Friday, October 23, 2009

The Bruce Conner Prospective (Experimental)

Eye and Ear Clinic at SAIC (112 S Michigan Ave, Rm 1307) - Monday, 6pm
One of the great accidents of Art History is that Bruce Conner did not invent the found-footage film. Sure, Joseph Cornell made ROSE HOBART in 1936 and Eisenstein et al were rumored to have rearranged THE BIRTH OF A NATION while teaching themselves the art of montage in the 1910s, but Conner did it better. In his first major film, simply titled A MOVIE (1958, 12 min, 16mm) he displayed a knack for gluing the scraps of civilization together to create both a humorous and scathing visual commentary on society at large and Hollywood idioms. As the title indicates, this was a generalized version of the more mind-numbing fare that is arguably still the norm: sex, explosions, racism, and sexy racist explosions. In REPORT (1967, 13 min, 16mm) he used the news coverage surrounding the Kennedy assassination, shot off his own TV set, to explore the media's obsession with violence and celebrity. Again Conner uses a medium of mass communication as the message, but shows more sensitivity as he explores his own feelings about an event that defined a generation. Craig Baldwin's TRIBULATION 99 (1992, 48 min, 16mm) is a film that is epic in scope and archival in source material. Taking a different approach to appropriation, Baldwin braids 99 different conspiracy theories into a narrative. With footage mainly from B-movie clips and educational films, he explains in half-whispered narration not just who killed JFK, but what it had to do with the Mayans and aliens. Baldwin shows a sensitivity to the societal fringes that incubated these theories, and you get the sense that although he doesn't believe them, he knows they're onto something. Also screening: Brian Boyce's SPECIAL REPORT (1999, 3 min, video), Kent Lambert's SEPTEMBER SICK SEMPER TYRANNIS (2008, 4 min, video), and Jesse McLean's ONLY WE KNOW (2009, 5 min, video). Lambert and McLean person. JH - Cine-File.info

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