Bruce Conner, the Last Magician of the 20th Century
Program Three
Channeling the “black magic” of Ray Charles’ music, Conner used occult symbols and mysterious images to create this nocturnal and raucous masterpiece.
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The White Rose
Directed by Bruce Conner.
US, 1967, 16mm, black & white, 7 min.
An elegiac musical documentary capturing the slow removal of Jay de Fayo’s iconic “painting” The White Rose from the San Francisco loft from which she had been evicted.
Shot at multiple speeds (and forwards and backwards), Conner’s dance film uses incredible rapid-fire montage to deliver a beautifully frenzied response to Maya Deren’s motion studies.
Conner’s mordant gem discovers wonderfully strange and subversive subtexts at work within an obscure 1940s Biblical film.
A hilarious “educational” film that features a pulsing Devo soundtrack.
Working again with Byrne and Eno, Conner’s early music video offers a satire of patriotism and national security.
In his first collaboration with David Byrne and Brian Eno, Conner used footage from educational films to create a rhythmically austere image-track for music from their pioneering “sampling” album My Life in the Bush of Ghosts (1981).
For his first video work Conner slowed down 8mm footage shot in 1967 on the set of Cool Hand Luke into a meditation on the cinema and landscape that uses a beautiful Patrick Gleeson soundtrack.
Conner distilled footage from his unfinished documentary on the gospel group The Soul Stirrers into a collage accompaniment to the group’s version of the classic spiritual His Eye Is On the Sparrow.
Conner’s exquisite final work is a step-printed reinterpretation of footage from his 1966 unreleased film, EASTER MORNING RAGA that further reveals his abiding interest in the psychedelic as an alternate way of seeing.