BREAKAWAY
1966, 16mm, b&w/sound, 5min.
Music by Ed Cobb
Dance and vocal by Toni Basil (Antonia Christina Basilotta)
"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
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.