During SFMOMA and MoMA’s large survey retrospective honoring the late Bruce Conner (1933 - 2008), Kohn Gallery premieres Conner’s masterwork, the seminal A MOVIE (1958). Comprised of scavenged newsreels, B-movies, and coming attractions, A MOVIE has been described as the first contemporary “found footage film.” The sophistication in which Conner has crafted the work – a precision that would define his entire oeuvre across diverse media – belies any association with the readymade.
A MOVIE orchestrates a virtual symphony of disasters, including car crashes, explosions, war, and famine, as well as moments of grace – a tightrope act, a plane floating through clouds, or light reflected on water. The images in their specificity become archetype, and they attain a state of visual poetry that allows the viewer to feel their full emotional weight.
With his initial exploration in the film medium, Conner launched a lifelong career positioning moving image alongside collage, assemblage sculpture, drawing, painting, and photography; in this first film he reconceived notions of cinema itself. A MOVIE is deeply invested in exploring the tactile nature of its medium, where Conner found the perfect vehicle to explore the depths of the human experience in modernity.
In A MOVIE’s joining of montage with Respighi’s “Pines of Rome,” Conner also established a filmic language of music and image that he would refine in his work over the course of several decades. In this stroke, Conner managed to not only re-introduce film to the art world (after a relative absence dating to the 1930’s), but invented the music video--an achievement later recognized by David Byrne and Brian Eno, who approached him to make films accompanying their classic “My Life in the Bush of Ghosts.”
The new 4K digital restoration of A MOVIE, conducted from Conner’s original 16mm positive A-roll, is the second in a series of groundbreaking digital restorations which will ultimately preserve all of his films in unique limited editions of the highest quality. The first to receive this treatment, CROSSROADS (1976) was described in a feature-length essay in Artforum in 2013, and has been hailed as a new standard in the presentation and archiving of moving image.
