The day my blog becomes a movie projector, screen, a bunch of folding chairs, and a storefront in a bad part of town in honor of Bruce Conner

note, June 12, 2008: Bruce Conner has asked that I remove the imbedded films from this post, so I have.

----

image: Larry Keenan

“If they give you lined paper, write the other way.” -- Bruce Conner

Introduction

'In 1958 Bruce Conner began making short movies that probed beneath the turbulent 1950s and 1960s and revealed the roots of this troubled American psyche. His entirely unique style established him as one of the most important figures in postwar independent filmmaking. His innovative technique can be best seen in his first film, A MOVIE (1958), an editing tour-de-force made entirely by piecing together scraps of B-movie condensations, newsreels, novelty shorts, and other pre-existing footage. His subsequent films are most often fast-paced collages of found and new footage, and he was among the first to use pop music for film sound tracks. Conner's films have inspired generations of filmmakers and are now considered to be the precursors of the music video genre.' -- Walker Art Center


Program

A MOVIE (1958; 11:45)



VIVIAN (1964; 2:40)



THE WHITE ROSE (1967; 7:29)



PERMIAN STRATA (1969; 3:47)



CROSSROADS (1976; excerpt, 1:15)



TAKE THE 5:10 TO DREAMLAND (1977; 5 minutes)



MONGOLOID (1978; 3:37)



MEA CULPA (1981; 5:14)



AMERICA IS WAITING (1981; 3:29)




Extra

Bruce Conner talks about meeting Louise Brooks

Watch it here (after scrolling down)



For future reference

BREAKAWAY (1966; 2:30)

Bruce Conner’s nearly 20 short films range in length from 10 seconds to 37 minutes. One of his best-known is 1966’s BREAKAWAY, which takes its name—and its soundtrack—from a two-and-a-half-minute pop song released that same year by the film’s subject, singer and actress Toni Basil. Using a handheld 16mm camera, Conner filmed Basil dancing, leaping, kicking, and posing in a variety of costumes (and states of undress) over the course of several hours, then edited down the footage to create one of the key works of experimental cinema. -- Doug Aitken, Esopus


REPORT (1967; 13:09)

Bruce Conner's film, at once a found-footage documentary and an act of mourning, reports on the assassination of John F. Kennedy. The film often seems degraded: iconic images of the motorcade start and re-start, jump cut and broken. The mismatch between what we see and hear — or between the procession of images themselves — is jarring. We are interrupted by film-leader, blanks. (cont.)


LOOKING FOR MUSHROOMS (1967; 14:30)

In 1962, Bruce Conner left San Francisco and moved to Mexico, apparently intending to “wait out the impending nuclear holocaust”. He spent about a year in Mexico before running out of cash and patience, and returning to the United States. 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. Conner cut Looking for Mushrooms down to 100 feet in 1965 in order to fit it into an endless-loop cartridge for continuous projection. In 1967 he added a soundtrack by The Beatles (“Tomorrow Never Knows”). Thirty years later, Conner revisited Looking for Mushrooms, extending it to 15 minutes by repeating each frame five times and adding a new soundtrack – “Poppy Nogood and the Phantom Band” (1968) by Terry Riley. -- Brian Frye, Senses of Cinema


LUKE (2004; 22:00)

Bruce Conner: 'It was in 1967. They were shooting a scene in Cool Hand Luke on a country road, California flatland, very much like the Southern environment where the story was supposed to take place. Dennis Hopper invited me to visit the set. He also asked the producer and the director if I could shoot some film of their location production on that day using my regular 8mm movie camera. They said fine and thought it would be worthwhile and fun, so that is what I did. I didn’t know exactly what I would confront except that they were supposed to have scenes of prisoners working on surfacing a road. I decided to shoot the film and edit it entirely inside the camera, so I would have to discover an opening shot. The film had two and a half minute running time if it was running at sound speed of twenty-four frames per second, I would try to find a concluding shot that hopefully would sum up everything. It was also an exercise in poverty filmmaking. Regular 8mm was being phased out and Super8 was being phased in. The equipment I had was therefore less expensive than anything else, and it fit my budget. I believe this production cost about three dollars, both for the film and processing.' (cont.)


Brochure

from Bruce Conner and the Cultural Breach

by Kristine McKenna

image: Larry Keenan

The art world is widely regarded as a free zone, a place where anything goes and revolution rules the day; in fact, it's a rigidly structured fiefdom governed by a strict code of unwritten rules. Multimedia artist Bruce Conner is an anarchist to the soul, and he's never been able to resist messing with those rules.

The doors of perception began opening early for him. As a young boy, he recalls hours spent contemplating the uncountable blades of grass in his lawn, and saw terrifying faces in the wood-grain pattern of his grandmother's dresser. At age 11 he had his first mystical experience.

"It was late afternoon and the sun was shining on the rug and I was lying there doing my homework when things started changing," he recalls. "I went into this strange world and began evolving into countless different creatures and people, until finally I was very tired and very old. It seemed to last an eternity, and when it stopped I could hardly remember how I'd been when I started out. I felt so old I thought I'd crack and break if I moved. Then I looked at my hand and saw it wasn't old, and looked at the clock and it was 20 minutes later."

According to Conner's friend and fellow film-maker Stan Brakhage, Conner was signed into a New York gallery contract in the early 1960s which stipulated stylistic and personal restraint beyond Conner's freewheeling nature. Conner reacted by attending openings, only to move among the crowd wordlessly pinning buttons that read "I am Bruce Conner" or "I am not Bruce Conner" to their clothes. Many send-ups of artistic authorship followed, including a five page piece Conner had published in a major art publication in which Conner's making of a peanut butter, banana, bacon, lettuce, and Swiss cheese sandwich was reported step-by-step in great detail, with numerous photographs, as though it were a work of art. Brakhage reported that when Conner moved to Mexico in the mid-1960s, he (Conner) painted the word "LOVE" on a roadway, only to be forced to scrub it off by officials. Conner subsequently moved back to San Francisco, working for a while selling beads on Haight Street as his art career floundered outside of the gallery system which had made him a star earlier in the decade.

Conner made his first film, A MOVIE, in 1958. A startling bombardment of rapidly edited images, this, like all his films, is devoid of linear narrative and is designed to be understood on a subliminal level. As with the assemblage sculptures that first brought him acclaim in the mid-1950s, he pieced his films together out of scavenged materials, and many of his movies explore the intermingling of sex, death and violence he sees as being central to American culture.

"Bruce's movies changed my entire concept of editing," says longtime friend Dennis Hopper. "In fact, much of the editing of Easy Rider came directly from watching Bruce's films, and, when I look at MTV, it seems they all must've been students of his."

Pals with a Hollywood contingent that included Hopper, Dean Stockwell, Warren Oates and Peter Fonda, Conner did pre-production work on Fonda's 1970 film The Hired Hand and briefly returned to filmmaking to do rock videos for Devo, Brian Eno, and David Byrne during the heyday of punk.

Conner's last burst of intense art activity came in 1978 when he became involved in the San Francisco punk scene as a staff photographer for fanzine Search and Destroy. A corrosive aesthetic of outraged idealism that Conner had anticipated by decades, punk was tailor-made to his sensibility, and he spent most of 1978 at a punk club called the Mabuhay.

"I lost a lot of brain cells at the Mabuhay," he laughs. "During that year I had a press card so I got in free, and I'd go four or five nights a week. What are you gonna do listening to hours of incomprehensible rock 'n' roll but drink? I became an alcoholic, and it took me a few years to deal with that.

"I've always been uneasy about being identified with the art I've made," he concludes. "Art takes on a power all its own and it's frightening to have things floating around the world with my name on them that people are free to interpret and use however they choose. Beyond that, I've seen many cases where artists have been defeated because the things they made came to be perceived as being more important then they themselves were. De Chirico struggled to develop a new style of painting, but nobody was interested-they only wanted to show his own work. This is something I've experienced myself, and it's a highly unbalanced situation because essentially the artist is denied a voice about the course of his own life and work."

Bruce Conner @ Wikipedia

Bruce Conner on DVD 1: 

'CROSSROADS', 'LOOKING FOR MUSHROOMS'

2002 B.C. is a new DVD release that brings together eight 

16mm Conner shorts. It is available only from the Michael 

Kohn Gallery in West Hollywood. With an admirable perversity,

 Conner insists that his fans donate 50 bucks to one of three 

L.A. charities to get the disc. (Philanthropic cineastes can dial 

323.658.8088 to make the hookup.). The DVD houses the 

films BREAKAWAY, MARILYN TIMES FIVE, VIVIAN, 

A MOVIE, REPORT, a.o.

----