The exhibition Light out of Darkness references a solo exhibition project of the same name for the University Art Museum at Berkeley, California, in the 1980s. By no means the least of the reasons why it never actually took place was Conner’s refusal to compromise in his dealings with institutions, whose rules for artists he would not accept. The title «Light out of Darkness» emphasizes the experimental character of Conner’s filmic output, which in his early works, especially, resembles a brilliant probing of human perception. The symbolic dualism of light and darkness stands for the artist’s propensity to think in opposites and metaphors and for his mysticism.

CROSSROADS

‘Operation Crossroads’ was the name used by the U.S. Army for a series of nuclear tests conducted at Bikini Atoll in the Pacific in the summer of 1946. Conner managed to obtain footage of the second bomb that had hitherto been kept under lock and key in the National Archives. The objective of the ‘Baker’ test was to study the impact of a submarine explosion on ships in the immediate vicinity. Most of these were seized Japanese warships, which the testers strategically positioned inside a given radius. To record the moment of detonation from every possible angle, the U.S. Army deployed hundreds of cameras – some of them high-speed cameras – on land, on sea, and in the air.

A MOVIE

Conner’s first film, A MOVIE (1958), which he produced on a budget of just three dollars, is a collage of found footage gleaned from newsreels, B movies and graphic animation. The result is a radically experimental film in which he deconstructs and reconstructs film-making and story-telling techniques, while at the same time using the effects of overstimulation, fade-ins, cross-fading and afterimage effects to probe the limits of retinal perception. A MOVIE links together a surplus of dramatic climaxes to form a new, open-ended sequence of actions, and with it a meta-film that lends itself to multiple readings. The countdown, here interrupted by the parasitic interjection of a near-naked woman peeling off her pantyhose, becomes an integral part of the action. The repetition of the title ‘A MOVIE’ is just as insistent as the fade-in of ‘THE END’ and the name of the author ‘BRUCE CONNER’.

Scenes of hot pursuit with cowboys and covered wagons from the Wild West are cut together with elephants, steam engines and automobiles to set in motion a furious race that segues into scenes of crashes and disaster. A submarine captain peers into his periscope and on spotting a pin-up girl fires a torpedo that ignites an atomic bomb. The detonation in turn sets off a tsunami that capsizes ships and knocks water-skiers off their skis. Conner’s game is at once funny and tragic. It shows how drastically content is shaped by choreographed media images of it and exposes the powerful impact of music on our perception of it – as when the image of a slain soldier is underpinned by the heroic fortissimo of Ottorino Respighi’s Pini di Roma.