Even now, film students regularly get their minds blown by Bruce Conner’s first major work: the 12-minute 1958 short “A Movie,” which splices pieces of film leader and end-credit cards together with images of mushroom clouds, crashing waves, and people performing feats of derring-do. It’s a film that rewards closer study of its structure, to note the way Conner matches movements and compositions as he cuts rapidly from one piece of found footage to the next. But it’s also exciting in its use of Respighi’s “Pines Of Rome” and its brief glimpses of heart-stopping action. So it goes with most of Conner’s films, from his chilling repetition of Kennedy assassination coverage in “Report” to the dreamy takes of a topless Norma Jeane Mortenson in “Marilyn Times Five.” Conner’s work frequently deals with attention-grabbing subject matter, in films awash with pop music, nudes, and hauntingly familiar visions of modern life.

"Even 'Rocky' got a montage!" belted the singing puppets of Trey Parker and Matt Stone's "Team America: World Police."

Messrs. Parker and Stone were dishing some astute criticism of generic blockbusters, in the guise of a politically incorrect prank. But the satire of Hollywood tropes had nothing on Bruce Conner. The San Francisco filmmaker, visual artist, sculptor and music-video pioneer (1933-2008) made only a couple dozen short, experimental films in his 74 years. But they were terrifically influential in their brilliant, subversive use of—you got it—montage.

Bruce Conner (1933–2008) was a film artist who changed the game with his first movie, titled A Movie (1958). Every image in this 12-minute assemblage, except the title card ("A Movie by Bruce Conner") is secondhand—drawn from newsreels, travelogues, stag films, and academy leaders. Premiered at a San Francisco gallery as part of the sculptor's first one-man show, Conner's Movie was a true film object—as well as a self-reflexive exercise in academic montage, a joke on the power of background music (in this case, Respighi's sprightly "Pines of Rome"), a high-concept/low-rent disaster film and a pop art masterpiece.

COSMIC RAY FOREVER! Pelting the screen with flickering invocations of sex and death and set to Ray Charles’s arousing, carousing “What’d I Say,” Bruce Conner’s 1961 electrifying five-minute granddaddy of all music videos is the opening salvo in a retrospective of movies by the artist, who died in 2008 at age seventy-four after a long illness. Conner’s reputation as a maker of still images—assemblages, collages, photographs, drawings, and paintings—has taken off in recent years, but it is his moving-image work that cements his place among the innovators and masters of twentieth-century art.

The words that hover around Bruce Conner — avant-garde, experimental, collage, Beat, artist — aren’t likely to get the average moviegoer out the door and into a theater seat. Neither is the title of the current Film Forum retrospective devoted to him, “Bruce Conner: The Art of Montage.” But there is no reason for anyone to dread the two alternating programs of Conner shorts, 70 and 75 minutes long. There is plenty of pure pleasure to be had from these films, for the eye and the heart as well as for the brain.