I Am Not Bruce Conner (for B.C.)

1934-2008

Manohla Dargis:

For better and sometimes worse, scores of other filmmakers in both the avant-garde and the commercial mainstream have been influenced by Mr. Conner’s shocking juxtapositions and propulsive, rhythmically sophisticated montage. MTV should have paid him royalties.

Bruce Jenkins, from 2000 BC: The Bruce Conner Story, Part II:

It would be Conner's singular contribution [to cinema] to remove the viewer from the Brakhagean paradigm -- from a close encounter, that is, with the personal vision of the filmmaker -- and from Hollywood's third-person, omniscient fictions as well. The result would be a completely novel viewing experience that might best be termed "second-person film," continually addressing itself to the experience of "you," the film viewer, through an active reworking of the already coded and manipulated cultural material of the movies. Highly constructed and meticulously crafted from cheap cast-offs, peripheral forms, and eccentric images of his own devising, Conner's work would challenge the very legibility of the medium in any of its contemporary manifestations. Through a break with realism and a defiant insistence on liberating the materiality of film, he would deliver cinema from the protocols of both conventional and experimental practice. No mere formalist, however, Conner deployed his uniquely radical practice, like the Cubists before him, in the service of understanding the cultural and social significance of his materials -- specifically, by unmasking the ways in which meanings are constructed and conveyed in the culture. It was, indeed, an explosion in a film factory.