It is difficult to measure the profound impact of the late Bruce Conner's films (1933-2008) upon postwar American cinema and popular culture. Perhaps most influential was Conner's unique approach to montage and the almost uncanny editorial acumen that guided his work from his very first film, the found footage masterpiece A Movie (1959). From a strictly technical standpoint, Conner's precision cutting was easily as skillful and sophisticated as that of the great Soviet masters. And yet Conner used montage to explore a far more ambiguous and multivalent register than the often politically schematic work of the Russian avant-garde.  Rather than message-driven texts, Conner’s cinema refashions film and television images into haunting and illuminating textures that unleash and channel the inner, unconscious forces at work within cinema and popular media, releasing the ghosts of trauma and nostalgia from the machine. Films such as Report, Television Assassination and Crossroads repurpose iconic images and televisual events—JFK's assassination, the Bikini Atoll tests—into meditations at turns mournful and outraged, and always deeply insightful about the power and limits of the moving image’s capacity to tell and to show.

For their remarkable use of music to structure their energetic bricolage, early Conner films such as Cosmic Ray and Breakaway are frequently pointed to as important precursors to the modern music video. In Conner's late work the furious, pyrotechnical montage of the first films gives way to a restrained and lyrical editing style that fashions fewer images into immersive and hypnotic experiences. One later highlight of Conner's long career was his 1996 transformation of his first color film, the three minute Looking for Mushrooms, into a hallucinatory trance film made in collaboration with avant-garde composer Terry Riley.

A protean artist of almost overwhelming talent, Conner first made his name as a pioneer of assemblage art, crafting ethereal and ominous sculptures using raw materials gathered from San Francisco scrap heaps. Taking old cardboard boxes, broken dolls, pulp magazines, frayed string—and especially the torn women's stockings that became the signature element of his sculptures—Conner created a body of eerie, beautiful and sharply political sculptures that subtly address the rapacious appetite for sex and death driving much of postwar American popular culture.   

Rejecting the commodity drive of the art market, Conner abruptly ceased his assemblage work just as he began to achieve real recognition as an artist—turning instead to cinema and a mode of found footage filmmaking directly informed by his sculptural practice. Although superficially similar to Pop Art, the appropriation strategies behind Conner's films are notably distinct. Rather than the crisp, bright icons favored by Pop Art, Conner turned to dingy and degraded cinematic marginalia—condensed versions of B pictures, educational and industrial films, newsreels—for the source material in the majority of his films. Rejecting Pop Art's deadpan humor and cool detachment, Conner's films are inspired by the raw, abrasive energy of the television and movie trailer, in which the tragic and the absurd cruelly coexist within the same split-second. The scabrous humor of films such as Cosmic Ray and America Is Waiting is balanced by a gentler and often elegiac tone that drew upon Conner's barely repressed love of cinema and deep nostalgia for the childhood movie-going experiences that were a crucial touchstone for the later films Take the 5:10 to Dreamland and Valse Triste. A brave artist who encouraged us to look the apocalypse in the eye, Conner also reminded us that the magic and mystery of cinema allows us to share our memories with others in the dark.