Bruce Conner: A Movie

BY: PROVOKR Staff

Experimental filmmaker Bruce Conner, who emerged from the San Francisco scene in the Beat era of the late 1950s and died in 2008, is having the first retrospective of his life’s work, “Bruce Conner: It’s All True,” which includes paintings, assemblages, drawings, photography and performance, at New York’s Museum of Modern Art through October 2. The exhibit then travels to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, which organized the show (with co-curation by New York’s MoMA), from October 29 through January 22, 2017.

Conner’s early short films were edited together from found footage, and they reflected his obsession with the anxieties of postwar American culture, from rampant consumerism to nuclear apocalypse. He was, says Aaron Cutler in Slant, “a ‘fuck this’ artist, not just for savage cultural criticism lightly guised as celebration, but because of the myriad ways in which he offered it, shifting style as soon as it bored him. Conner prized the odds and ends of movies, literally. He found a bunch of chopped-up reel markers and B-movie outtakes and edited them together into the matter of A Movie—plane and car crashes, a Teddy Roosevelt speech, Indian uprisings, war deaths, elephant hunts, shivering natives, and a scuba dive into ancient ruins, all scored to Respighi’s triumphant Pines of Rome. The obscenely long opening director’s credit (well over 30 seconds, in a 12-minute film) clues us into human intervention. If the artist can stand outside the material, it seems to say, so can the viewer.”