BY IAN COLVIN
Bohemian artists and beatniks flocked to San Francisco in droves during the 1950s and 1960s. At the height of this wave of migration, legendary avant-garde filmmaker Bruce Conner made the city his home and began creating filmic assemblages that juxtaposed snippets of archived footage set to music.
Tuesday at 7:30 p.m., Melnitz Movies will present a 35 mm print of Conner’s 1976 work “Crossroads,” a film that uses footage of nuclear tests at Bikini Atoll and music by composers Patrick Gleeson and Terry Riley. It is often considered to be one of the canonical productions of 20th-century experimental filmmaking.
The Daily Bruin’s Ian Colvin spoke with Gleeson, a pioneer of synthesizer music, about “Crossroads” and his involvement in West Coast avant-garde cinema.