A pair of short films connected more by technique than content, being playful arrangements of stock footage accompanied by music.
A Movie (1958) was the first film made by artist Bruce Conner, and is usually described as being one of the first films to draw attention to the medium itself. Film-makers have been foregrounding film techniques since the silent days but Conner pulls apart established conventions: putting title cards in the wrong place, mixing comic montages with scenes of real death and destruction, and underlining all of this with a pompous musical soundtrack which doesn’t always match the visual material. Playing with the medium for humorous reasons isn’t so uncommon, you can find plenty of other examples elsewhere, from Buster Keaton to Chuck Jones’ Duck Amuck and Monty Python. Conner takes things further in his swerves from the comic to the serious, and in his ironic treatment of manipulative film scoring.
Everywhere at Once was released in 1985 by Alan Berliner although I doubt it was made that year when it must have taken a considerable amount of time to assemble. The film is a chain of isolated moments in which a very short piece of footage (eg: scurrying ants) is combined with a complementary piece of music. There’s no specific narrative arc, things move rapidly from one clip to the next, with occasional moments where two images correspond—a traffic light turning red is followed by a shot of a seal balancing a red ball on its nose—while one musical fragment leads into the next. Describing all of this (and reading about it) is much less fun than the end result which is very clever and inventive. Berliner, unsurprisingly, worked as a film editor before going on to write and direct feature-length documentaries.
Previously on { feuilleton }
• Into the Midnight Underground
Both wonderful excavations from the Internet Archive!! A perfect complement to this morning’s coffee.
Not going to swear to having seen this episode, but CBS ran a piece on Conner on its still lamented (by me) Camera Three:
https://share.google/aimode/Bp5oGauEWnhBw3gK6
I was trying to watch the show regularly then and I absolutely do remember an episode on an avant garde filmmaker that was doing relatively abstract things — making film in part about film. That is, film as something physical.
Whether it was Conner or someone else I’m thinking of, I cannot say. But the timing strongly suggests it was. At that time, the show was eclectic. That is, it would have been very unlikely to run a series of episodes on a given subject.
And because we live in the kind of world in which we live, very, very few episodes of the show are online.
Conner seems to have been too obscure to ever be featured on TV here at least until the Midnight Underground series (linked above) which ran a couple of his films for Devo and Eno/Byrne. There’s still a lot of his stuff I haven’t seen.