Bruce Conner is in your head. How did he get there? Do not be alarmed, but there has been some seepage in the collective consciousness. Can you feel it? Yes. Yes you can. That name, Bruce Conner, is familiar. How do you know that name?
Not to be confused with memorably coiffed Olympic decathlete and game-show habitué Bruce Jenner, nor with mild-mannered, gamma-irradiated comic book character Bruce Banner, Bruce Conner was a San Francisco countercultural artist and filmmaker who came of age in the 1950s and ’60s. And yet, it is not wrong to go rummaging through the absurd, amusing, appalling mental scrapbook of American cultural effluvia in order to track him down.
Conner died last fall, the newspapers say, but who knows how gone he really is? One time, many years ago, he gave notice of his own death to Who’s Who, and hosted a solo art show called Works by the Late Bruce Conner.
More to the point of this discussion, though, are Conner’s brilliantly inventive, highly kinetic and variously agitating films, which similarly imply an establishment-rattling trickster who could be very serious too. In 1958, he made a movie called A Movie. “My intent was to make an anti-movie,” he later said. Later still, the San Francisco Chronicle described A Movie as “a sort of paean to human failure.” For its maker, this lushly scored, sublimely funny yet also somehow dread-inducing 12-minute collage of found footage became definitive.
Conner’s ironic selectivity and poetically intelligent editing became a way of feeding the pop-culture machine back to itself. It also became widely influential. “Do I like being tagged as the father of music videos?” he once said. “I would demand a DNA test.” He was clever and creatively surly that way. (At least one of his sculptural artworks was directly inspired by his annoyance with a San Francisco museum’s way of displaying another.) Other subjects of Conner’s deftly cinematic social critiques include high-profile sex crimes, the Kennedy assassination, materialism, and pop art. “I get impassioned and that’s not cool and cool was what pop art was all about,” he said.