BY ELLIOTT STEIN

November – December, 1978

During my two-week stretch at Alice Tully Hall I found but one first-rate new film to cling to, all 300 seconds of it: Bruce Conner’s Valse Triste (★★★★). This evocative revery slipped by elusively, accompanied by Sibelius music. The duration of shots, the images (industrial films? found footage?) work with the sound with the immediacy of inevitability – so much so that one becomes convinced while viewing it that Sibelius wrote the score for the film. Max Ernst would have loved this picture. Bruce Conner—master assemblagist! …