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 MoreTAKE THE 510 TO DREAMLAND
THE SOHO WEEKLY | Movie Journal – A canal, a road, a mysterious white receding shape…
… But I saw a little film by Bruce Conner, called “5:10 to Dreamland,” which is just a little film of seven minutes, and it contains very few images, and they are not too spectacular. But Bruce Conner collages them in ecstatic orders and they work in miraculous ways. The film has no real subject, at least not one that would be immediately visible. It’s just a series of images – a canal, a road, a mysterious white receding shape, a girl with a ball in front of a mirror, a slow-motion water splash, some clouds. The film is tinted soft brown. The girl, the tint, the splash remind one of Joseph Cornell. But it’s a Conner film. A Conner film in a Cornell key.
Read MoreTHE SOHO WEEKLY | Movie Journal – Conner’s 5:10 to Dreamland
On June 17, Anthology Film Archives is showing two new Bruce Conner films, Crossroads and Take the 5:10 to Dreamland. Conner is perhaps best known for A Movie and Cosmic Ray, two rapid-fire collage films that got laughs throughout the country during the 1960’s. Take the 5:10 to Dreamland, by contrast, is a very slow collage film, in which diverse images are separated from each other by brief sections of darkness. It is also my favorite Conner film.
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