Bruce Conner

A rare behind-the-scenes view of the exploding New York “underground” in the late sixities, a turbulent time and place that was to change American culture forever. A German TV crew, led by journalist Gideon Bachmann, explores the epicenter of the sixties revolution in art, music, poetry and film and interviews the main players in the “New American Cinema,” that was born on the streets of New York. Against a backdrop of cultural upheaval in all of the arts and growing political agitation against the Vietnam War, Bachman interviews the most prominent figures in “underground film,” including Jonas Mekas, Shirley Clarke, the Kuchar Brothers and Bruce Connor, and visits the most notorious location in the New York art world of the era - Andy Warhol’s Factory - to conduct an interview with the genius of Pop Art himself.

A short film documenting the making of Bruce Conner's Breakaway.

Jonas Mekas assembles 160 portraits, appearances, and fleeting sketches of underground and independent filmmakers captured between 1955 and 1996. Fast-paced and archival in spirit, the film celebrates the avant-garde as its own “nation of cinema,” a vital community existing outside the dominance of commercial film.

The inevitable fat cigar between his fingers, the American actor, director and fine artist Dennis Hopper (1936) self-mockingly looks back on his chequered life and career, at the request of Dutch director, photographer and fine artist Thom Hoffman. The latter sifted through the turbulent life story of Hopper, who is primarily known from the cult film Easy Rider (1969). Hopper went through as many high as low points. In conveniently arranged chapters, Hoffman shows the decisive moments in Hopper's life and asks colleagues like Wim Wenders, David Lynch, Sean Penn and Julian Schnabel to comment on them. The documentary is richly illustrated with film excerpts, photos, newspaper articles and anecdotes. The main reason for this film was the retrospective of Dennis Hopper's art work in the Amsterdam Stedelijk Museum in 2001.

Starring Bruce Conner, a belly dancer, a geiger counter, and a toxic waste dump.

Two Moon July was a multidisciplinary event that featured experimental video, film, visual art, performance and music in a theatrical framework. More than thirty artists participated in the program, which was produced for the Kitchen by Carlota Schoolman and directed by Tom Bowes.

Bay Area filmmakers and Canyon Cinema co-founders Ben Van Meter and Bruce Conner were invited to L.A. to talk about Underground Film on the Art Linkletter Show.

Bruce Conner’s most celebrated film for a reason: it takes historical moments that were replayed over and over on television—chilling repetition of Kennedy assassination coverage—and repurposes them into a meditation on how the media tries to exert authority and apply a sense of order to the anarchic. And though it may sound perverse to say so, the film is also—not incidentally—a thrill to watch. -- The A.V. Club

"A film portrait cut to the tune of Conway Twitty's version of 'Mona Lisa.' Filmed in part at a 1964 show of Conner's artwork in San Francisco, the film is also a witty statement about forces that take the life out of art. Vivian Kurz, the subject of the film, is entombed in a glass display case." - Judd Chesler Award: Gold Medal Award, Sesta Biennale D'Arte Republica Di San Marino. Da Vinci thought he caught her smiling.

The 1945 atomic-bomb explosion at Bikini Atoll becomes a thing of terrible beauty and haunting visual poetry when shown in extreme slow motion, shown from 27 different angles, and accompanied by avant-garde Western classical music composed for electric organ by Terry Riley. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in partnership with Pacific Film Archive in 1995.

During his year in Mexico, Conner hosted psychedelic guru Timothy Leary, who he had met on an earlier visit to New York. Conner and Leary occupied themselves with mushroom hunts in the Mexican countryside. It’s not clear whether their hunts were successful. But Conner’s staccato home-movies of their walks – combined with movies of previous mushroom hunts in San Francisco – became his film Looking for Mushrooms. The film rushes through the rustic landscape of rural Mexico, flitting past houses and through a crumbling graveyard. Not to be confused with Conner's re-edited 1996 version of Looking for Mushroom.

A commentary on the destructive expectations of females in a male dominated society, Marilyn Times Five was made from an old stag film called "The Apple-Knockers, and the Coke"(1948) these sections of the film were set to Marilyn Monroe's song "I'm Through With Love". The film depicts a Marilyn Monroe look-a-like slowly taking her clothes off for the camera (the viewer). The woman's actions are looped several times which gives the audience a sensation of exhaustion. That exhaustion keeps building until the very end where the woman is shown crumpled on the floor in an awkward position, which makes it appear as if she is lifeless.

With a similar dreamy mood like its predecessor "Take the 5:10 to Dreamland" (1976) this clip starts with a boy getting into his bed. The camera zooms in into the boy's mind and a slow, sad waltz (i.e."Valse Triste") accompanies images of a locomotive, a miner, the globe, the sky, a sheep heard, etc. Disparate elements, but if one concentrates only at the movement of the figures, one can perceive a commotion, slowly livening up: The starting wheels of the heavy locomotive, the tired miner pushing the heavy cart of coal bricks, the globe smoothly turning around and around, the clouds imperceptibly floating in the sky, the sheep idly moving in the herd, etc. We reach the first climax when a mannequin opens her coat like a flower. The second big crescendo spurts out from a "water hose", after watching schoolgirls doing gymnastics for quite a while. A sad, but nostalgic aftertaste lingers in the end when funeral cars drive away through a flooded area…

Its slow somnambulic rhythm, its animalistic jungle sounds as well as the eerily mixed images create a dream mood that comes closest to my actual dreaming-feeling. The long black phases between the sequences are as important as the images themselves because they leave empty space where the "echo" of the last image can seep through without interfering with the following image. But our logical mind still somehow feels compelled to construe some kind of sense, parallel, or some erratic story out of it.

Jay De Feo started painting THE WHITE ROSE in 1957. When the unfinished painting was removed eight years later it weighed over 2300 pounds.

Bruce Conner's landmark experimental film consisting entirely of found footage edited to a new score.

Breakaway plays out like a visual symphony. A prototype for the best (but still, lesser) contemporary formalist music videos, like Peter Care’s “What’s the Frequency, Kenneth?” and “Drive” (both for REM), Conner’s movie is an experiment in the visual language of film. But no matter how powerful a formal analysis of his filmmaking process may be in suggesting how Conner’s rhythms affect us, there is much in Breakaway – in Basilotta’s brash and unbridled self-assertiveness, in Conner’s feverish camera style, and even in the uncomplicated honesty of Cobb’s catchy lyrics and tune – that defies verbalisation… and must simply be loved! -- Senses of Cinema

Experimental short uses Ray Charles' “What'd I Say” as accompaniment to constantly shifting collage of female nude, cartoons, and newsreels of atomic bomb explosions.

Stock footage edited with music to comment on American culture.

In his first collaboration with David Byrne and Brian Eno, Conner used footage from educational films to create a rhythmically austere image-track for music from their pioneering “sampling” album “My Life in the Bush of Ghosts” (1981).

16mm/Digital, color/b&w/sound Bruce Conner began working on By and By a documentary about The Soul Stirrers several decades ago shooting their reunion concert with four cameras and accumulating interview material. Conner was poised to finish the piece in the mid-'80s but the project was abandoned for a variety of financial and personal reasons. From the ashes of this project arises a new collage film miniature completed this year. His Eye Is on the Sparrow takes its name from a classic gospel song written by Civilla D. Martin and Charles H. Gabriel in 1906 often associated with Ethel Waters , Mahalia Jackson and most recently Lauryn Hill. The Soul Stirrers cut their version in Chicago on October 10, 1946 and it is this recording that is heard on the track. Carefree and complex the song moves in tandem with a set of found images that seem utterly transparent yet are evocative of other mysteries just out of reach. - Mark McElhatten

A film he made in 1969 that rarely gets discussed, and is only barely mentioned even in the monograph 2000 BC: The Bruce Conner Story Part II. This excellent tome contains close analysis by Bruce Jenkins of film-school staples like A Movie and Looking For Mushrooms as well as of later works like Valse Triste and Take the 5:10 to Dreamland. The 1969 film is called Permian Strata, a title which works in conjunction with the images and the song that makes up the film's soundtrack to form a colossal pun. So often experimental film gets pigeonholed as overly serious, boring, stuffy, or requiring an expertise in filmmaking processes to fully appreciate.

TELEVISION ASSASSINATION is one of two major works that Bruce Conner began in the days immediately following the Kennedy assassination and the artist's own thirtieth birthday, in the fall of 1963. While REPORT utilized montage and a strongly articulated structure to analyze the forces at work in the killing of a President (including our own complicity), TELEVISION ASSASSINATION is a complex, synthesizing work that weaves together fragments from the flux and flow of that history as it was in the process of being constructed and displayed daily to a nation of spectators. A monument to the enduring potency of the Kennedy myth and to the marketers who created it, the installation brings Conner's critique full-circle into the very medium that formalized it. In so doing, the work seems to suggest that the final resting place for the slain President was neither Brookline nor Arlington National Cemetery, but rather in the box, on the tube, held suspended forever on the television screen.

LOOKING FOR MUSHROOMS (1959-1967) is a psychedelic travelogue film that documents a series of “trips” through rural Mexico and urban America. Conner combined street views of San Francisco shot in the late 1950s with scenes of rural Oaxaca captured during his “mushroom-hunting” excursions between 1961 and 1962, when Bruce and his wife, Jean, were living in Mexico City. On at least one of these trips, the Conners were joined by Timothy Leary, the ex-Harvard professor and soon-to-be leading proponent of psychedelic drugs. In 1996, Conner revised the film once again: he used an optical printer to expand its length from three to fourteen-and-a-half-minutes, and added a new soundtrack, Terry Riley's "Poppy Nogood and the Phantom Band," to create a more meditative, but no less hypnotizing, iteration of the mushroom hunt.

A documentary film exploring the manner in which a determined young man overcame a basic mental defect and became a useful member of society. Insightful editing techniques reveal the dreams, ideals and problems that face a large segment of the American male population. Educational. Background music written and performed by the DEVO orchestra.

A short film created during the production of Cool Hand Luke.

Departing from an inimitable film repertoire of tour-de-force editing technique, visual comedy, and apocalyptic themes, avant-garde master Bruce Conner envisioned EASTER MORNING (2008)—a metaphysical quest for renewal beyond the natural and ephemeral worlds—to be his last finished masterpiece.

A three screen projection comprised of imagery from COSMIC RAY (1961) and EVE-RAY-FOREVER (1965).

Its slow somnambulic rhythm, its animalistic jungle sounds as well as the eerily mixed images create a dream mood that comes closest to my actual dreaming-feeling. The long black phases between the sequences are as important as the images themselves because they leave empty space where the "echo" of the last image can seep through without interfering with the following image. But our logical mind still somehow feels compelled to construe some kind of sense, parallel, or some erratic story out of it.

EVE-RAY-FOREVER is a silent, three-screen expanded version of COSMIC RAY (1961). Originally exhibited as an 8mm Technicolor looped installation at the Rose Art Museum in 1965, it was digitally restored in 2006 by Conner in close collaboration with his editor, Michelle Silva. By combining three channels of footage of slightly different lengths, EVE-RAY-FOREVER generates an ever-changing, chance-based juxtaposition of images that flash on the screen with dizzying speed. The film’s name reflects the tripartite structure of the work, with “Eve” referring to the nude woman who appears on the far left channel, “Ray” to Ray Charles, the inspiration for COSMIC RAY, and “Forever” signifying its looped playback, which allows the work to play and mutate continuously.

From KQED kinescope with Michael McClure (No longer extant).

In 1968, Bruce Conner offered this film comprised of the unedited footage of Toni Basil dancing, footage that was previously edited down in 1966 to create the film Breakaway.