If you missed the recent MOMA survey dedicated to the quicksilver Bay Area artist, who died in 2008, at the age of seventy-four, this show makes a fine introduction. A recently restored version of Conner’s 16-mm. film “Report,” from 1967—on view alongside the ingeniously irritating avant-girlie movie “Marilyn Times Five,” made in 1973—considers how a nation processes trauma, the magnetic appeal of conspiracy theories, and the slippery nature of time. 

Every anniversary of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in November 1963 draws upon a painful cache of moving image materials that were produced before, during, and after what film critic Jim Hoberman has characterized as Kennedy's "verite presidency." His emergence as the leading candidate for the Democratic nomination in 1960 had been the subject of Robert Drew's landmark cinema-verite documentary Primary (1960), which while devoting equal time to Kennedy rival Hubert Humphrey, captured the future president's remarkable mastery of the televisual codes. More significant in terms of the election were the four televised debates between Kennedy and his Republican opponent Richard Nixon. After the election, documentary producer Drew twice revisited Kennedy to record a typical workday in the Oval Office for Bell & Howell Close-Up! (1961) and a year later to capture the President and his brother, Attorney General Robert Kennedy, feverishly responding to a civil rights crisis triggered by Alabama governor George Wallace's stance against desegregation of the state university. In between these productions, there were dozens of "live" televised press conferences staged by White House Press Secretary Pierre Salinger as well as the First Lady's celebrated television special, A Tour of the White House (1962), which was broadcast on all three networks and seen by some 46 million viewers.