TECHNES Encyclopedia Database

A MOVIE (Bruce Conner, 1958)

Bruce Conner was a pioneer in found footage cinema and a multidisciplinary artist known in particular for his sculpture, installations and photography. He completed his first film, A MOVIE, in 1958; by virtue of its inventiveness, humour and scathing look at the civilization of images, it represents a turning point in the history of found footage cinema. The film’s critical fortune and avowed influence have confirmed its importance in the history of re-use. Against music by Ottorino Respighi, Pini di Roma, A MOVIE is made up of leader and countdown timers; short excerpts from newsreels, ethnographic films, westerns, nudies and sports films; images of nuclear tests, monument and disasters; and an entire compendium of images which make up the zero degree of the visual culture of the era in which the film was made (even though few of the films are recognizable and it has no movie stars, these images are visual commonplaces, or what a critic has called “cultural archives”^[6]). Composed in large part of films from the Castle Films catalogue – 100-foot reels of 16 mm film easily available on the amateur market (for which Joseph Cornell and Ken Jacobs also had a fondness) – A MOVIE tears these images from their original context and repurposes them, creating ironic or caustic pairings. As Conner explains, the film was made in a self-taught, artisanal manner:

Since there was a movie I wanted to see, and didn’t see it being made, I decided it had to be my job to make it. And absolutely nothing was being taught in schools on how to make films. I couldn’t take a class in filmmaking. I had to invent my own ways of making movies. All I could learn was how to glue one piece of film to another. A MOVIE was made in the most primitive film editing process that is possible. You just glue it together. I had no work print, synchronizer, moviola, sound reader. I had none of the technical tools that beginning film students use today. I had never even heard of most of these technical tools.^[7]

The film was thus assembled practically without traditional editing equipment or tools, apart from a Griswold splicer borrowed from Larry Jordan.^[8] Unlike the deliberately jerky editing of Rose Hobart, in which the splices are often visible on screen, the cuts in A MOVIE are astonishingly smooth despite the great disparity of sources. In this way, the film effects a return to the parataxical principle of the monstration/juxtaposition of attractions, even as the film demonstrates a contemporary televisual logic which, in passing from one television set to another, can create abrupt piling up, for example, of images of natural disasters and variety shows. The most inventive quality of A MOVIE is undoubtedly the fact that in 1958, using a splicer and bits of found footage, it creates a lucid and unforgiving image of the society of the spectacle which was just then emerging.