Archive

Special Screening

Cosmic Ray

Bruce CONNER

USA1959 7min 16mm Color

Synopsis

One of the major pieces by Bruce Conner, who mainly works using collage, or in a broader sense, Found Footage. Found Footage is a practice in which the artist constructs the film with filmed by others, and thereby deconstructing and reconstructing the original intentions. And the end project is a film of its own. CONNER makes a collage out of his own film of a naked dancing woman, and footage of Mickey Mouse, war documentaries, commercials, and westerns, edited to the music of Ray CHarles’ ‘Tell me what I say.’ With his films CONNER attacked the banality of pop culture and war. In this way, maybe the film should be called ‘The Great Ray Charles’ instead of ‘Cosmic Ray.’ (PARK Dong-hyun)

Diretor

Bruce CONNER

Bruce Conner was born in McPherson, Kansas in 1933, and studied art at Wichita University, the University of Nebraska, the Brooklyn Art School and the University of Colorado. Conner first made a name for himself in the 1950s with sculptures of found objects. In the late 1950s, he began making short movies and established himself as a seminal figure in the history of independent filmmaking.