HFA Glances Back at Conner

The mushroom cloud was the symbol under which the mid-20th century was baptized. As the last great global tumult, the Second World War represented the convergence and the stratification of ideologies. But what hoisted itself above all of these intersecting faiths—above fascism, communism, capitalism, democracy—was the ambivalent shroud of dust and ash in which mankind could glimpse a vision of its own destruction. To watch footage of the atomic tests—the grainy, bird’s-eye view of a seemingly endless geyser of particulate matter—is to understand an iota of a vengeful, earthbound god. To watch that same footage to the sounds of Ray Charles’ “What’d I Say” is something of a different experience.

That’s what viewers get, among other things, in the 1962 film “Cosmic Ray.” The film arranges footage of nude women, cartoons, dancers and—what else—more bombs, to the near-frenzied sounds of Mr. Charles’ raucous, sexually charged frenzy of a performance. Many credit the piece, as well as others by this film’s director (Bruce Connor), with influencing the concept of the contemporary music video. To assert that the man behind “Cosmic Ray” was interested in searching for new means of delivering popular music into the home, however, is reductive to say the least.

Last month, the Harvard Film Archive presented a series of films from Conner that included “Cosmic Ray” in its program. Conner, who began his career as a figure in Beat circles in San Francisco in the mid-1950s, was active until his death earlier this year and remains an enigmatic icon in 20th century American art. Though he worked extensively in drawing, painting, and as a collage artist throughout his long and prolific career, Conner first gained attention for his sculpture work. These pieces were composed entirely of objects found in the scrap heaps of San Francisco—bits of cardboard and old building material, torn fabric and thread, pulp serials, broken dolls and, most famously, women’s nylon stockings.

Sudden acclaim for his sculpture work and the implied pressures toward more commercial artistic aims elicited a shift in Conner’s medium of choice. In the late-1950s, Conner moved toward filmmaking, bringing the same creative philosophy which had inspired his sculptures to film collages, assembled from varied and seemingly incongruous source materials. His 1958 debut, titled simply “A Movie”, is perhaps his most famous film. The work is a collage inter-cutting various scenes of restless, frustrated, even comically absurd mobility—men on horses, novelty bicycles, surfboards, water-skis and racecars—clips of peep-show footage, air disasters, tight-rope walkers, and myriad other images, set to the sounds of Ottorino Respighi’s “The Pines of Rome.”

Its narrative framework, to the extent that there is one, is fleeting. Conner takes pains to thwart any clear interpretation, but motifs of modern warfare, performitivity, the Freudian return to the womb, and the sex and death drives all figure heavily in “A Movie.”

It’s difficult, well-nigh impossible, to summarize satisfactorily the vision or intention behind any of Conner’s films. The closest one can come, it seems, is to describe thematic parts that figure prominently in at least some of them. The first, potentially unifying, simultaneously elusive concept is that of the found object, extracted from its continuum, and repurposed as art. All of Conner’s work seems to collect beneath a font of discarded, quoted, recontextualized materials—educational films, pornography reels, propaganda, B-movies, television, newsreels, quoted songs. As a filmmaker, Conner seems to revel in an almost Dadaist attitude toward a new democratic vision of art, where all materials—no matter how inane or lewd or ephemeral—can be incorporated into an artistic whole.

The second, less elusive, but ultimately more personal concept is that of a love for the cinema. As much as Conner subverts the conventions of popular film—filling “A Movie” with abrupt inter-titles that read simply “The End” and “Movie,” or taking a clip of countdown reel as the entire substance of his work “Ten Second Film”—there is a kindness, a sense of nostalgia and good humor that the artist brings to his work that precludes strong criticism or hostility in favor of eccentric homage.

Taking imagery into consideration, Conner is obsessed with the female form. The sixteen-minute pseudo-loop piece, 1973’s “Marilyn Times Five,” dwells, as if under hypnosis, on the increasingly nude form of nubile Monroe-doppelganger Arline Hunter. The same images, placed further ahead in time each cycle, play over “I’m Through With Love,” a song from Monroe’s film “Some Like It Hot.” Many of Conner’s other films feature nude or scantily clad women, usually juxtaposed along footage concerned with violence, disaster or population explosion. The artist seems in search of a sort of mimesis of consciousness for the modern man—a clustered, disorienting rush of disconnected, yet inexplicably related dialogues on history, culture and gender as they have traveled through time and how they exist now.

A baffling, fascinating figure to the end, Conner twice insisted on memorializing himself based on an incorrectly predicted date of death. He had written his own obituary and wrote a description of himself for the encyclopedia “Who Was Who in America.” If Conner saw anything of his own end in those atomic explosions, it’s unlikely that a self-authored eulogy will surface to let us know about it. He requested that no funeral be given in his honor.

—Columnist Ryan J. Meehan can be reached at rmeehan@fas.harvard.edu.