BY ANTHONY REVEAUX
Thirteenth in a series of monographs written for the series Filmmakers Filming.
co-sponsored by FITC and Walker Art Center.
Bruce Conner A MOVIE (1958, 16mm, b&w/sound, 12min.); © Conner Family Trust, San Francisco, California
Filmmaker Bruce Conner mines, sifts and salvages through, the spiraling effluvia of our audio-visual junkyards. A razor-eyed fate, he snips and splices; now rejecting, then finding and filing ... but rarely forgetting. His film works are unique constructs composed of familiar imagery recombined into richly provocative puzzles that rhythmically prod the viewer to attempt reconciliations of ambiguity with the obvious and the comic with the horrific, as irony unites anger and concern.
If artist Bruce Conner had never made a film, his statements as a painter, sculptor, collagist and printmaker would be more than sufficient to satisfy critic and historian alike. In his assemblages of the nineteen sixties there lurks a smoldering intensity in the conditions of the found materials and their uneasy equilibrium in shotgun wedlocks of the incongruous. The tarry patches of exhausted linoleum, the shrapnel shards of pressed-tin ceiling, the burn ward flaps of old leather satchels ... reflect the glazed toughness of a blast victim's survival through time.
"Child", dedicated to Caryl Chessman, delivered capitol punishment to sentimentality in the shell of a ruined doll caged in its abandoned high chair. Elements of faded, terminal eroticism underlay works like "Spider Lady" with its nacreous webs of lost lace, broken beads and forgotten compacts. By comparison, Rauschenberg’s goat is Olympian in its repose.
Conner's restless explorations have led his craftsman's hand to constructions, installations, book editions, posters, performances, light shows and life-size, body-direct photograms. His is an obsessive, driven search insisting upon authenticity as it reveals to us again and again the unbelievability of raw "truth."
Born in 1933 in McPherson, Kansas, Bruce Conner attended public schools in Wichita where his abilities led him to private classes in drawing and painting. He studied at the Kansas City Art institute and Wichita University in the early fifties. At Nebraska University he earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in 1956.
A scholarship to the Brooklyn Museum Art School lured him to the East Coast where, " ... I figured that if I was going to have anything to do with the art business, I had to 'do time' in New York." The Charles Alan Gallery was already showing his work there but, classically hungry and broke, he " ... spent on awful lot of time going to movies and concerts ... but I had to spend the money on that instead of eating."
Seven months proved to be more than enough ''time" in the Oversize Apple, and another scholarship to the University of Colorado in 1957 provided a welcome escape-chute from The City. His future wife Jean was also studying art there at the time. Together with fellow students. they established the Experimental Cinema Group in Boulder, which is reportedly still screening to this day. A year later in San Francisco he founded the camera Obscure Film Society with Larry Jordon.
San Francisco would be home base for him and his family from then on. It was also the place for the germination of what would become some of the most original contributions to cinematic art of our time. The concept of A Movie began as a motion picture component for an installation piece. In fellow artist and filmmaker Larry Jordon's rented room, Conner laced together footage from found remnants of old newsreels, documentaries and girlie films. With borrowed equipment he filmed the strongly simple ''title" and "credits." Scraps of numbered focus leader and segments of black, imageless film were woven into the loom of the work.
San Francisco was also the site of his second one-man show in 1958 at the East/West Gallery on Fillmore. A Movie was premiered at the opening night, while a giant searchlight filled the foggy air outside the gallery with a luminous, diffused beam of light. What people in the gallery saw and heard, was indeed in every sense of the meaning, a movie. To the sensuous, self-righteous melodrama of Respighi's music could be seen images of: Native American’s charging over a hill; the collapse of a suspension bridge; starving Africans; "End of Part Four"; a man and a woman tight-rope walking high above a city street; "The End" and a carrot-and-stick sequence of: / a German U-boat commander reacting to a target in his periscope // an alluring blonde woman obligingly reclines in an erotic pose // the submarine launches a torpedo // on erectile mushroom cloud of an A-bomb celebrates a "direct hit" /. Later, a scuba diver swims free of a sunken ship and gropes upwards toward the shimmering light.
In a balancing act between predetermination and randomness worthy of John Cage, the conditions of A Movie ensured that no two people would experience exactly the same chain of imagery. What most all could agree upon was that they had seen a "movie" ... or at least a part of one. The piece had resonated their cinematic subconscious. The fact that A Movie continues to succeed so well on those terms is testimony to the depth of Conner's selective strategies. If an artwork may be considered classic, or even "great" it must withstand successive sensings and not exhaust its yield of originality. These jaded eyes have seen A Movie at least fifty times. Yet, with each additional viewing, they still continue to discern new nuances and subtleties.
Cosmic Ray combined the working argot of motion picture construction normally invisible to the audience: numbers, flash-frames, head and tail indicators, X's and scrap stock, with clips from documentaries and cartoons. Conner photographed footage of streaming street-lights and an impromptu parody of a strip-tease danced by Beth Pewther, all worked into on intensely kinetic and structurally erotic film-piece. In a titular pun of homage to the source of the music (a hard-driving Ray Charles rock & roll song) "Ray" is rendered "Cosmic'' indeed. The artistry of Conner is so strongly evident that even if stripped of its pictorial content, Cosmic Ray would succeed as a work of abstract, nonobjective cinema on the basis of its precise and rhythmic articulation of photo-sensitive percussion. In an 8mm incarnation of the material, three Cosmic Rays were designed to be shown simultaneously in a row from three film loop projectors. "Like a filmic slot machine." Each of them was a unique edit, one in color and the other two in black & white.
Leader was made in 1963 and destroyed shortly after. Why discuss a film which no longer exists? By following the short story of Bruce Conner’s Leader, we may gain some small measure of insight into the aesthetic politics that are such a chord of strength in the body of his work. It was in that same year that he received a Ford Foundation grant for filmmaking. "Prior to getting that grant I was an Artist (sculpture, collage and painting) who happened to have made two very short films: A Movie and Cosmic Ray. Suddenly, instead of being an Artist who dabbled in movies. I became a Filmmaker who dabbled in art!”
A ten-year retrospective of his collage and assemblage artwork was being shown at the Alan Gallery in New York. Conner… as moved to action when the critical response invested more attention on the “glamour" of his two films spotlighted by the Ford grant completely at the expense of his retrospective. "I decided to make a movie to ruin my reputation as a filmmaker. I would carefully make a film which would imply content obscure enough that there would be some people who would insist upon taking it seriously. But my intention was to clear the auditorium by the end of the film. I made a film which was made up of nothing but numbered leader, spliced head-to-tail and repeating over and over for thirty-six minutes. I purposely made the soundtrack somewhat distorted. You could only understand about two-thirds of the words." Recorded from a television drama about Americans captured by the Germans in World War II, it muttered about entrapment, despair and longing for escape. Conner's message to the audience was to abandon their seats and leave his career in peace.
It was presented to the public in the Swetzoff Gallery in Boston, along with two other films. In those dear days of innocence they were hoped to have been "pornographic"; Ken Jacobs' Little Stabs at Happiness and Jack Smith’s Flaming Creatures. Had it been shown at the end of the program as Conner had requested and the lusts of the intelligentsia satisfied beforehand, it may well have momentarily served his ruse. When the programmer decided to place it in between the "dirty" movies as a buffer the crowd became ugly and incidents were reported. "Instead of this film signaling my end as a filmmaker it became instead a celebrated case. It was a classic 'riot in Boston’ and of course, New York wanted it right away.”
In frustration, he prepared to advertise it in the Filmmakers' Cooperative catalog and listed it for sale at .50¢ a foot, like honest lumber or drainpipe. Jonas Mekas heard about what Conner intended and immediately began raising money to purchase it en toto so that it could be "saved" for humanity. At that point, he withdrew it since “I could see that I was being defeated everywhere along the line." At a "Funk Film" symposium in Berkeley he threw it out into the crowd as a sacrificial gesture, where it was snatched up by "... some very fat woman” who was never to be seen again.
It is this stubborn integrity that underlies Conner's relationship to his work and its perception by the world. It is the same man who, in the late sixties, ran for public office as a Supervisor in San Francisco: buttons, posters, bumper stickers and all. Whether it is dealing with a film laboratory or the Library of Congress, he has consistently displayed a persistent and unwavering insistence on "the Truth."
When Conner was commissioned to design the poster for the New York Film Festival in 1965 he constructed Ten Second Film, which he intended to act also as its television commercial and to precede the film programs in the theater. One of his few silent films, it was a public “Leader" in that it was composed as a series of ten strips of film, each of them twenty-four 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.
Breakaway (1966) should have put to rest any rumors at the time that Conner assembled found footage only because he couldn't hold a camera. He photographed his friend in Los Angeles, choreographer Antonia Christina Basilotta, while she danced against a black backdrop in a variety of costumes and in the nude. The strong, high-contrast imagery of the dancer is kinetic even when seen as a single frame. The camera's shutter-speeds capture her movements in gestural, expressive light-smears. lntercut rhythmically with strophes of black leader, she gyrates in graceful, stroboscopic accelerations. Conner’s editing is consummate here, as he alternates angles of her figure from different shots with different (or absent) costumes intokinaesthetic, flowing continuity.
His temporal strategy takes a major tum here with Breakaway. 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 the photography. As a complete five-minute film, 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.
The assassination of John F. Kennedy was rendered somehow the more incomprehensible and less believable through the mediation and extension of television. Conner was living in Brookline, Massachusetts where Kennedy was born on the day that Kennedy died. It took almost a year-and-a-half for the first version of Report to be completed. There would be seven revisions of the film before Conner could lay the dread happening to rest. The continuity of Report drew upon what was by then the bottomless font of his imagery: news clips, documentaries and television commercials. There is a new depth of interior rhythm imposed here, strengthening not only on audio-visual critique of a discrete event, but also re-examining how we receive informational history.
The film fragment of the limousine, the ambulance, the dying President and the shocked First Lady. As seen over and over again in the news, every television set in the country becomes, unwittingly, a Conneresque loop projection of tragedy. In Report we see this electro-celluloid Shroud of Turin drift repeatedly by, unstoppable in its dire momentum. The insistent pitch of the reporter's voice-over on the sound track leads and anticipates as it diffuses and obscures. Accelerating pulses of light destroy the peace of not-seeing. At a moment of realization, the image goes to black and the event is shifted off-screen. We go on through sequences of montage between shots of a bullfight arena; a soap commercial; an A-bomb explosion: a mad scientist. The counterpoint of Conner's irony is here more direct in its relationship of the verbal to the visual than in any other of his films to date. It assumes the stance of a complex, elliptical dialogue. In the end, Report is a cinetaph of the shock-waves of communicable destruction.
Even while Bruce Conner was mastering the art of found film montage he was still working with live-action subjects. Vivian (1963-65) follows Vivian Kurz as she explores and interacts with a show of his sculptures and canvases at the Batman Gallery in San Francisco. Conner's lyrically inquisitive hand-held camera swoops and pounces in fast-moving adagios.
The mood of The White Rose (1967) was elegiac and compassionate as it documents the removal of Jay de Feo's large pointing from her apartment-studio. So heavy and thick was the result of her years of additive impasto that a wall had to be cut through in order to remove it from the room. Obsession. Persistence. Defense of the artwork’s integrity. All of these are values that Conner identifies with and values. The White Rose is a tribute to those values.
Permian Strata (1969) is almost a throw-away gag. For a while Conner planned a collaboration on a 35mm narrative feature film which did not evolve. If he couldn't personally direct large, costumed casts in big studio sets in synchronous sound he certainly could find one and turn it on its ear. With his relentless zeal he zeroed in on one of those amateurish and spiritually unconvincing Bible movies. To the druggie metaphor of "... everybody must get stoned!" from Bob Dylan's song, "Rain Day Women #12 & 35,” the Bible heroes become targets of real (painted papier-mâché) stones in the marketplace of religious propaganda.
Marilyn Times Five (1969-73) is, in its subtly tragic undertow, an erotic Report. A young woman, allegedly Marilyn Monroe, is seen with pitiless scrutiny in the grainy arena of an old girlie film. The reiteration of five cycles rotates the commodity of her moon-pale body as her song repeats five times on the sound track. ''I'm through with love." The last shot terminates with a final reward of stillness as she is seen crumpled on the floor.
The only film in color that Bruce Conner has produced that we can see today is Looking for Mushrooms which he shot in San Francisco and Mexico between 1960 and 1963, and the final sound version was completed in 1967. A "psychedelic" chain reaction of bright single frames, short takes and multiple exposures within the camera, it was a free-flowing extension of the style of his earlier 8mm work. All the rest of his films are in black & white, and most of those are constructed from found footage.
Why has he confined himself to these materials? Conner most often will cite the comparatively rock-bottom costs of these methods in respect to what has become an increasingly expensive art form for the independent artist. But there are more fundamentally theoretical and aesthetic underpinnings to his practice. "Over a period of time I more or less narrowed my world of filmmaking to images that are in black & white movies, which limits them as to their date of origin, since very few black & white films have been made in the last ten or fifteen years.”
With these given parameters of praxis, he willingly restricts himself to certain limits as have other collage artists like Max Ernst, Jess (Collins) and his contemporary, Larry Jordan. Jordan, for example, whose source materials derive from nineteenth-century engravings, have bound him by a finite set of possible image-units accessible to him. That is, there were only just so many engravings designed and struck during that particular historical period. There will be no new and later editions.
"I have to achieve a certain balance between film scenes from a variety of sources. There has to be some commonality for me to work with. I have to make connections. In black & white film, there’s a certain abstract quality. Because of its very blackness or grayness, you can make a construction from one scene to another which is enormously difficult in color.”
Conner's studio practice was even more spartan up until the 1970s. "I was usually running the original through the projector several times before prints would be made. It accelerates the historical process. I didn't use workprints until I started making Crossroads.”
The longest shot in Crossroads is seven-and-a-half minutes long, longer than many of his shorter films. At thirty-six minutes, Crossroads (1976), is Conner's "Gone With the Wind." The first underwater atomic bomb test at Bikini Atoll on July 25th, 1946 was recorded by over five-hundred camera “eyes” in boats, in planes and on land. The colossal, gravid image of that mushroom cloud was raised as a sceptre of American might for all the world to see… and fear. This was a dragon-slayer of a project. To strike at the heartlessness of the beast; the spectre of atomic war itself.
With his obsessive persistence. Conner ventured into the labyrinth of the National Archives in Washington, D.C. where much of that generation-old footage had been filed as "classified." He was determined to re-choreograph one of our biggest "performances" into on artifact for re-appraisal. The first section of Crossroads is twelve minutes of successive views of the detonation, with a reverberating score by Patrick Gleeson performed on the Moog synthesizer. It begins with silence and a bird's call before the holocaust of sound descends. The last twenty-four minutes with Terry Riley's numbing, translucent missa solemnis evokes a funereal majesty in slow motion until the very grain of the motion picture film executes a glowing totentanz as it flickers in lethal incandescence.
In the aftermath of the shadow of the Cloud come two of Bruce Conner's most accomplished and exquisite works. Take the 5:10 to Dreamland (1976) came into being when Patrick Gleeson presented the filmmaker with the tape of a composition he had created as a gift for him. "The first time I heard the music I started envisioning some of the same images that I have been running through the Moviscop viewer for years and years. As soon as the music was over I described the images: the girl's face: the man; the water…” After Patrick timed the music and announced “It’s five minutes and ten seconds. Take the 5:10 to Dreamland!”
The two films are expressions of a divine chamber music of the mind. In Take the 5:10 to Dreamland fleeting glimpses are seen of: a woodland stream: a man's face; a white rabbit; a tracing plumb-bob ... connected and yet separated by dark hyphens of fade-out, blackness and fade-in. The scenes appear innocent on the surface but are disturbingly evocative at heart. The moments of darkness become brief chambers of memory for those crystalline images that remind us of...
The glass-bell resonance of Gleason's score elevates these mirrors of perception and centering. Like the sound track of Crossroads, this film begins with a bird song and ends in thunder.
Valse Triste is frankly and gracefully autobiographical of Conner's Kansan boyhood. Here, the period of the nineteen-forties of his source materials parallel his own life experiences. “‘Valse Triste’ was the theme music for a radio serial, 'I Love a Mystery.' I wasn't supposed to stay up past ten o'clock. I would have to sneak out of bed to listen to it and hear it begin with the sound of a train off in the distance. I showed it to my son Robert and he said, 'Oh, It looks like me. In that movie.' Of course, I had been thinking it was me.”
Valse Triste begins with a young boy getting into bed in a mid-American bedroom. The images in this film compared to the intimate, miniaturist scale of many shots in Take the 5:10 to Dreamland are more documentary, more Farm Security in their framings and depth. A line of dark, wet cars files across a flooded road; a man and a boy ceremoniously burn trash; 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 the water... the one shot shared by both films. This pair of films relate to the intensely cerebral patterning of his drawings and prints.
The two films share a unique genetic character in the Conner oeuvre: they are both tinted in sepia tone. "It was not necessarily an aesthetic choice. Take the 5:10 to Dreamland was a magnetic recording that did not transfer agreeably to a negative optical track. To get the best possible sound it turned out that we had to print on color film. Color film doesn't reproduce black & white very well. The appropriate choice would be sepia tone. I decided, since Valse Triste is like a companion piece that it should be tinted the same way."
In 1978 Conner delved into the depths of the San Francisco punk rock scene to catch a new New Wave group called Devo. He found an affinity in the oblique world-view expressed so dynamically through their music and performances. Conner brought the song "Mongoloid" to (a sort of) life. Using the lyric track of the Devo song for the axis of continuity in the film, he proves that he is as innovative and assured in choreographing imagery to New Wave as he was with rock & roll in Cosmic Ray. Here, his multi-faceted focus is even more concerned with the motion graphics of advertising, education and medicine. One leitmotiv of the film is a man with the electrodes on his head, eyes closed as if in meditation. Is he a retarded vegetable awaiting the song of reason, or a gifted genius transcendent in his powers? The imagery ping-pongs within the flickering ambiguity of evolution and de-evolution, while never faltering in its drive.
Conner was again given primary inspiration for a work when David Byrne asked the filmmaker to make a film based on music that he and Brian Eno had composed. No conditions were imposed as to the content of the film... only the length as established by the song. The lyrics of "America is Waiting" such as: 'Well now, you can't blame the people–blame the government! Take it in again! Again! Again! America is waiting for a message of some sort or another... " cued Conner for a strongly structured and richly varied piece which examines ideas of loyalty, power, patriotism and paranoia.
A barrage of flash-frames reveals: radar dishes turning; soldiers descending into a bunker; a Minuteman symbol; a group of deadly serious citizens pledging allegiance to the Flag; the interior of a movie theater; details of a deodorant commercial: a wooled blue-collar worker over whom a title alludes to "Larry's Personal Problems"; factory control levers moving in ghostly autonomy.
Like most of Bruce Conner's films, repeated viewings yield deeper layers of successive structures. America is Waiting (1981) is strongly composed of interlocking visual connections, emblematic content and a resonating ambiguity of the human condition within the constructs with which we confound ourselves. After a sequence of: a hand actuating a detonator; a man fleeing between buildings and pursued by a chain of explosions; a hand actuating a detonator... and the final image; a lamb and ewe on a hillside. A pastoral and secure resolution like the light at the end of A Movie? But no... at the last moment, a dog springs from behind the sheep and then out of the frame to screen right.
(to be continued... )
All quotes are from interviews with the filmmaker by the author in San Francisco in January, February and March of 1981.
BRUCE CONNER: 16MM FILMOGRAPHY
“A Movie” 1958 12min. b&w
Music: Pines of Rome by Respighi. Conducted by Toscanini. RCA Victor.
“Cosmic Ray” 1960-62 4min. b&w
Music: "What'd I Say" by Ray Charles, from In Person, Atlantic Records.
Leader 1964 35min. b&w
Sound: From a TV show about Americans captured by the Nazis.
(no longer extant)
“Vivian” 1964-65 3min. b&w
Music: "Mona Lisa" by Conway Twitty.
“Ten Second Film” 1965 10sec. b&w
Silent
“Breakaway” 1966 5min. b&w
Music: "Breakaway" by Ed Cobb, sung by Antonia Christina Basilotta.
“Looking for Mushrooms” 1961-67 3min. color
Music: "Tomorrow Never Knows" by The Beatles.
“Report” 1963-67 13min. color
Sound: "Three Days That Shook the World."
“The White Rose” 1967 7min. b&w
Music: Sketches of Spain by Miles Davis, Columbia Records.
Liberty Crown 1967 5min. b&w
Sound: From KQED kinescope with Michael McClure.
(no longer extant)
“Permian Strata” 1969 3.5min. b&w
Music: "Rainy Day Women #12 & 35" by Bob Dylan, from Blonde on Blonde, Columbia Records.
“Marilyn Times Five” 1969-73 13.5min. b&w
Music: "I'm Through With Love" by Marilyn Monroe.
“Crossroads” 1976 36min. b&w
Music: Original compositions by Patrick Gleeson and Terry Riley.
“Take the 5:10 to Dreamland” 1976 5:10min. b&w–sepia tone tint
Music: Original composition by Patrick Gleeson.
“Valse Triste” 1977 5min. b&w–sepia tone tint
Music: 'Valse Triste" by Sibelius. from Kuolema, Op. 44.
“Mongoloid” 1978 3.5min. b&w
Music: “Mongoloid” by Devo
“America is Waiting” 1981 3.5min. b&w
Music: “America is Waiting” by David Byrne/Brian Eno from My Life in the Bush of Ghosts
BRUCE CONNER: AWARDS
1958
San Francisco Art Association Annual – Ann Bremer Award
1963
San Francisco Art Association Annual – Exhibition Award
San Francisco Art Association – Neallie Sullivan Award
1964
San Francisco Art Association Annual – Award for A Movie
Ford Foundation Fellowship Grant
1965
Tamarind Lithography Workshop Fellowship Grant
Copley Foundation Award
1967
Sesta Biennale D’Arte Republica Di San Marino – Gold Metal
1973
National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship Grant
1974
American Film Institute Grant
1975
Francis Scott Key Award
Guggenheim Fellowship
1979
Brandeis University Creative Awards – Citation In Film
BRUCE CONNER: SELECECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY
Albright, Thomas, “Any Image on Film Can Find Its Way Into a Conner Movie.” San Francisco, Sunday Examiner & Chronicle. Datebook, March 4, 1979.
Albright, Thomas, “Bruce Conner – The Master of the Non-Narrative Movie.” San Francisco, Sunday Examiner & Chronicle. Datebook, March 28, 1976.
Belz, Carl I., “Three Films by Bruce Conner.” Film Culture. No. 44, 1967, pp. 56-59.
Brown, Robert K., “Interview with Bruce Conner.” Film Culture. No. 33, 1964, pp. 15-16.
Conner, Bruce. “Bruce Conner Makes a Sandwich.” Artforum. Sept.,1967.
– “Bruce Conner: A Discussion at the 1968 Flaherty Film Seminar." Film Comment. Vol. 5, No. 4, New York, 1969. pp. 16-25. (Portions of this discussion were also printed in Film Library Quarterly, Vol. 2. No. 3,1969)
Conner, Bruce. Catalogue entry descriptions. In Canyon Cinema Cooperative, Catalog 4. San Francisco: Canyon Cinema Inc.,1976. p. 39. (also see: supplement update, 1980, pp. 7-8.)
Conner, Bruce. Catalogue entry descriptions. In Film-Makers’ Cooperative Catalogue, No. 6. New York: New American Cinema, 1975. pp. 52-53.
Cook, Scott. “Valse Triste and Mongoloid.” Millennium Film Journal. Nos. 7/8/9, Fall/Winter, 1980-81. pp. 248-252.
Curtis, David. “Experimental Cinema: A Fifty Year Evolution.” (New York: Universe Books) 1971. Sections on Bruce Conner are indexed on p. 165.
Johnson, Lincoln F. Film: Space Time Light & Sound. (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston) 1974. Illustrations on pgs. 675, 676, 753-756; Comment on pgs. 248, 278, 280, 276-77.
Kelman, Ken. “The Anti-Information Film (Conner’s Report)”. The Essential Cinema: Essays on the Films in the Collection of Anthology Film Archives, Vol. 1, Anthology Film Archives, 1975. pp. 240-245.
Knight, Arthur. Playboy Magazine, April 1967. (Comments on Cosmic Ray, pp. 142, 208, 211.)
Kroll, Jack. Newsweek, February 13, 1967. (Comment on Report, p. 118.)
Leonardi, Alfredo. Occhio Mio Dio: Il New American Cinema. (Milan: Feltrini) 1971, pp. 136-138.
– “Mailer believes that his strongest single influence was the San Francisco film maker Bruce Conner…” Time Magazine, November 15, 1971.
Moritz, William and O’Neill, Beverly. “Fallout: Some Notes on the Films of Bruce Conner.” Film Quarterly. Vol. 31, No. 4, Summer 1978. pp. 36-42.
Mosen, David. “Report.” Film Quarterly. Vol. 19, No. 3, Spring 1966, pp. 54-56.
O’Doherty, Brian. “Bruce Conner and His Films.” in: Gregory Battcock, The New American Cinema. (New York: Dutton) 1967, pp. 194-196.
Renan, Sheldon. An Introduction to the American Underground Film. (New York: Dutton) 1967. pp. 137-138.
Reveaux, Anthony. “Bruce Conner’s New Films.” Artweek. April 3, 1976. Vol. 7, No. 14. pp. 1, 20.
Reveaux, Anthony. “Avant-garde Film in the Bay Area: A Romantic Tradition.” Pacific Magazine. Vol. 2, No. 2, March 1981.
Scheugl, Hans and Schmidt, Ernst Jr. Eine Subgeschicte des Films Laxikon des Avantgarde-, Experimental- und Undergroundfilms. 1. Band (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag) 1974. pp. 149-150.
Shedlin, Michael. “Marilyn.” Film Quarterly. Vol. 27, No. 3, Spring 1974.
Sitney, P. Adams. Visionary Film. (New York: Oxford U. Press) 1974. pp. 23, 129, 343, 348-9, 349-51, 360-62, 367, 371.
This monograph is made possible by grants from the Minnesota State Arts Board from funds appropriated by the Minnesota State Legislature and from the National Endowment for the Arts.