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.”
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SFMOMA | Online Screening: Bruce Conner
Films by Bruce Conner are currently on view in SFMOMA’s galleries as part of Bruce Conner: It’s All True, including works shown in their original celluloid format—16mm film—as well as two works that have recently been digitally restored. As an extension of the exhibition, which continues through January 22, 2017, we have created an additional screening venue here. The four films selected for presentation include TEN SECOND FILM (1965), an homage to Conner's fascination with the trailer, AMERICA IS WAITING (1981), an example of Conner’s aesthetic of appropriation, and two works that are closer to what we might imagine to be “home movies” meditating on Conner’s upbringing in Kansas in the years before and after World War II: TAKE THE 5:10 TO DREAMLAND (1977) and VALSE TRISTE (1978).
Read MoreFILM COMMENT | Valse Triste: Elliott Stein at the New York Film Festival
in VALSE TRISTE
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 (★★★★four star).
Read MoreMONTHLY FILM BULLETIN 1987 | Valse Triste
in VALSE TRISTE
VALSE TRISTE is a homage to surrealist cinema and a belated trance-film (the psychodramas of Maya Deren, Kenneth Anger and Sidney Peterson date from the 1940’s, the time of Conner’s adolescence and this film’s footage). It also reworks the debased popular “dream sequence”, principally by imitating one of its cliché-prone situations – a boy’s dream about steam engines, daily chores, home travel and girls. Shorn of context, ordinary images keep their typicality but gain uniqueness, mystery and the aura of memory; a paperboy cycles down a street, a couple in overcoats enter a taxi, cars crawl down long roads, a man and a boy build a bonfire, a family pose by their farm. This material is renewed, or redeemed, by stripping it of sentimentality and information.
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