THE FILMS OF BRUCE CONNER VOLUME 1 BREAKOUT SAN FRANCISCO ARTHOUSE TRIBUTE DVD-R!

Bruce Conner (November 18, 1933 – July 7, 2008) was an American artist who worked with assemblage, film, drawing, sculpture, painting, collage, and photography. Bruce Conner was born November 18, 1933, in McPherson, Kansas. His well-to-do middle-class family moved to Wichita, when Conner was four. He attended high school in Wichita, Kansas. Conner studied at Wichita University (now Wichita State University) and later at University of Nebraska, where he graduated in 1956 with a bachelor of fine arts degree. During this time as a student he visited New York City. Conner worked in a variety of media from an early age. In 1955, Conner studied for six months at Brooklyn Museum Art School on a scholarship. His first solo gallery show in New York City took place in 1956 and featured paintings. In 1957 Bruce Conner dropped out of the Master of Fine Arts (MFA) program at the University of Colorado in Boulder, Colorado and moved to San Francisco. His first solo shows in San Francisco, in 1958 and 1959, featured paintings, drawings, prints, collages, assemblages, and sculpture. The Designer’s Gallery in San Francisco held Bruce’s third solo show. The gallery featured black panels which set off his drawings. One of his paintings, Venus, was displayed in the gallery window. The painting showed a nude inside a form representing a clam shell. A local policeman confronted the gallery owners to get it removed, “as children in the neighborhood might see the painting.” The American Civil Liberties Union stood behind the gallery’s right to display it, and the matter never became an issue. Conner first attracted widespread attention with his moody, nylon-shrouded assemblages, complex amalgams of found objects such as women’s stockings, bicycle wheels, broken dolls, fur, fringe, costume jewelry, and candles, often combined with collaged or painted surfaces. Erotically charged and tinged with echoes of both the Surrealist tradition and of San Francisco’s Victorian past, these works established Conner as a leading figure within the international assemblage “movement.” Generally, these works do not have precise meanings, but some of them suggest what Conner saw as the discarded beauty of modern America, the deforming impact of society on the individual, violence against women, and consumerism. Social commentary and dissension remained a common theme among his later works. Conner also began making short movies in the late 1950s. He explicitly titled his movies in all capital letters. Conner’s first and possibly most famous film was entitled A Movie (1958). A Movie was a “poverty film”, in that instead of shooting his own footage Conner used compilations of old newsreels and other old films.] He skillfully re-edited that footage, set the visuals to a recording of Ottorino Respighi‘s Pines of Rome, and created an entertaining and thought-provoking 12-minute film, that while non-narrative has things to say about the experience of watching a movie and the human condition. In 1994, A Movie was selected for preservation by the National Film Registry at the Library of Congress. Conner subsequently made nearly two dozen mostly non-narrative experimental films. In 1959, Conner founded what he called the Rat Bastard Protective Association. Its members included Jay DeFeo, Michael McClure (with whom Conner attended school in Wichita), Manuel Neri, Joan Brown, Wally Hedrick, Wallace Berman, Jess Collins, Carlos Villa and George Herms. Conner coined the name as a play on ‘Scavengers Protective Society’. A 1959 exhibition at the Spatsa Gallery in San Francisco involved an early exploration by Conner into the notion of artistic identity. To publicize the show, the gallery printed up and distributed an exhibition announcement in the form of a small printed card with black borders (in the manner of a death announcement) with the text “Works by the Late Bruce Conner.” In 1961, Conner completed his second film, Cosmic Ray, a 4-minute, 43 second black-and-white quick edit collage of found footage and film that Conner had shot himself, set to a soundtrack of Ray Charles‘ “What’d I Say.” The movie premiered in 1962. Conner and his wife, artist Jean Conner, moved to Mexico c. 1962, despite the increasing popularity of his work. The two — along with their just-born son, Robert — returned to the USA and were living in Massachusetts in 1963, when John F. Kennedy was assassinated. Conner filmed the television coverage of the event and edited and re-edited the footage with stock footage into another meditation on violence which he titled Report. The film was issued several times as it was re-edited. In 1964, Conner had a show at the Batman Gallery in San Francisco that lasted just three days, with Conner never leaving the gallery. The show was announced only via a small notice in the want ads of the Los Angeles Times. Part of the exhibition is documented in Conner’s film Vivian. Toward the end of 1964, London’s Robert Fraser Gallery hosted a show of Conner’s work, which the artist documented in a film called London One Man Show. Also that year, Conner decided he would no longer make assemblages, even though it was precisely such work that had brought him the most attention. According to Conner’s friend and fellow film-maker Stan Brakhage in his book Film at Wit’s End, Conner was signed into a New York gallery contract in the early 1960s, which stipulated stylistic and personal restraint beyond Conner’s freewheeling nature. It is unlikely that Conner would ever sign such a restrictive document. 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. Just before Conner moved to Mexico in 1961, he repainted a worn sign on a road surface so that it read “Love”. Conner produced work in a variety of forms from the 1960s forward. He was an active force in the San Francisco counterculture of the mid-1960s as a collaborator in Liquid light shows at the legendary Family Dog Productions at the Avalon Ballroom. He also made—using the new-at-the-time felt-tip pens—intricate black-and-white mandala-like drawings, many of which he subsequently (in the very early 1970s) lithographed into prints. One of Conner’s drawings was used (in boldly colored variations) on the cover of the August, 1967 issue (#9) of the San Francisco Oracle.[17] He also made collages made from 19th-century engraving images, which he first exhibited as The Dennis Hopper One Man Show. He also made a number of short films in the mid-1960s in addition to Report and Vivian. These include Ten Second Film (1965), an advertisement for the New York Film Festival that was rejected as being “too fast;” Breakaway (1966), featuring music sung by and danced to by Toni Basil; The White Rose (1967), documenting the removal of fellow artist Jay DeFeo‘s magnum opus from her San Francisco apartment, with Miles Davis‘s Sketches of Spain as the soundtrack; and Looking for Mushrooms (1967), a three-minute color wild ride with the Beatles‘ “Tomorrow Never Knows” as the soundtrack. (In 1996 he created a longer version of the film, setting it to music by Terry Riley). In 1966, Dennis Hopper invited Conner to the location shoot for Cool Hand Luke; the artist shot the proceedings in 85mm, revisiting this footage in 2004 to create his film Luke. During the 1970s Conner focused on drawing and photography, including many photos of the late 1970s West Coast punk rock scene. A 1978 film used Devo‘s “Mongoloid” as a soundtrack. Conner in the 1970s also created along with photographer Edmund Shea a series of life-size photograms called Angels. Conner would pose in front of large pieces of photo paper, which after being exposed to light and then developed produced images of Conner’s body in white against a dark background. Throne Angel, in the collection of the Honolulu Museum of Art, is an example with the artist crouching on a stool. Conner also began to draw elaborately folded inkblots. His innovative technique of skillfully montaged shots from pre-existing borrowed or found footage can be seen in his first film A Movie (1958). His subsequent films are most often fast-paced collages of found footage or of footage shot by Conner; however, he made numerous films, including Crossroads, his 30-plus-minute meditation on the atom bomb, that are almost achingly deliberate in their pace. Conner was among the first to use pop music for film soundtracks. Conner’s collaborations with musicians include Devo (Mongoloid), Terry Riley (Looking for Mushrooms (long version) and Easter Morning), Patrick Gleeson and Terry Riley (Crossroads), Brian Eno and David Byrne (America is Waiting, Mea Culpa) and three more films with Gleeson (Take the 5:10 to Dreamland, Television Assassination, and Luke). His film of dancer and choreographer Toni Basil, Breakaway (1966), featured a song recorded by Basil. Conner, who had twice announced his own death as a conceptual art event or prank, died on July 7, 2008, and was survived by his wife, American artist Jean Sandstedt Conner, and his son, Robert. i met Bruce Conner at a show here in San Francisco, 2006. he was so nice. i asked him about COSMIC RAY appearing on Something Weird Video’s VHS tapes from the 90’s with aa different soundtrack….he just looked at me, did not know what i was talking about. but it was still great meeting him. this tribute contains: A Movie (1958) Breakaway (1966) Marilyn Times Five (1973) Mea Culpa (1981) Report (1963–1967) Take the 5:10 to Dreamland (1976) Valse Triste (1977) Vivian (1964) White Rose (1967) color, black & white, mono, silent, fullscreen. DVD-R comes packaged as shown in color DVD case, wrapped in plastic!