One of my favorite filmmakers, Bruce Conner, died the other day. His work won him "avant-garde" classification, and while that seems right, since he was experimenting on his own movie island, it keeps - and has always kept - his films at a misleading distance from ready access. Stock footage and original and found film were the raw materials for his collages, and they probably kept him from getting his due as a seminal artist. His bewitching blend of archival material (what did Conner film; what did he find?) is used, most famously in 1958's "A Movie," not simply to tell stories but to critique culture while worrying your conscience.
Like Andy Warhol, Conner was a pop-art polymath, having, for example, made his own deconstruction of Marilyn Monroe (1974's "Marilyn Times Five") and sculpted, sketched, and inkblotted, too. His early pieces were kaleidoscopic assemblages of found material that put him closer to Robert Rauschenberg's combines and straddled the line between chic and junk. Seeing them was like visiting some decomposing thrift shop, and his self-photograms were surreal phantasmagorias. One of the happiest things he ever did was filming Toni Basil dancing to her song "Breakaway" in 1966.
But Conner was probably never ambitious enough to become a brand, an industry, or an icon. He didn't have Warhol's star quality. He didn't want it. He gathered his creative strength during the atomic age at the early height of the Cold War and during the early apex of television advertising, and he was active in 1960s countercultural San Francisco. So on the one hand his films were playful (cool: found footage!) but his mood often headed into an exhilarating combustion of awfulness: they erupted with these apocalyptic orgies. Even by the time he was working with David Byrne and Terry Riley and making films out of Devo songs, he was still giving us nuclear TV nightmares.
Conner was using the movies not as a medium of entertainment or escape but a tool for kaleidoscopic critique, and being ahead of his time it took forever for the culture to catch up with his perceptions, his suspicions, his fears, and, even then, it never truly did. He died still ahead of his time.
