The Wednesday night I got into town was the evening after America had selected Barak Obama as our next president, my friend Katja informed me that their was a Bruce Conner retrospective being put on by the Austin Film Society. The screening was going down at the Alamo Draft House in downtown Austin, I was happy to see that this theater was much like the Mcmenamin's movie/beer houses in Portland, except in my humble opinion the Alamo draft house was much, much nicer, the sound system was absolutely awesome and perfectly filled the room which seats about 100.
I was a bit exhausted from the flight and the first few Conner films didn't quite hold my tired ass mind well and I drifted in and out. I had up to this point only seen a few of Conner's films, most notably the Mongoloid video he made for Devo, I also had the opportunity to see two of his more well known works Cosmic Ray and Breakaway which starred a very young and incredibly beautiful Toni Basil, you know, the "Oh Mickey your so fine, your so fine you blow my mind HEY MICKEY!" Toni Basil. It was an indulgent treat to get to see these two films again especially seeing as Portland's Cinema Project had programmed them just a few weeks back during their recent 5 day EXPANDED FRAMES symposium.
When Conner's Report suddenly came on, I was absolutely riveted it was constructed from news footage taken the day of the Kennedy assasination, seeing as Barak Obama had not 24hrs earlier taken the election by storm coupled with the fact that I was now visiting the state in which JFK was assasinated this film held an incredibly timely weight. Check out this in depth analysis of Report by Nathan Austin
In my mind Conner's work allows the viewer to meditate upon the act of more truly perceiving projected images. In several of his films a series of frames would play followed by a segment of black immediately followed by what appeared to be a repeat of the previous loop but generally with slightly more or less frames than before. What I found happening was is I began to actually question what my eyes were seeing and whether I was "remembering" or experiencing something "new", I felt that my consciousness was being locked into a rhythm of image and thought where the past and the present were no longer mutually exclusive. This was one of the most impressive collections of work I have seen in quite some time, my hat is off to you Mr. Conner, R.I.P.
To further compound the ever increasingly small worldness of the experimental film world it turned out that the young woman presenting his films by the name of Michelle Silva who was an assistant to Bruce in has last several years and represents the Conner estate is also the star of cinematic madman Craig Baldwin's latest master opus "Mock Up on Mu!", I knew she looked uncannily familiar, unsurprisingly it turns out that she is also a filmmaker as well as a Canyon Cinema associate!
In my mind Conner's work allows the viewer to meditate upon the act of more truly perceiving projected images. In several of his films a series of frames would play followed by a segment of black immediately followed by what appeared to be a repeat of the previous loop but generally with slightly more or less frames than before. What I found happening was is I began to actually question what my eyes were seeing and whether I was "remembering" or experiencing something "new", I felt that my consciousness was being locked into a rhythm of image and thought where the past and the present were no longer mutually exclusive. This was one of the most impressive collections of work I have seen in quite some time, my hat is off to you Mr. Conner, R.I.P.
To further compound the ever increasingly small worldness of the experimental film world it turned out that the young woman presenting his films by the name of Michelle Silva who was an assistant to Bruce in has last several years and represents the Conner estate is also the star of cinematic madman Craig Baldwin's latest master opus "Mock Up on Mu!", I knew she looked uncannily familiar, unsurprisingly it turns out that she is also a filmmaker as well as a Canyon Cinema associate!
