View online January 7—22, 2017

Bruce Conner, VALSE TRISTE (1978, 16mm, sepia/sound, 5min.); Courtesy Conner Family Trust, San Francisco; © Conner Family Trust, San Francisco.

In his most autobiographical film, Conner re-creates his childhood Kansas of the 1940s as a dreamland, accompanied by the theme music from the radio program I Love a Mystery. This nostalgic work takes the viewer to a distant place, lost in time, where dark limousines file across a flooded road and a man and a boy burn leaves. Other sepia-toned sequences and images include a businessman at his desk and a photograph of a locomotive. Once again, no narrative emerges from the associative imaginary of this dreamer’s “valse triste.”