Arthur Lipsett’s Strange Codes is the legendary found-footage filmmaker’s first and only independent film, made after his departure from the National Film Board of Canada. In a rented house in Toronto, Lipsett stages a series of mysterious rituals, appearing onscreen in the guise of various characters, among them, an archeologist, a soldier, a scientist, a magician, and the Monkey King of the Peking opera. Dense with enigmatic gestures and private allusions, Strange Codes operates, in Lipsett’s words, “at the midway points between the primitive, ritualized world and the world of logic and science.”
