Lipsett retired from cinema with an incomprehensible film that the National Film Board of Canada did not want to finance: Strange Codes (1972). Filmed in his Montreal flat and inspired by The Tibetan Book of the Dead, it is a mysterious farewell letter in which we see him reading with a magnifying glass, obsessively pulling out books, objects, toys, cartologies. Lipsett dissects his isolation, reveals his secret world, shows the lair where he committed suicide on 1 May 1986, a few days before his 50th birthday.