IN 1996, I was working at the Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley, California. Although I was the cataloguer, Edith Kramer, the PFA’s director at the time, knew I had a background in film printing and processing, and she let me hang around the screening room when the archive was preserving Crossroads (1976), Bruce Conner’s profound reworking of the 1946 Bikini Atoll atomic-bomb test footage.1 The film, a thirty-seven-minute montage choreographing twenty-three black-and-white shots of the underwater nuclear explosion to the accompaniment of a transcendent dual score by pioneering synthesist Patrick Gleeson and composer Terry Riley, is today considered Conner’s masterpiece and one of the most provocative and compelling works to address the atomic era. Having only recently joined the PFA, I was honored to be a fly on the wall as my colleagues worked.
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INCITE | Representing the Unrepresentable: Bruce Conner's CROSSROADS and the Nuclear Sublime
"Since 1946, selections from archival footage of Operation Crossroads—especially footage of the Baker test—have become a familiar source of nuclear explosions in innumerable documentaries and feature films... robably their best-known appearances have been in the apocalyptic conclusion to Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove and at the mid-point transition from despair to hope in Michael Jackson’s video 'Man in the Mirror.' But in my view the most creative and compelling recycling of Baker test footage appears in Bruce Conner’s thirty-six minute, black and white film Crossroads (1976). In sampling the critical literature on 'nuclear movies' and other cultural appropriations of nuclear imagery, however, I have found only one passing reference to Conner’s film—in a Wikipedia entry on Operation Crossroads. More surprisingly, no thorough discussion of the film appears in the (admittedly not very extensive) critical writing on Conner’s films. I hope to remedy these oversights—to some extent at least—in what follows."
Read MoreARTFORUM | A Life in Two Parts: Bruce Jenkins on Bruce Conner (1933-2008)
BRUCE CONNER'S DEATH this past summer was not his first. Back in 1972, in an attempt to stanch annual solicitations for inclusion in Who's Who in America, he wrote to inform the publisher of his death, only to find himself an entry in Who Was Who in America the following year. A more conceptual loss, of his artistic persona, took place in February 1973, when a long planned exhibition titled "The Complete Dennis Hopper One Man Show" finally opened at James Willis Gallery in San Francisco. Originally proposed in the mid-1960s at a time when Conner had completed two dozen or so Ernst-like collages utilizing fragments of nineteenth-century engravings, the show was named so as to cede authorship of the work to the actor Dennis Hopper, a friend of the artist's. Conner's Los Angeles dealer at the time, Nicholas Wilder, was concerned about Hopper's non-participation in the project and refused to mount the exhibition, and the material, which Conner later made into new etchings, was not seen in it's entirety until the San Francisco show nearly a decade later.
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 in the Cities | Bruce Conner
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.
Read MoreFILM QUARTERLY | Fallout: Some Notes on the Films of Bruce Conner
Given the concern for our present and future ecological welfare, it is timely and brilliant Bruce Conner to have selected the birth of the Atomic Age as the subject of his newest film, Crossroads. From material recently declassified by the Defense Department, Conner has constructed a 36-minute work, editing together 27 different takes of the early atomic explosions at Bikini, all un-altered found footage in its original black and white. The film is without dialogue or descriptive factual detail. It consists simply of the visual record of these first bombs' destructive capability.
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.
Read MoreFILM CULTURE | Three Films by Bruce Conner
Recipient of one of the Ford grants, Conner is best known to the art world for his assemblage constructions and, in cinema, for three works: A MOVIE, COSMIC RAY, and REPORT. The latter film, produced with the Ford funds, deals with the Kennedy assassination. All three films, however, are closely related to Conner’s work in assemblage. They draw their inspiration from the world of contemporary realities and issues: not only Kennedy, but in general death, violence, sex, and destruction. Like his objects, Conner’s films constantly weave the current issues with elements of a more nostalgic cast: film-clips from an old western, a snapshot of Jean Harlow, any material which might be found in the trim bin or an old suitcase. Consistent too is Conner’s humor: a combination of grim satire and morbid irony.
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