Because I’m in San Francisco, I’m thinking again about Bruce Conner, one of my supremely favorite filmmakers.
Bruce Conner has been one of my favourite artists for over 25 years, when we started to show his work at the Innis Film Society. I’m thinking back to the career retrospective of Conner’s work presented by both MoMA and SF MoMA a couple of years ago. First, I have to say that I didn’t quite believe when I heard the news of this exhibition. On the one hand, the curators must have convinced themselves to do this because of the quantity and quality of the still work: paintings, sculptures, photo-based work, drawing, and collage (“real art” that has value in the marketplace). On the other hand, everyone involved had to be conscious of the fact that the significance of Conner’s work is best understood by considering his film work first and foremost. On that note, I believe that MoMA did an extraordinary job with the impossible: presenting substantial time-based pieces in a space-based institution. For the most part, the individual films were shown on their own in blacked-out mini-theatres, using very nicely engineered 16mm loopers. The exceptions were for Cosmic Ray, which was presented as Three Screen Ray, a digital transfer and reconstitution of the original film, Easter Morning (8mm transferred to digital), and three works that were also rock videos and were presented on chunky monitors in the lobby waiting area: Mongoloid (Devo), America is Waiting (Byrne/Eno), and Mea Culpa (Byrne/Eno). On the whole, I believe MoMA and SF MoMA were thinking about how to best represent film. That being said, I have some reservations. Full disclosure, I co-curated an exhibition called Outsiders, where we had to figure out how to incorporate film into the overall exhibition and in 2017 I had a similar challenge with a Guillermo del Toro exhibition. Part of me wants to say “just show films where they want to be shown: in a proper theatre, with start times, great sound, impeccable projection, and good seating.” People don’t come to galleries expecting to give over hours of time and concentration to look at film, video, performance, etc., so why fight it? On the other hand, I think that by incorporating moving images into the exhibition proper, we get to tell a more complete story of an artist, or a phenomenon, or the times in general. Further, I know that we can reach people who would not otherwise find themselves inside a theatre looking at artists’ films. In an ideal world, we would incorporate film and video into the galleries, and present traditional screenings in a proper theatre as well. We will ideally attract audiences who will give over their time to complete films in either the gallery or the theatre space. I certainly watched some full films at the Conner exhibition, but the spaces weren’t comfortable. It’s hard to create a proper seating situation in those rooms, one that allows for the grazer to exist comfortably with the diehard fan. It’s hard to create black boxes that don’t feel claustrophobic, or like you might step on someone’s foot, hand or head. Regardless of how these spaces are designed, people tend to stand up against the wall, keeping close to the exit door or curtain.
Well, film is always an experiment, always a compromise, and always a mystery to people. Moving images are still the state of the art in contemporary art but we have so rarely figured out how to make their presentation work in a way that is satisfying to audiences. I’m glad it’s an issue. I’m glad that SF MOMA and MoMA did such a comprehensive retrospective of one of my favourite artists and trying to figure out how give film the same right presence.
Here are the three videos (shot on film) that play in the elevator lobby on the way up to the show: Mea Culpa https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ksd8MOlwUs0 (collage by Durga Drummond, and music by Brian Eno and David Byrne) America is Waiting (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PTFIzLKaZj4) (music by Brian Eno and David Byrne) Mongoloid https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CPd8TMu2LbY (music by Devo) In Conner’s canon, these are three relatively minor films, but they are not slight. Conner’s visual wit, his selection of images, and inspired approach to montage, not to mention his great taste in music and musical partners, ensure that these films are major achievements, “minor” only in comparison to Conner’s other film work. I can’t think of a Conner film that I don’t like, or that I think is actually minor. There aren’t many other filmmakers I can say that about: there are Brakhage and Anger films, not to mention Godard and Fassbinder films, that I don’t like. Here’s Cosmic Ray, one of Conner’s greatest films (and certainly by favourite): https://vk.com/video-62393824_166721430?list=ae69dbb5bb88b1a0c1 Ray is the first to fully incorporate popular music into avant-garde film. I know, there’s Fischinger, but there’s something more to Cosmic Ray, as if Eisenstein’s theories of contrapuntal montage and intellectual montage are here finally being recognized in ways far more satisfying than in Eisenstein’s October or Ivan the Terrible. Eisenstein may not have agreed that this was the direction he had in mind, but I feel that Conner, Anger and Brakhage, for example, better realized his ideas than he ever did.
My comparison between Eisenstein and the American avant-garde may be off-base. I am more confident in saying, however, that Conner is one of those filmmakers who is utterly “unconventional” but completely confident in his approach, so that when I’m watching his work his decisions seems just as natural as what we typically consider mainstream conventions.
Through the use of found footage, cut to create new meanings, incorporation of scratched and otherwise damaged film, and a powerful dance between the music and the image track, Cosmic Ray, building on Conner’s earlier A MOVIE (1958), is so exciting, so powerful, that it not only holds up more than 50 years later, it still seems like a brand new film in some ways. It still seems like a poignant, surrealist treatment of eros and thanatos, sex and death/violence.
The revelation for me at the exhibition was Conner’s Looking for Mushrooms. There’s no good version online (the Conner Family Trust has been policing this sort of thing rigorously of late) but I’ll encourage you to check it out when you can. MoMA’s description is helpful:
“Departing from the stock footage that characterizes Bruce Conner’s earlier films, LOOKING FOR MUSHROOMS (1959–67/1996) is his first color film and consists of footage he shot while living in Mexico in 1961–62, as well as some earlier shots of him and his wife, Jean, in San Francisco. Building on the rapid rhythms of A MOVIE (1958) and BREAKAWAY (1966), and introducing multiple-exposure sequences, it is a psychedelic, meditative travelogue of rural Mexico, featuring sumptuously colorful images of the natural world, villages, and religious iconography. Most of the footage was shot while the Conners roamed the hillsides seeking psilocybin, or magic mushrooms, sometimes joined by psychologist Timothy Leary, who appears briefly in the film. Conner showed early versions of this film as a loop. In 1967 he added a soundtrack: the song “Tomorrow Never Knows” by The Beatles. In 1996 he created a longer version of the film that repeats each frame five times, which he set to music by experimental composer Terry Riley.I believe he made a silent version early in his career, made a version with The Beatles’ “Tomorrow Never Knows” on the soundtrack in 1968, and then a new version in 1995 with a Terry Riley soundtrack.” Riley was a rather regular partner of Conner’s, with Crossroads being the most noticeable collaboration.
It looks like you can see some of these films on MoMA’s website but I haven’t been able to make the streams work. You can try yourself, however, at: http://www.moma.org/collection/works/200175?locale=en I’ve had so many other Conner favourites over the years, like the underrated Vivian (https://vk.com/video-17894528_163037466 - a dubious website but the stream works today), The White Rose (http://www.tudou.com/programs/view/g716RoHhsYo ), and the sublime Crossroads (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NS7fZGBF48w), a work in the AGO’s collection and presented as part of a presentation related to our Camera Atomica exhibit. And, though for many A MOVIE (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4FMjBtvsx2o ) still stands as the greatest of great Conner works, my preference is still for Report, a film where I think Conner is as confident with his personal vision as he is during Cosmic Ray: https://vk.com/video-17894528_163037444.
I am convinced by film scholar and curator Jon Davies’s take on Report: “In Report, Conner obsessively returned to the terror of John F. Kennedy’s assassination and the transformation of the dead president into merely another marketable myth of the 1960s media landscape. Radio reports of that fateful day are provocatively juxtaposed with a wide variety of surprising and affecting found images, from shots of the motorcade to glossy commercials. No other film gives me the chills the way Report does, and not only in its visually assaultive substitution of (inaccessible) footage of the moment of Kennedy’s shooting with the hallucinogenic flicker of alternating black and white frames, and later at his moment of death with a neurotic repetition of countdown leader – as if to admit the failure of representation in the face of the real lived catastrophe we hear described in panicked tones by the announcer. (Conner once said, “there’s no real film there.”) “It is in the second act’s evocation of a soul-killing popular culture that turns citizens into spectator-consumers and politicians into merchandise that I find myself shaken to the core, as Conner unleashes a torrent of scathing visual puns to suggest how JFK was merely another precious product for sale alongside snack foods and scouring pads. This barrage of imagery is so powerful because its soundtrack has returned to the announcer’s up-tempo commentary on the unsullied early moments of the presidential procession, before Kennedy is shot. Punctuating his optimistic oration, Report’s closing image of a secretary pressing a “SELL” button is like a jolt of electricity, coming as it does at the end of all the horror that the enraged and possessed Conner has put us through. “Conner would re-edit his films throughout their life-spans, they were always in progress, lived and breathed, never finished (completing Report meant Conner would have to accept that JFK was really dead). Conner’s visionary spirit – his love, his anger and his fear – will live on in all who are marked by their visceral intensity.”