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Tony Conrad Film

Screening on Film

By the mid-1960s I had been drawn to film because of its hopelessly shabby integrity, and also because of its restive and anarchic aspects, which implicitly challenged the progressivism of the art market. At the same time, and perhaps even because of its unruliness and freedom from the market, I felt that film could be used to construct esthetic challenges that the existing market disciplines in art did not, would not, or could not touch. It seemed to me quite rational to look to the border regions of art for its greatest mobility and interest. After all, it had been within music, not painting or sculpture, that the most radical artistic challenges of the early 1960s had appeared. – Tony Conrad

Film notes courtesy Canyon Cinema

PROGRAM

  • Straight and Narrow

    Directed by Tony and Beverly Conrad.
    US, 1970, 16mm, black & white, 10 min.
    Print source: Canyon Cinema

Straight and Narrow is a study in subjective color and visual rhythm. Although it is printed on black and white film, the hypnotic pacing of the images will cause viewers to experience a programmed gamut of hallucinatory color effects. Straight and Narrow uses the flicker phenomenon not as an end in itself, but as an effectuator of other related phenomena. In this film, the colors, which are so illusory in The Flicker, are visible and under the programmed control of the filmmaker. Also, by using images that alternate in a vibrating flickering schedule, a new impression of motion and texture is created.

  • Articulation of Boolean Algebra for Film Opticals

    Directed by Tony Conrad.
    US, 1975, 16mm, black & white, 10 min.
    excerpt of 75 min. original

This work is one of the most austere and highly structure-dependent films ever, made without images other than six patterns of alternating black and white imposed upon the full surface of the film strip.

  • The Flicker

    Directed by Tony Conrad.
    US, 1966, 16mm, black & white, 30 min.
    Print source: HFA

This is a notorious film; it moves audiences into some space and time in which they may look around and find the movie happening in the room there with them. Much has been written about The Flicker. It is a library of peculiar visual materials, referenced to the frame-pulse at twenty-four frames per second. All flickering light is potentially hazardous for photogenic epileptics or photogenic migraine sufferers.

  • The Eye of Count Flickerstein

    Directed by Tony Conrad.
    US, 1967-1975, 16mm, black & white, 7 min.
    Print source: Canyon Cinema

The sustained dead gaze of black-and-white TV "snow," captured in 1965 and twisted sideways, draws the viewer hypnotically into an abstract visual jungle.

Part of film series

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Introducing Tony Conrad:
A Retrospective

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The Reincarnations of Delphine Seyrig

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Ben Rivers, Back to the Land

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Harvard Undergraduate Cinematheque

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Make Way for Tomorrow. Carson Lund’s Eephus

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Jessica Sarah Rinland’s Collective Monologue

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David Lynch, New Dimensions

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Museum Hours: Mati Diop’s Dahomey

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Albert Serra, or Cinematic Time Regained

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Wang Bing’s Youth Trilogy