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 MoreVALSE TRISTE
FILM 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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