Bruce Conner Films

From: DOMINIC ANGERAME (email suppressed)
Date: Fri Jan 12 2007 - 08:29:03 PST


Canyon Cinema is now "Leasing for the life of the
Print" new and used films by Bruce Conner. Below is a
list is films available. Anyone interested please
contact Dominic Angerame at Canyon Cinema
(address suppressed)

Quantities are very limited.

Thanks

Dominic Angerame
Canyon Cinema

BRUCE CONNER

16mm prints for sale only, both new and used condition
from Canyon Cinema. Most prints are estar based and
treated with 3M photoguard.

Breakaway

Music by Ed Cobb. Dance and vocal by Toni Basil
(Antonia Christina Basilotta).

"The camera captures her movements in gestural,
expressive light smears. Intercut rhythmically with
strophes of black leader, she gyrates in graceful,
stroboscopic accelerations. Conner's editing is
consummate as he alternates angles of her figure from
different shots into a kinesthetic, flowing
continuity.

"Basically a two-and-a-half minute film, this 'module'
of image and sound is then reversed. Everything goes
'backwards' to the 'original' beginning. The sound
track with Basilotta singing the title song is run in
reverse as an aural analogue to the visual abstraction
of photography. It resembles a paradigm for those high
school physics demonstrations of gravitation where we
saw a ball, once thrown straight up into the air,
loyally retrace its trajectory to Earth." - Anthony
Reveaux

A dance film viewed twice (once forward, once
backward) in five minutes. The film was shot at single
frame exposures as well as 8, 16, 24 and 36 frames per
second.

1966, 16mm, b&w/so, 5m

16mm print (new) $750
16mm print (used) $375

Cosmic Ray

"COSMIC RAY seems like a reckless collage of fast
moving parts: comic strips, dancing girls, flashing
lights. It is the dancing girl - hardly dressed,
stripping or nude - which provides the leitmotiv for
the film. Again and again she appears - sandwiched
between soldiers, guns, and even death in the form of
a skull positioned between her legs. And if the
statement equates sex with destruction, the cataclysm
is a brilliant one, like an exploding firecracker, and
one which ends the world with a cosmic bang. Of
course, the title also refers to musician Ray Charles
whose art Conner visually transcribes onto film as a
potent reality, tough and penetrating in its ability
to affect some pretty basic animal instincts. But if
such is the content of the film - that much of our
behavior consists of bestiality - the work as a whole
stands as insight rather than indictment." - Carl
Belz, Film Culture

1961, 16mm, b&w/so, 4m

16mm print (new) $600
16mm print (used) $300

Crossroads

Original music by Patrick Gleeson and Terry Riley.
"Conner bases his film on government footage of the
first underwater A-bomb test, July 25, 1946, at Bikini
Atoll in the Pacific. Recorded at speeds ranging from
normal to super slow motion, the same explosion is
seen 27 different times - from the air, from boats and
land-based cameras; distant and close-up. The opening
segment emphasizes the awesome grandeur of the
explosion - the destructiveness, as well as the
dramatic spectacle and beauty. As the repetition
builds, however, the explosion is gradually removed
from the realm of historic phenomena, assuming the
dimensions of a universal, cosmic force. And in the
film's second section this force is brought into a
kind of cosmic harmony, part of the lyrically
indifferent ebb and flow of life that one sees in a
lingering, elegaic view of the ocean." - Thomas
Albright, San Francisco Chronicle

1976, 16mm, b&w/so, 36m

16mm print used: $7,000

Looking for Mushrooms (Long Version)

Music by Terry Riley: "Poppy Nogood and the Phantom
Band," 1968 - BMA - Publisher: Ancient Word Music.

This is the same film footage as edited in the earlier
short version of LOOKING FOR MUSHROOMS released in
1968 with a Beatles soundtrack. It is made longer with
five frames for each original frame but still remains
the same edit (but with a new soundtrack by Terry
Riley) and nothing added, nothing lost, always the
same, neverending ....
Award: Best Experimental Film, Ann Arbor Film
Festival, 1997

1996, 16mm, color/so, 14.5m

16mm print new: $1,800
16mm print used:$900

Marilyn Times Five

With Arline Hunter.

"A young woman, allegedly Marilyn Monroe, is seen with
pitiless scrutiny in the arena of an old girlie film.
The reiteration of five cycles rotates the commodity
of her moon-pale body as her song repeats five times
on the sound track ... 'I'm through with love.' The
last shot terminates a final reward of stillness as
she is seen crumpled on the floor." - Anthony Reveaux

The image, or Anima, of Marilyn Monroe was not owned
by Norma Jean any more than it was owned by Arline
Hunter. Images can sometimes have more power than the
person they represent. Some cultures consider that an
image steals the soul or spirit of the person
depicted. They will dwindle and die. MX5 is an
equation not intended to be completed by the film
alone. The viewer completes the equation.

1968-1973, 16mm, b&w/so, 13.5m

16mm print new: $1,800
16mm print used: $900

Mongoloid

A documentary film exploring the manner in which a
determined young man overcame a basic mental defect
and became a useful member of society. Insightful
editing techniques reveal the dreams, ideals and
problems that face a large segment of the American
male population. Educational. Background music written
and performed by the DEVO orchestra.

Mongoloid he was a mongoloid, happier than you and me.

Mongoloid he was a mongoloid, and it determined what
he could see.
Mongoloid he was a mongoloid, one chromosome too many.

And he wore a hat, and he had a job
And he brought home the bacon so that no one knew
©1977 DEVO

1978, 16mm, b&w/so, 3.5m

16mm print new: $600
16mm print used: $300

A Movie

"... a montage of found materials from fact
(newsreels) and fiction (old movies). Cliches and
horrors make a rapid collage in which destruction and
sex follow each other in images of pursuit and falling
until finally a diver disappears through a hole in the
bottom of the sea - the ultimate exit. The entire
thing is prefaced by a girl from a shady movie lazily
undressing. By the time A MOVIE is over she has
retrospectively become a Circe or Prime Mover." -
Brian O'Doherty, The New York Times

"Using only found footage, Conner has created one of
the most extraordinary films ever made. One begins by
laughing at the juxtaposition of cowboys and Indians,
elephants and tanks, but soon the metaphor of
association becomes serious, as we realize we are
witnessing the apocalypse." - Freude

1958, 16mm, b&w/so, 12m
16mm print used: $1,000

Television Assassination

Filmed from TV set 1963-1964 by Bruce Conner - Patrick
Gleeson music: 1995 - Lee Harvey Oswald - View from
window, Texas School Book Depository - Eternal Flame,
Arlington National Cemetery - President Kennedy -
Funeral Flowers at Dealey Plaza, Dallas - Kennedy
Inaugural Parade - PT 109 Official Warren Commission
Report - Texas School Book Depository - Kennedy
Motorcade - Mail Order Bolt Action Rifle - Oswald in
custody - Jack Ruby shoots Oswald - TV roll bars -
multiple exposures - Lincoln Memorial - chalk board
diagrams - White House - military guard at Kennedy
grave - Baked Turkey commercial for Thanksgiving Day
Dinner - Oswald - et cetera.

"A remarkable film. The score by Patrick Gleeson is
every bit as effective as his pieces for earlier Bruce
Conner films and transforms the experience of seeing
these familiar - but also transfixing - images. The
humor that leavens the genuine sadness of the material
is given gentle boosts here and there acoustically." -
Bruce Jenkins, Director, Film/Video, Walker Art Center

1963-1995, 16mm, b&w/so, 14m

16mm print used: $900

The White Rose

Jay De Feo started painting THE WHITE ROSE in 1957.
When the unfinished painting was removed eight years
later it weighed over 2300 pounds.

"The images selected and the order constructed become
a formal mystic service. We see the altar, the
penitence, the cross, the investiture, the descent,
and finally, the mourning. The men in garments from
Bekins seem to draw strength from touching the
surface. The respect they render the painting appears
as worship." - Camille Cook

"... a fine, brief, tongue-in-cheek 'documentary' of a
huge painting being removed from an artist's studio,
carried onto a Bekin's moving van with a combination
of cold efficiency and all the lugubrious solemnity of
a state funeral. It has remarkable timing and pace,
and an 'artless' style which can only come from a deep
sense of what the art is all about." - Tom Albright,
Rolling Stone

1967, 16mm, b&w/so, 7m

16mm print new: $750
16mm print used: $350

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