Bruce Conner

A film he made in 1969 that rarely gets discussed, and is only barely mentioned even in the monograph 2000 BC: The Bruce Conner Story Part II. This excellent tome contains close analysis by Bruce Jenkins of film-school staples like A Movie and Looking For Mushrooms as well as of later works like Valse Triste and Take the 5:10 to Dreamland. The 1969 film is called Permian Strata, a title which works in conjunction with the images and the song that makes up the film's soundtrack to form a colossal pun. So often experimental film gets pigeonholed as overly serious, boring, stuffy, or requiring an expertise in filmmaking processes to fully appreciate.

Bruce Conner’s most celebrated film for a reason: it takes historical moments that were replayed over and over on television—chilling repetition of Kennedy assassination coverage—and repurposes them into a meditation on how the media tries to exert authority and apply a sense of order to the anarchic. And though it may sound perverse to say so, the film is also—not incidentally—a thrill to watch. -- The A.V. Club

Bruce Conner's landmark experimental film consisting entirely of found footage edited to a new score.

In his first collaboration with David Byrne and Brian Eno, Conner used footage from educational films to create a rhythmically austere image-track for music from their pioneering “sampling” album “My Life in the Bush of Ghosts” (1981).

Experimental short uses Ray Charles' “What'd I Say” as accompaniment to constantly shifting collage of female nude, cartoons, and newsreels of atomic bomb explosions.

A short film created during the production of Cool Hand Luke.

The 1945 atomic-bomb explosion at Bikini Atoll becomes a thing of terrible beauty and haunting visual poetry when shown in extreme slow motion, shown from 27 different angles, and accompanied by avant-garde Western classical music composed for electric organ by Terry Riley. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in partnership with Pacific Film Archive in 1995.

With a similar dreamy mood like its predecessor "Take the 5:10 to Dreamland" (1976) this clip starts with a boy getting into his bed. The camera zooms in into the boy's mind and a slow, sad waltz (i.e."Valse Triste") accompanies images of a locomotive, a miner, the globe, the sky, a sheep heard, etc. Disparate elements, but if one concentrates only at the movement of the figures, one can perceive a commotion, slowly livening up: The starting wheels of the heavy locomotive, the tired miner pushing the heavy cart of coal bricks, the globe smoothly turning around and around, the clouds imperceptibly floating in the sky, the sheep idly moving in the herd, etc. We reach the first climax when a mannequin opens her coat like a flower. The second big crescendo spurts out from a "water hose", after watching schoolgirls doing gymnastics for quite a while. A sad, but nostalgic aftertaste lingers in the end when funeral cars drive away through a flooded area…

A documentary film exploring the manner in which a determined young man overcame a basic mental defect and became a useful member of society. Insightful editing techniques reveal the dreams, ideals and problems that face a large segment of the American male population. Educational. Background music written and performed by the DEVO orchestra.

Breakaway plays out like a visual symphony. A prototype for the best (but still, lesser) contemporary formalist music videos, like Peter Care’s “What’s the Frequency, Kenneth?” and “Drive” (both for REM), Conner’s movie is an experiment in the visual language of film. But no matter how powerful a formal analysis of his filmmaking process may be in suggesting how Conner’s rhythms affect us, there is much in Breakaway – in Basilotta’s brash and unbridled self-assertiveness, in Conner’s feverish camera style, and even in the uncomplicated honesty of Cobb’s catchy lyrics and tune – that defies verbalisation… and must simply be loved! -- Senses of Cinema

From KQED kinescope with Michael McClure (No longer extant).

"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 Award: Gold Medal Award, Sesta Biennale D'Arte Republica Di San Marino. Da Vinci thought he caught her smiling.

Jonas Mekas assembles 160 portraits, appearances, and fleeting sketches of underground and independent filmmakers captured between 1955 and 1996. Fast-paced and archival in spirit, the film celebrates the avant-garde as its own “nation of cinema,” a vital community existing outside the dominance of commercial film.

Departing from an inimitable film repertoire of tour-de-force editing technique, visual comedy, and apocalyptic themes, avant-garde master Bruce Conner envisioned EASTER MORNING (2008)—a metaphysical quest for renewal beyond the natural and ephemeral worlds—to be his last finished masterpiece.

Stock footage edited with music to comment on American culture.

During his year in Mexico, Conner hosted psychedelic guru Timothy Leary, who he had met on an earlier visit to New York. Conner and Leary occupied themselves with mushroom hunts in the Mexican countryside. It’s not clear whether their hunts were successful. But Conner’s staccato home-movies of their walks – combined with movies of previous mushroom hunts in San Francisco – became his film Looking for Mushrooms. The film rushes through the rustic landscape of rural Mexico, flitting past houses and through a crumbling graveyard. Not to be confused with Conner's re-edited 1996 version of Looking for Mushroom.

A rare behind-the-scenes view of the exploding New York “underground” in the late sixities, a turbulent time and place that was to change American culture forever. A German TV crew, led by journalist Gideon Bachmann, explores the epicenter of the sixties revolution in art, music, poetry and film and interviews the main players in the “New American Cinema,” that was born on the streets of New York. Against a backdrop of cultural upheaval in all of the arts and growing political agitation against the Vietnam War, Bachman interviews the most prominent figures in “underground film,” including Jonas Mekas, Shirley Clarke, the Kuchar Brothers and Bruce Connor, and visits the most notorious location in the New York art world of the era - Andy Warhol’s Factory - to conduct an interview with the genius of Pop Art himself.

A short film documenting the making of Bruce Conner's Breakaway.

16mm/Digital, color/b&w/sound Bruce Conner began working on By and By a documentary about The Soul Stirrers several decades ago shooting their reunion concert with four cameras and accumulating interview material. Conner was poised to finish the piece in the mid-'80s but the project was abandoned for a variety of financial and personal reasons. From the ashes of this project arises a new collage film miniature completed this year. His Eye Is on the Sparrow takes its name from a classic gospel song written by Civilla D. Martin and Charles H. Gabriel in 1906 often associated with Ethel Waters , Mahalia Jackson and most recently Lauryn Hill. The Soul Stirrers cut their version in Chicago on October 10, 1946 and it is this recording that is heard on the track. Carefree and complex the song moves in tandem with a set of found images that seem utterly transparent yet are evocative of other mysteries just out of reach. - Mark McElhatten

LOOKING FOR MUSHROOMS (1959-1967) is a psychedelic travelogue film that documents a series of “trips” through rural Mexico and urban America. Conner combined street views of San Francisco shot in the late 1950s with scenes of rural Oaxaca captured during his “mushroom-hunting” excursions between 1961 and 1962, when Bruce and his wife, Jean, were living in Mexico City. On at least one of these trips, the Conners were joined by Timothy Leary, the ex-Harvard professor and soon-to-be leading proponent of psychedelic drugs. In 1996, Conner revised the film once again: he used an optical printer to expand its length from three to fourteen-and-a-half-minutes, and added a new soundtrack, Terry Riley's "Poppy Nogood and the Phantom Band," to create a more meditative, but no less hypnotizing, iteration of the mushroom hunt.