TAKE THE 5:10 TO DREAMLAND 

1977, 16mm, sepia/sound, 5min. 10sec.

Music by Patrick Gleeson

"... it contains very few images but Bruce Conner collages them in ecstatic orders and they work in miraculous ways. The film has no real subject, at least not one 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 state produced by a film like 5:10 TO DREAMLAND is very similar to the feeling produced by a poem. The images, their mysterious relationships, the rhythm, and the connections impress themselves upon the unconscious. The film ends, like a poem ends, almost like a puff, like nothing. And you sit there, in silence, letting it all sink deeper, and then you stand up and you know that it was very, very good."

– Jonas Mekas, The Soho Weekly News
 

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SFMOMA | The Soundtrack of TAKE THE 5:10 TO DREAMLAND by Patrick Gleeson

Composer Patrick Gleeson shares the story behind the music that inspired Bruce Conner’s TAKE THE 5:10 TO DREAMLAND.

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SFMOMA | Online Screening: Bruce Conner

Films by Bruce Conner are currently on view in SFMOMA’s galleries as part of Bruce Conner: It’s All True, including works shown in their original celluloid format—16mm film—as well as two works that have recently been digitally restored. As an extension of the exhibition, which continues through January 22, 2017, we have created an additional screening venue here. The four films selected for presentation include TEN SECOND FILM (1965), an homage to Conner's fascination with the trailer, AMERICA IS WAITING (1981), an example of Conner’s aesthetic of appropriation, and two works that are closer to what we might imagine to be “home movies” meditating on Conner’s upbringing in Kansas in the years before and after World War II: TAKE THE 5:10 TO DREAMLAND (1977) and VALSE TRISTE (1978).

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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.

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