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