Haunted by JFK’s assassination, Conner obsessively filmed television coverage of the killing, funeral and miscellaneous contemporary programming, repurposing the footage into both a sorrowful portrait of a lost hero—NB: Conner’s use of blank “leader”—and a blistering critique of postwar consumerism.

Conner followed his fascination with the atomic bomb to an absolutely brilliant furthest extreme, “expanding” 27 different shots of the 1946 Bikini Atoll a-bomb test footage into a mesmerizing two-part epic that juxtaposes the enhanced “realism” of Patrick Gleeson’s sound track in the first half against the hallucinatory trance music of Terry Riley that closes the film.

Originally part of a sculpture in which the footage was projected onto a decrepit television set, Conner’s film offers a frightening meditation on the televisual spectacle of JFK’s assassination.