If you missed the recent MOMA survey dedicated to the quicksilver Bay Area artist, who died in 2008, at the age of seventy-four, this show makes a fine introduction. A recently restored version of Conner’s 16-mm. film “Report,” from 1967—on view alongside the ingeniously irritating avant-girlie movie “Marilyn Times Five,” made in 1973—considers how a nation processes trauma, the magnetic appeal of conspiracy theories, and the slippery nature of time.
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SENSES OF CINEMA | Shooting the President: Bruce Conner’s Report
in REPORT
Completed over a three-year period, Bruce Conner’s Report is one of the key works of 1960s avant-garde cinema, a refinement and extension of the filmmaker-artist’s film work to that date. In some respects, it is a return to the montage, association and found footage driven preoccupations of his first cinematic opus, the truly seminal and massively influential A Movie (1958), and something of a condensation of Conner’s key interests in popular culture, mass media, the contemporary power of celebrity, recontextualisation, and the constitutive significance of cataclysmic violence to both the United States and what we might call late modernity. Although enmeshed in the nature of cinema itself, as well as our experience of it (it is in essence both a visceral and intellectual encounter), Report equally resonates with Conner’s significant work in sculptural assemblage and what would become known as conceptual art.
Read MoreCONTESTING CAMELOT: BRUCE CONNER'S REPORT
Every anniversary of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in November 1963 draws upon a painful cache of moving image materials that were produced before, during, and after what film critic Jim Hoberman has characterized as Kennedy's "verite presidency." His emergence as the leading candidate for the Democratic nomination in 1960 had been the subject of Robert Drew's landmark cinema-verite documentary Primary (1960), which while devoting equal time to Kennedy rival Hubert Humphrey, captured the future president's remarkable mastery of the televisual codes. More significant in terms of the election were the four televised debates between Kennedy and his Republican opponent Richard Nixon. After the election, documentary producer Drew twice revisited Kennedy to record a typical workday in the Oval Office for Bell & Howell Close-Up! (1961) and a year later to capture the President and his brother, Attorney General Robert Kennedy, feverishly responding to a civil rights crisis triggered by Alabama governor George Wallace's stance against desegregation of the state university. In between these productions, there were dozens of "live" televised press conferences staged by White House Press Secretary Pierre Salinger as well as the First Lady's celebrated television special, A Tour of the White House (1962), which was broadcast on all three networks and seen by some 46 million viewers.
Read MoreRECYCLED IMAGES | Bruce Conner
The reason I made A MOVIE was because I was waiting for somebody to make a movie that seemed obvious to my mind. I became interested in what was called "experimental" movies, because I had seen some unusual short sequences disguised as "dream sequences" in 1940s movies. Fantasy scenes would not be seen in narrative feature films except occasionally when a character would dream events similar to real life. Strange transformations would take place in normal scenes. Images might be in negative instead of positive, slow motions, backwards, extremely fast, etc. A door would open revealing something different from what you would expect.
Read MoreFILM COMMENT | Bruce Conner: A Discussion at the 1968 Flaherty Film Seminar
Transcription of the 1968 Q&A at the Flaherty Film Seminar, which followed a screening of Bruce Conner's films. Conner candidly discusses COSMIC RAY, REPORT, VIVIAN and 10 SECOND FILM.
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