‘Human might, majesty and mayhem’: a visual time capsule from 1965

In A Trip Down Memory Lane, the Canadian avant-garde filmmaker Arthur Lipsett uses newsreel footage covering 50 years to unleash a flurry of previously unrelated images – women in a beauty pageant, a scientific demonstration, an automobile catching fire – combined for unsettling and satirical effect. Created in 1965 as a ‘time capsule’, Lipsett’s collage film serves both as a glimpse into the dramatically different yet not-so-distant past, and as a peculiarly incisive exploration of what its producer, the National Film Board of Canada, calls ‘human might, majesty and mayhem’.