The late Bruce Conner was a visionary artist and consistent fixture of the San Francisco counter-culture up until his passing in July 2008.  Well-known on the West Coast for his collage sculptures before turning to film assemblage, Conner emerged in the 1960s as a major avant-garde filmmaker.  His early films A MOVIE (1958), a montage of found materials culled from various sources including war documentaries, nudie flicks, old westerns and disaster footage, assembled in a rapid collage to Respighi’s “Pines of Rome,” COSMIC RAY (1961), a four-minute quick mix of self-shot and sourced footage set to Ray Charles’ “What’d I Say,” and REPORT (1963-67), a meditative deconstruction of the JFK assassination, appeared during the development and explosive expansion of the post-Maya Deren underground film movement, and helped to define and shape an entire genre of experimental screen practice: the found-footage film.