Arthur Lipsett's 1963 experimental film 21:87 shaped Star Wars more than most people know. George Lucas watched it dozens of times as a film student and drew the concept of the Force from a snippet where an AI pioneer calls humans complex machines. The number 2187 appears throughout Star Wars as an Easter egg to Lipsett's title, yet the Montreal filmmaker remains largely uncredited.
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If it weren't for a bureaucratic Canadian government agency, Star Wars, all of it, might never have happened. There is a 9-minute film sitting in the National Film Board's archive that Star Wars creator George Lucas watched more than 2 dozen times. I have also watched it. It's weird. Uh, it doesn't have a plot, the, uh, the audio doesn't match up with the images, the images seem to be at random. A Montreal filmmaker named Arthur Lipsett made it in 1963 from scraps of footage and audio tracks he pulled out of other people's garbage cans at the NFB editing rooms and called it 21:87. George Lucas was a film student at USC at the time when he saw it. He later said the film had a very powerful effect on him. Buried in 21:87 is a snippet of discarded audio from a conversation between an artificial intelligence pioneer named Warren McCulloch and an NFB cinematographer named Roman Kroiter. McCulloch argues that humans are nothing more than complex machines. Kroiter pushes back.
He says that many people, in contemplating nature and communicating with other living things, become aware of some kind There's some kind of force or something behind this apparent mask which we see in front of us.
And Lucas has said, "Yeah!" The most famous concept in the history of popular cinema, the spiritual core of a franchise that has earned well over $10 billion came from a throwaway line in a 9-minute college film built from garbage by a Montrealer. If you're watching close, you'll see the hints. Princess Leia's cell on the Death Star in A New Hope. "We gotta find out which cell this princess of yours is in. Here it is. 2187." The stormtrooper in The Force Awakens is FN-2187. Lipset made 6 more experimental films at the NFB through the '60s. He died in 1986, 2 weeks before his 50th birthday. He and George Lucas never met. Every May 4th, Canadians post things online about Hayden Christensen being from Ontario, which is true and fine, but Almost nobody talks about the Montreal filmmaker who built the spiritual architecture of the whole thing. The Jedi tradition holds that you don't wield the Force as much as listen to it. Peace, patience, harmony with nature. Of course the Force is Canadian.
