Program 5: Bruce Conner tribute Series: Views from the Avant-Garde [46th NYFF Oct. 3-5, 2008] Director: Bruce Conner, Runtime: 79
Our very special thanks to Jean Conner for making these personal prints available and to Michelle Silva and Henry Rosenthal.
“Bruce’s films changed my entire concept of editing" - Dennis Hopper
“That rail-thin beatnik exercised a marvelous mastery of both concept and execution, driven by an obsessive and contrarian mind. But beyond his creative output, for me it was his subcultural sensibility that was cause for wonder—that within this cracker-white Kansas-comes-to-the-City could roil such dark and dangerous and anti-authoritarian impulses… As I think Greil Marcus said, he was the flip-side of American Gothic — had seen the Holy Ghost in the midnight sky above the stark prairie, and that terror was ever celebrated in the apocalypses of his Art." – Craig Baldwin
Bruce Conner pioneered the art of sculptural assemblage and found footage collage filmmaking. His works have been recognized by countless museum and gallery shows all over the world most significantly the 150 work "not a retrospective” 2000 BC: The Bruce Conner Story, Part II,” which presented selections of his oeuvre in printmaking photography sculpture installation and filmmaking.
Taking what was at hand he reached into the human subconscious into the heartland into the dreamland into the dark and made a meticulous visionary irreverent metaphysical art. Erotic, mysterious, astute. He is the first filmmaker I would think about and would show when wanting to demonstrate how editing can make, should make, meaning, poetic, consequential meaning.
Tonight we celebrate the work of Bruce Conner with a special selection of films drawn from his personal collection of prints.
Sparkling, sage, irascibly straight shooting, practical and prophetic Conner was a unique personality...
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A MOVIE USA, 1958; 12m (16mm, b&w/sound) “Using only found footage, Conner has created one of the most extraordinary films ever made. One begins by laughing at the juxtaposition of cowboys and Indians, elephants and tanks, but soon the metaphor of association becomes serious, as we realize we are witnessing the apocalypse.”—Freude
THE WHITE ROSE USA, 1967; 7m (16mm, b&w/sound) “Jay De Feo started painting ‘The White Rose’ in 1957. When the unfinished painting was removed eight years later it weighed over 2300 pounds.”—Bruce Conner
“The images selected and the order constructed become a formal mystic service. We see the altar, the penitence, the cross, the investiture, the descent, and finally, the mourning. The men in garments from Bekins seem to draw strength from touching the surface. The respect they render the painting appears as worship.”—Camille Cook
BREAKAWAY USA, 1966; 5m (16mm, b&w/sound). Music by Ed Cobb. Dance and vocal by Toni Basil (Antonia Christina Basilotta). “A dance film viewed twice (once forward, once backward) in five minutes. The film was shot at single frame exposures as well as 8, 16, 24 and 36 frames per second.”
—B.C.
“The camera captures her movements in gestural, expressive light smears. Intercut rhythmically with strophes of black leader, she gyrates in graceful, stroboscopic accelerations. Conner’s editing is consummate as he alternates angles of her figure from different shots into a kinesthetic, flowing continuity.
"Basically a two-and-a-half minute film, this ‘module’ of image and sound is then reversed. Everything goes ‘backwards’ to the ‘original’ beginning. The sound track with Basilotta singing the title song is run in reverse as an aural analogue to the visual abstraction of photography. It resembles a paradigm for those high school physics demonstrations of gravitation where we saw a ball, once thrown straight up into the air, loyally retrace its trajectory to Earth.”
—Anthony Reveaux monograph on Bruce Conner published by Film in the Cities
VIVIAN USA, 1964; 3m (16mm, b&w/sound) "A film portrait cut to the tune of Conway Twitty's version of 'Mona Lisa.' Filmed in part at a 1964 show of Conner's artwork in San Francisco, the film is also a witty statement about forces that take the life out of art. Vivian Kurz, the subject of the film, is entombed in a glass display case." - Judd Chesler
TEN SECOND FILM USA, 1965; 10s (b&w/silent) “When Conner was commissioned to design the poster for the 1965 New York Film Festival he constructed TEN SECOND FILM, which he intended to act as its television commercial and to precede the film programs in the theater. It was a public ‘leader’ in that it was composed, like the poster, of a series of ten strips of film (each 24 frames long) of count-down leader, seen as fundamental heraldry of motion picture exhibition. The leaders of the Festival, however, felt it was too risky to submit the public to this secret image of their heritage.”—Anthony Reveaux
One reason the festival gave for rejecting the film was it “went too fast.” It travels the right speed: 24 frames per second. 240. Count ’em.
REPORT USA, 1967; 13m (16mm, b&w/sound) “Society thrives on violence, destruction, and death no matter how hard we try to hide it with immaculately clean offices, the worship of modern science, or the creation of instant martyrs. From the bullfight arena to the nuclear arena we clamor for the spectacle of destruction. The crucial link in REPORT is that JFK with his great PT 109 was just as much a part of the destruction game as anyone else. Losing is a big part of playing games.”
—David Mosen, Film Quarterly
“Conner is the most brilliant film-editor of the avant-garde. In REPORT he has used newsreel footage and radio tapes of President Kennedy’s assassination to produce a 13-minute movie that captures unbearably, yet exhilaratingly, the tragic absurdity of that day.”—Jack Kroll, Newsweek
LOOKING FOR MUSHROOMS (long version) USA, 1996; 14.5m (16mm color sound). Music by Terry Riley: “Poppy Nogood and the Phantom Band,” 1968 - BMA - Publisher: Ancient Word Music. “This is the same film footage as edited in the earlier short version of LOOKING FOR MUSHROOMS released in 1968 with a Beatles soundtrack. It is made longer with five frames for each original frame but still remains the same edit (but with a new soundtrack by Terry Riley) and nothing added, nothing lost, always the same, neverending....”—B.C.
TAKE THE 5:10 TO DREAMLAND USA, 1977; 5m (16mm, sepia/sound). Music by Patrick Gleeson. “... it contains very few images but Bruce Conner collages them in ecstatic orders and they work in miraculous ways. The film has no real subject, at least not one immediately visible. It’s just a series of images—a canal, a road, a mysterious white receding shape, a girl with a ball in front of a mirror, a slow-motion water splash, some clouds. The film is tinted soft brown.
“... the state produced by a film like 5:10 TO DREAMLAND is very similar to the feeling produced by a poem. The images, their mysterious relationships, the rhythm, and the connections impress themselves upon the unconscious. The film ends, like a poem ends, almost like a puff, like nothing. And you sit there, in silence, letting it all sink deeper, and then you stand up and you know that it was very, very good.”—Jonas Mekas, The Soho Weekly News
VALSE TRISTE USA, 1979; 5m (16mm sepia/sound) “VALSE TRISTE is frankly and gracefully autobiographical of Conner’s Kansas boyhood. Here, the period of the 1940s of his source materials parallels his own life experiences.
“A line of dark, wet cars files across a flooded road; a man and a boy ceremoniously burn leaves; a businessman at his desk turns to look over his shoulder to the photo of a locomotive on the wall behind him; a medium shot of an engineer in the cab of his locomotive; a shard of rock shears from a quarry wall and plunges into water....”—Anthony Reveaux
“Nostalgic recreation of dreamland Kansas 1947 in Toto. Theme music from I Love a Mystery radio programs (Jack, Doc, and Reggie confront the enigmatic lines of railroad trains, sheep, black cars, women exercising in an open field, grandma at the farm...) Meanwhile, 13-year-old boy confronts reality. Sibelius grows old in Finland and becomes a national monument.”—B.C.
EASTER MORNING USA, 2008; 10m (digital, color/sound) This is Bruce Conner’s last completed film. It is derived from the 8mm footage of EASTER MORNING RAGA (1966). Conner originally showed EASTER MORNING RAGA projecting at variable frame rates and with loops. Some prints were made but the film was never released for circulation.
EASTER MORNING revisits the earlier material resetting it to a version of Terry Riley’s landmark minimalist composition “IN C” (1964) recorded by the Shanghai Film Orchestra in 1989. The use of traditional Chinese instruments in this unusual recording gives the music a shift in timbre that is revelatory, beautifully matching the radiance and open heartedness of this mind manifesting optical poem.—M.M.
