 5106 Lacombe Av. This is her last visit. Helen died soon after her return to San Diego.
This is also posted in Solomon’s chapter.
Norma Goldberg Lipsett, Arthur, Marian
Unknown date. Possibly 1944 in the 5106 Lacombe Av. apartment building (brick wall behind).
The above photo looks a year or two earlier than the photo with “Grandfather” in the backyard of 4970 Hingston.
1945: The house at 4970 Hingston Ave
In May 1945, the Lipsett family had just moved into 4970 Hingston Ave.
The photo below is identified as being in 1945, when Arthur is 9 and Marian is 6. They are in the backyard of the Hingston Ave house, with “Grandfather”. [Source Lois Siegel website]
We think “Grandfather” must be Joseph Goldberg, Norma’s father. He lived in Winnipeg. It makes sense that he has come to Montreal for a visit, to see the new house.
[It is unlikely that it would be Solomon’s father Aurial Joseph Lipschitz. In 1945 he was busy in Los Angeles.]
1947: Norma Goldberg Lipsett’s suicide
A year and a half later, on 8 January 1947, Norma Goldberg Lipsett died by suicide. Ten-year-old Arthur was in the house when she swallowed a household chemical that poisoned her. We do not know the trigger for this extreme event in Norma’s life.
[There are several versions of how this story gets told. Marian who was 7 was not in the house, …
“Name: Norma Lipsett; Burial Date: 08 Jan 1947; Burial Plot: Line 9, Grave 11
Burial Place: Montreal, Québec; Shaare Zion; Cemetery: Back River Memorial Gardens Cemetery.
1947-1952: Five years without a mother
Over the next five years, in their now-motherless household, Marian and Arthur went to school, visited friends and tried to carry on as before.
Arthur was much more self-sufficient than Marian. He had a woodworking area in the basement where he made carvings of birds and other projects. This was his retreat.
Photo right: Marian and Arthur at a day camp in the summer, a rare cheerful photo.
In 1952, Solomon’s second marriage to Renee Schwartz
In 1952, when Arthur was 16 and Marian was 13, Solomon told them he was marrying again. They would now have a step-mother. [This is described by Marian in the Amelia Does book.]
Their new mother was a survivor of the concentration camps.
Renee (Rozsa) Schwartz was born in Hungary 24 Sep 1906. Her first husband was Zoltan Kramer. In 1928 they had a daughter Eva. During WW2, her entire family were imprisoned in concentration camps. In 1944, her mother, father and brother died in Auschwitz-Birkenau. Her husband Zoltan died in 1944 in Dachau.
Renee, and her daughter Eva now age 16, were liberated from Auschwitz-Birkenau at the end of WW2. In 1949 Renee and Eva came to Canada, to Montreal.
In 1950, when Renee and Eva joined the Lipsett household, Renee was 44 and Eva was 24.
Marian found the new relationships difficult, as described in the Amelia Does book.
Arthur, already skilled at doing things in his own way, does not seem to have been impacted by the change. At age 16, he was busy with his studies at Westhill High School, and with art classes on Saturday morning at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. He graduated from Westhill in 1954.
In 1957, he graduated from the Visual Arts program at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts School of Art and Design.
1958, Arthur’s career begins
1958, at age 22, Arthur was hired as an animator at the National Film Board.
Soon he found his own apartment. His NFB job was added in the Montreal Telephone Book:
1959: Lipsett A, apt 7, 4360 Cote des Neiges rd.
1961 & 1962: Lipsett A filmmkr Nat Film Bd., h apt 7 4360 Cote des Neiges rd
1963-69: Lipsett AH apt 9 4921 Coronet Street.
1968-69: Lipsett A filmkr Nat Film BD, apt 9 4921 Coronet.
The blue dots on this c.1950 map of Montreal streets, explained:
Top centre, four family addresses on or near Queen Mary, up to 1943.
Far left, the family house on Hingston Ave. from 1945.
Centre, right: first address Apt 7, 4360 Cote des Neiges rd. from 1959-1962.
Centre mid: second address Apt 9, 4921 Coronet Street, from 1963 to 1970.
Far right: favourite Sunday spot, Lac des Castors (Beaver Lake) on Mont Royal.
Lower: 37-39 Chesterfield Ave. same building as J. Sandiford, before departure to England summer 1970.
1962-1969: Apt 9, 4921 Coronet Street
When Judith Sandiford met Arthur Lipsett at a film screening, he had just moved from 4360 Cote des Neiges to Apt 7, 4921 Coronet Street. He had just bought a beautiful oak hall chair. He needed a better place for it. The chair is in both photos below.
In the 1960s, behind 4921 Coronet was a school with a playground. There was the joyful noise of kids at play in the yard. Below are the windows overlooking the school yard, with two stained glass little windows Arthur found in a second-hand store.
This chair was put in storage when Arthur left Montreal in 1970. It reappears later in this story.
The school and its play-yard are long gone, replaced by condos. The streets nearby have been renamed and re-engineered. The building that is now numbered 4921 is a new building on top of and expanded beside what used to be there. [according to googlemaps]
The building at 4360 Cote des Neiges has been demolished, as reported in the Eric Gaucher film).
Sunday in the park with The Times
Arthur at Mount Royal Park, near Beaver Lake. A Sunday ritual in the mid-60s. Photos by JSandiford
12 July 1970: Montreal to UK
After Arthur resigned from the National Film Board in fall 1969, he came to live in a room at 37-39 Chesterfield Ave in Lower Westmount, where Judith also lived. He put all the contents of the apartment at 4921 Coronet into trunks and into a storage facility in Montreal.
For the next 6 months, he went to the NFB from 11 pm to 7 am in order to finish his obligations to the NFB for final film. He came every morning for a meal (his dinner, Judith’s breakfast). Judith also completed her obligations as a school teacher, and also packed up belongings.
On 12 July 1970, they boarded a plane for London. They packed many clothes, so that they could stay for a year.
For July, August and September, they travelled all over the UK, mostly by local buses, staying in local B&Bs. Arthur was the searcher for lodgings and the landlady charmer, while Judith waited by the luggage.
However, the onset of Arthur’s illness had begun. He had bouts of quiet distress and grief. He went to a doctor for some medical help. Arthur is holding up the prescription in this image. A photo-booth strip was a favorite celebration.
The close-up reveals that it is Librium. The date is hard to read but looks like September.
His illness was schizophrenia, though we did not understand this yet. Librium is not useful.
14 October 1970: UK to Toronto
In early October, Arthur said we had to go back to Canada. We would go to Toronto, not Montreal. The flight to Canada was on 14 Oct 1970.
Montreal was in the midst of the 1970 “October Crisis” with the Front de libération du Québec (FLQ). The government has just invoked the War Measures Act. This situation was headline news in the UK tabloids.
In Toronto we stayed briefly with our friend and filmmaker Martin Lavut. We found a little seedy apartment at 25 Slade Street, right behind the Christie streetcar barns, and a block away from Martin and his girlfriend Suki Faulkner.
Fall 1970 to Spring 1972: 25 Slade St
1971: Arthur had all the trunks moved from Montreal to Toronto (from personal notes). It seems impossible that these could all fit in that tiny apartment. Perhaps the trunks went into a storage place where he could access them.
1971: “He began assembling paper material and books” (from personal notes).
1972 February: Arthur went on a collecting trip to England and Wales, to several places that specialized in books of arcana and esoteric knowledge.
Late Spring 1972: 38 Belsize Drive
In late spring 1972, we rented a beautiful house near Yonge and Davisville at 38 Belsize Drive. There were rose gardens all around the house. There was a big living-dining room on the main floor. Upstairs were two bedrooms, and a sun-porch. The sun-porch was Judith’s space.
The rest of the house was Arthur’s. The trunks were delivered and Arthur set up workspaces in the two bedrooms.
Late Spring 1973: 38 Belsize Drive
The demands of Arthur’s schizophrenia increased. The story of the crisis in that house in June 1973, and crisis of the hall chair sawed into small pieces, is told in the film “Remembering Arthur“.
Martin Lavut stayed in touch with Arthur. Martin also got advice from the head psychiatrist at the Clarke Institute: you cannot force, but you can inform — that is, tell how to seek help.
Martin did that, and Arthur did take himself to the Clarke Institute later in July.
In a phone call to Judith after that first hospitalization, Arthur said that the doctors said he had “made a miraculous recovery”, and they wondered “why his wife had not come to visit”. Heartbreaking to hear.
We do not know how Arthur coped with the house after that. He did eventually put all his collected material into storage once more.
The house at 38 Belsize Drive no longer exists. There are two houses where it once was.
1973-1974
Judith lived for a year on College Street in Toronto, in an apartment that Martin Lavut knew about. She did temporary office jobs before moving to Ottawa in late spring 1974. There she worked on a community newspaper, acquired some skills as a journalist and continued to do some supply teaching.
1975
Arthur moved to Victoria B.C. where a photographer friend Nina Raginsky, from Montreal, had settled. He lived there for about a year. There was an article about him in Victoria’s Monday Magazine, issue Sept 15-21, 1975.
And another project in Victoria:
‘In 1976 Lipsett went to Victoria and there worked on the film Blue and Orange (1978) with Tanya Ballantyne (Tree), a filmmaker at the NFB in the sixties. She was the director of the controversial 1967 film The Things I Cannot Change. Tree followed Lipsett to Victoria because she wanted to make a film with him. According to Tree, Blue and Orange was about “spontaneity”. The film has never been made into a release print, and the elements are still in Tree’s possession.’
[The only information we found about this film is above quote found in a thesis by Michael Dancsok 1998. Most of this thesis is poorly researched and full of errors.]
1976
Arthur returned from Victoria B.C. to Toronto, to 94 Amelia Street.
1976 Road Trip and Cab Ride
In 1976, Judith decided she had to radically rethink who she thought she was. She bought a car. The plan: take a couple of months to drive across Canada, about 100 miles a day, with no itinerary and no contact. She would check into General Delivery when she got to Edmonton.
Just before she left (June 1976), she drove down to Toronto to find Arthur and say goodbye.
She went to Amelia Street, and saw Arthur sitting on a park bench at the end of the street. They spent the rest of the day together.
Arthur told her, in a matter-of-fact way, that when his money ran out, he would commit suicide. Judith had a solution. She had some Canada Savings Bonds with her as her backup travelling money. She redeemed one for $750 and gave the cash to Arthur. They said goodbye at the end of a day together, and she drove off to a campsite north of Toronto to begin her trip.
She learned much later, in articles about Arthur, that shortly after her visit, he had taken a cab from Toronto to Montreal, costing at least $300. This story became evidence of how weird Arthur had become.
Only Judith knows how it really happened and what a good idea that was.
#1: He didn’t have to commit suicide.
#2: He got to Montreal, his home town, where he had a network of friends and family who knew him from his better days.
197–: Solomon wrote to Arthur in the 70s
An intriguing item in the thesis by Michael Dancsok 1998, in the end matter in “General Correspondence”:
“TO LIPSETT FROM: …
Lipsett, Saul (Father). 197(?), “Correspondence personelle” file, Arthur Lipsett
Collection, Cinémathèque québécoise Archives. Montréal.”
What did Arthur write to his father?
We have no idea what Solomon knew about what had happened in 1973 in Toronto, when the schizophrenia asserted itself and Arthur first went to a psychiatric hospital.
1976-1986
In Montreal Arthur lived ten more years with his schizophrenia. He died by his own hand a few days before his 50th birthday.
His story has been told over and over again by people looking for clues in his films of the disease that would eventually overcome him. There is no connection.
Arthur’s films were made by a brilliant, funny, kind man, with an astonishingly wide range interests and knowledge.
Films by Arthur Lipsett
Very Nice, Very Nice. 1961, 6 min 59 s; Arthur Lipsett’s first film.
21-87, 1964, 9 min 33 s; “A wry commentary on machine-dominated man, the man to whom nothing matters, who waits for chance to call his number.”
Free Fall, 1964, 9 min 15 s. High-speed imagery, with sudden pauses. Martin Lavut eyes, foliage at Jardin Botanique, gentleman with white hat, Granby Zoo animals, pinball arcades…. The footage is mostly filmed by Arthur with his Bolex. Judith was present for some of this filming
A Trip Down Memory Lane, 1965, 12 min 40 s. “Additional material for a time capsule” secondary title. Found footage of famous personages. Some with voice.
Fluxes, 1968, 23 min 55 s., “Arthur Lipsett’s view of the human condition. Fluxes has a disconnected flow of images that, in their erratic way, build up into a cutting indictment of the world the way it is.” All prior footage.
N-Zone, 1970, 45 min 28 s., secret name to us: The Zemel Zone.
Not finished, not released:
Blue and Orange, 1978, co-produced with Tanya Ballantyne Tree.
Films about Arthur Lipsett
NFB “Remembering Arthur” by Martin Lavut, 2006, 1 h 29 min. This is the version of Arthur Lipsett’s life told by long-time friend Martin Lavut, with the participation of Judith Sandiford, among others.
NFB “The Arthur Lipsett Project: A Dot on the Histomap” by Eric Gaucher, 2007, 52 min. “This full-length documentary introduces us to Arthur Lipsett, a man who defined experimental filmmaking at the NFB in the 1960s.”
NFB “Lipsett Diaries” by Theodore Ushev, 2010, 14 min “This film is not a biography of filmmaker Arthur Lipsett. THE LIPSETT DIARIES is not based on real diaries. It is a product of the authors’ imagination and free interpretation.” [the final text at the end of the film]
[JS comment: “This is personal self-indulgence and completely irrelevant to Arthur Lipsett’s memory.”
