Bruce Conner’s Breakaway

Thanks for posting this, there is never enough praise for Bruce Conner.

Before “Breakaway” there was “Cosmic Ray”, which is a more of benchmark:

http://fan.tcm.com/video/cosmic-ray-bruce-conner-1961

I think Conner was just fine with music videos as he did do Mongoloid:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mongoloid_(song)

and Mea Culpa with David Byrne and Brian Eno, pieces of what you can see here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FzqL4G6oA58

He did hate watching his films as video (and why it is so hard to watch nothing but bootleg copies on the web) but there was an amazing digital restoration of “Crossroads” at the Kohn Gallery recently that would be nice if it was shown in Houston sometime (hint):

http://www.kohngallery.com/news/2014/12/5/bruce-conner-los-angeles-times

What one college student in 1969, like myself, thought of Bruce Conner’s “Breakaway” was “super-cool!” But the film wasn’t like some alien life form. I may have been slightly ahead of the curve at the then very hip Rice Media Center, but Bruce Conner was considered a god immediately by my enlightened instructor James Blue. My very first class assignment was watching Connor’s “A Movie” (1958) and then making my own collage film, or “junk film” as Blue called it (a la the California assemblage movement), splicing together bits and pieces of Super 8 versions of industrial movies, Hollywood shorts, animations into a new super-rapid mélange.

Likewise, the live light shows from ca. 1967 onward presented along with traveling rock concerts by the Dead and the Airplane, for example, explored some of the same kind of dissociative editing and quick cut imagery: you know, like the acid trip the viewer was probably on anyway. Connor was an active participant in many of the San Francisco light shows.

Also he was part of a whole New American Cinema movement with such filmmakers as Will Hindle, Stan Brakhage, and Scott Barlett who were exploring rapidly shifting visual effects.

One other small point: I believe much, though not all, of the editing in “Breakaway” was done in-camera, not with physical splicing or film lab analog fading. In other words, setting the camera on stop-motion frames while filming.

Thanks for bringing this little masterwork to everyone’s attention again. Tune in, turn on, drop out, baby!