Featuring DAVID ISAACSON as Doctor Labyrinth
and JEFF DORCHEN (voice) and KARL HERLINGER (controls) as Hugo
Lead Puppeteer: AUDREY DENSMORE
Music by MIHALY VIG
Written, Photographed, Directed and Edited by ROSS LIPMAN
Best 10 Films of 2022 - Jonathan Rosenbaum, Screen Slate
Winner, Selezione Pixel (awarded by Corriere Del Ticino to the three most innovative films
in the Locarno Film Festival 2021)
"What most distinguishes Lipman’s film is its body of bricolage and its soul of an earnest spiritual quest. The Case of the Vanishing Gods offers a deeply ambitious, compelling account of the infinite conflations and permutations of material, cinematic, and psychological territories. That it does so with humor and the utmost ingenuity, with an ethereal budget and a cool seventy-minute run time, makes it a beacon of scrappy existential glory." - Rachel Jones, The Brooklyn Rail
"a black phantasmagoria on the relationship between cinema and ventriloquism
in which puppet theater meets animation and Greek tragedy borders on horror....
The film enters a dimension between history, spirituality and the unconscious which,
through a diversity of animation techniques, ventures to the very origins
of ventriloquism." - Sylvia Nugara, Il Manifesto
"Ross Lipman, one of the most important contemporary independent cinema innovators,
explores a fraction of film culture with surprising freedom, cutting, stretching
and creating a unique collage of history, cinema, and ventriloquist art. There is
no shortage of fear, and plenty of liberating laughter.
The Case of the Vanishing Gods
sets a clear direction for independent cinema, establishing the
increasingly important role of essay films beyond the mainstream cinema."
- Mateusz Tarwacki, Zawieszony
"Horror and psychoanalysis join in a beautiful, creative and damned disturbing work."
- Alessio Gradogna, Orizzonti di Gloria
"a welcome experience that skillfully assembles, repurposes and recycles archival images
to produce new sensations. Lipman confirms his talent as a film essayist, already displayed in NOTFILM and BETWEEN TWO CINEMAS. A great essay film."
- Monica Delgado, Desistfilm
"I thought I'd outgrown my fear of sentient dolls on a murderous rampage, but now
I need to re-evaluate that belief. One thing's for sure, if I ever saw a doll coming at
me and go under a bed/sofa, there is no way I'd bend down to look under it because
that way only leads to pain."
- Cara-Lynn Branch, Universal Cinema Film & TV Journal
"Was that a movie by someone who's never seen a movie before?"
- Anonymous viewer in lobby of Music Box Theater, Chicago
"One of the most original essay film artists now working in the U.S. I don't know another
body of work even remotely similar to his." - Thom Andersen
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