Bruce Conner Part II

by Frederic Colier

The intentional use of junk, or found footage, to create a movie that has no resemblance to the expected appearance of a movie gives the film a ludic quality. Perhaps, here lays Conner’s intended humor, where the humor would mask another form of aesthetic discourse—reflexivity. Reflexivity “subverts the assumptions that art can be a transparent medium of communication, a window on the word, a mirror promenading down a highway,” (Stam pxi). Duchamp’s legacy could not be more apropos to discuss A Movie’s reflexivity.

Duchamp had previously attempted to deviate three-dimensional found objects from the meaning of representational art by putting them on display. The deviation raised the question about the reflexive nature of their aesthetic value. [1]  Wrenched from their original functions, the objects became invested with new meanings. Duchamp’s intent was to destroy the notion of aesthetic beauty in the arts. Conner through the recycling of found footage gave Duchamp’s theory a new life, not by extending the experimental process of depiction of representation, but by reversing the process of reproducibility, endowing it once again with an esthetic value over which he had no control.  Made from the society’s junk, Conner’s film uses trash to narrate the incoherent story of destructive forces producing waste. The work once again achieves the level of unreproducibility—it remains unique and magical.[2]

Does this mean that Conner’s movie can be considered an anti-representational form of art? Conner is trapped between consciousnesses (to the extent that he is able to create a work of art). They relate to Duchamp’s practice of having “a sense of involvement in conditions of social, political, and cultural oppression and of hopes for change” (Harrison in COMA p171), and an inability to control the content of his subjects. The found footage is the language with which Conner has to express his thoughts. His voice is the language of others, and he can only modulate it. The violent thrust exerting by the artist toward self-expression is governed by a collective memory, by a society producing goods and events over which he has no control and cannot avoid watching and experiencing.

This reflexivity is one of the main features of the irony credited to postmodern Arts. As opposed to Modernist artists who valued the withdrawal from society, in order to encourage artistic creation and to celebrate the genius of the mind, postmodern artists predicate that the mind is no longer extractable from the society. These artists are the product of society and are predisposed to use its products. The recycling of society’s materials allows Conner not to be dominated by such products, and the recycled footage to call attention to itself. Through the display of a world impregnated with violence, the film’s reflexive nature makes violence also becomes visible.

Conner’s A Movie marks a remarkable artistic bridge between Duchamp’s ready-made, which discourages the aesthetic process, and Warhol’s silk reproductions, which turns mechanical reproduction once again into an art that is no longer aesthetic but anaesthetic. It consists in self-negating the mass-produced object to better encompass it in a renewed faith of its own commodification. Very much in Warholian fashion, by rescuing the footage from destruction and editing it, Conner’s morbid and violent depiction of reality gives the impression that the film stands for an anaesthetic Art. But it cannot be the case. Conner’s materials are not selected within the large serialization of commodified products. The footage is already the unique artificial effluvia of the visual medium.

This difference places Conner exactly at the perfect aesthetic fulcrum between Abstract Expressionism and Pop art. Since self-introspective Abstract Expressionism had led artistic creation into an impasse, from that point on, the artist had to access new ways to assert, to subvert previous artistic form, and to validate his/her existence within an arid artistic medium. At the time when Conner appears in the artistic landscape, artists, although subordinates to existing pre-conditions in voicing their own existence, could only articulate this voice through the materials at their disposal. A Movie must be seen as still carrying the tradition of Abstract Expressionism in two instances. In the first one, the film still aims at representing the unrepresentable, and this by creating abstract concepts of the artist’s internal condition and perceptions. Conner shows no concerns about surrendering a mimetic vision of his society but only about reproducing the internal consequences culture has borne him. The choice of this medium coupled with the use of found footage allows the filmmaker to expose the transparency of the medium and its discourse.

Yet, in the second instance, because society also defines the artist, Conner is reaffirming his artistic individuality. Here, he redeems himself from the ashes of war, disease, scourges, conflicts, and natural disasters by putting society’s cultural products on display. The move was audacious but suggestive, that from the heaps of chaos and decay, a place for personal growth and self-affirmation could remain. The artist’s emancipation from the oppressive society is reflected in the control of the medium.

The medium becomes the vehicle for self-expression. Through the corruption and manipulation of the historical facts, Conner redefines the role of representation. While simultaneously the numerous black inserts, for example, remind the viewers that they are watching nothing else than a movie, the film’s reflexivity questions the nature of reality. Sarcasm ridicules its construction. In Conner’s case, the work is aimed to disrupt, to be anti-illusionistic (the humorous juxtapositions and associations bear no resemblance to reality) even though the subjects depicted are still very much inscribed in an illusionistic tradition.[3]

 This ambivalence reflects the absence of firm aesthetic criteria, in a society which has erased the borders between illusion and anti-illusion, art and reality, high and low culture. Conner’s only control lies in the diachronic progression of the footage. Since the found footage recaptures a history of the past, the artist living in the present is defined by a collective past, where precisely his individuality is annihilated, and which he, Conner, challenges in the process of recapture. Regardless of his attempts to express himself, to unveil his identity, Conner only heads towards self-annihilation. Self-annihilation is the result of violence, which only uncovers itself in the process of artistic expression.

Recycling trash materials in order to reinvest them with an aesthetic purpose takes a deeper significance when the metaphorization of the footage’s content is analyzed. Horror turns into beauty. Visual leitmotivs such as naked women, missiles, atomic mushrooms, planes, crashing cars, explosions, etc., experience such an aesthetic shift. Pictures of horror, through editing rearrangement, become beautified. For this reason, the film with the crashing planes, the men free-falling out of the sky, the malaria children squirming, the bombs exploding ends up resembling Leni Riefenstalh’s compelling and mesmerizing images of the Olympia’s Diving sequence. In the case of Rienfenstalh, the beautiful pictures disguised an underlying horror. The image of an atomic mushroom carries a similarly ambiguous aura, the explosion’s consequences are dreadful, but the explosion itself is a beautified spectacle. In this instance, the emotional fascination is in the visual medium itself. Trash becomes emblematic of the beautification of the violence from which it results.

Although the use of waste mirrors the corruptive aspect of the narrative process, it also shows that this corrupted process works two ways. Indeed, the film suggests that behind the annihilation and self-annihilation of the artist, the viewer, or the mass, lays an alternative. The sacrificed victim is capable of beautiful accomplishments, even in the face of complete despair and hopelessness. Of course this beautification is not real, merely the product of the visual medium’s pervading effect. McLuhan underscores the problem: “Artifact and image are not intended to train perception or awareness but to insist that we merge with them as if part of the environment,” (McLuhan p342.) Removing the images from their environment exposes the images’ diegesis, which in turn alters our outlook and expectations about the environment. The great dream of self-emancipation through Reason disintegrates at this stage. In a Nietzschian sense, the apparent morbid, anxiety-driven, satisfaction derived from viewing oneself being destroyed or destroying endorses the presence and the ruling of the irrational. The artist gets a chance to watch the mechanism of violence at work. The violence contained in a Movie is estheticized only because the medium has been previously estheticized. What matters is no longer the story itself, the product, but how the artist narrates and puts it on display. This is why A Movie is an important film. It can only stand halfway between an anaesthetic and anti-aesthetic arts. It has none of the Pop art focus on the product; the product acquires its own life once created.  A Movie constantly relies on the existence of medium, because the medium is part of the artistic statement.

Part of A Movie’s greatness lies at the depth of this caustic reflexive nature. The film already shows (at the end of the Fifties) a strong commitment to postmodern principles. The film underlines, on the one hand, that technology is an integral part of the artistic production, and, on the other, that the emotionally based process of production is more important than the product itself.  As Wooster observes:

Conner’s work illustrates how completely film and now television have become part of the substances of our conscious and unconscious, producing work that is self-reflexive of the medium (film about film or television about television), and uses images culled from these sources to describes the artist’s emotions.

(Wooster p206).

Conner is then trapped in a vicious cycle where creating an art object defeats its own purpose. Any ideological attempt transmutes into an aesthetic metaphor. If the artist is a result of society’s refuse (even though the medium allows him to mythologize, fictionalize himself) the artist only comes alive during the process of creation. Given that technology is an extension of our physiology, the medium estheticizes the visibility of violence and its process.

The importance of pop culture footage, and especially of iconography within the film, emerges as the duality between collective and personal identification is examined.  A Movie’s found footage questions the archetypal effluvia of pulp icons. There are four recognizable characters in the short film, T. Roosevelt, Marilyn Monroe, Mussolini, and King George VI ascending the throne of England. These icons problematize Conner’s artistic discourse. They correspond to the narration of official History. To view them inserted within the film’s violent frame, being sanctified or killed, strengthens the meta-narratives. They represent long lasting establishments of our civilization, religious oligarchy, fascism, and capitalist democracy. These representations, however, reinforce the emotional fascination, in the religious sense, of the mysterious aura with which these personalities are endowed. Simon underscores this dichotomy. Conner appears to toy with “the misrecognotion and substitution of the body,” and focuses his “attention on the generic aspects of celebrity, on the paradoxical construction of the star as unique and yet mass produced,” (Simon p134). Although Simon asserts that, in A Movie, Conner mocks “ the declaration of authorship by repeating his name and setting it alongside found footage,” (idem) the process in a paradigmatic reading remains highly ambiguous, for the very opposite is also true. His identity is defined through the Mass. The fear of being swallowed and disappearing into the mass produced violence incites the filmmaker to brand his name along side distinguishable personalities.

Conner is in fact asserting and reclaiming his own iconography. He becomes a mass produced entity in the film while remaining the artist struggling to assert his own voice in a medium that drowns it out each time the film is played back. Conner commodifies himself. At the heart of Conner’s name’s lengthy over-exposition lays an authorial intent to reclaim a voice estranged from the anonymous mass. Conner associates himself, in classical warholian narcissism, with famous people. The medium allows Conner to achieve visibility. Without it he would disappear once again. By juxtaposing his name along side historical icons, Conner turns himself into an icon, a creator, a victim of collective sacrifice, and even, a messiah of apocalypse.

Furthermore, the absence of a proper hero in the film forces an ontological debate in the filmic representation of the found footage. Since the absence of hero, of main character, equals the disappearance of a personal voice, personal existence lacks validation. The found objects, along with the popular icons, become endowed with fetishism. The invalidated filmmaker creates a retributive process through which he can fetishize himself by associating himself with the found object. Each time the film is shown, the artist is discovered from the diluvial and drowning media production. If History can afford to place icons in the trash, so can the artist view himself redeemed in the fetishization of his own death. [4]  By imposing his name alongside the film, the artist is also sacrificed in the beautification of his own death.

Once again, Conner transforms the narcissistic nature of the film into the fetishism of self-reflection. By rescuing the footage from destruction, the artist secretly harbors a desire to be rescued. Watching his own destruction on the screen, he is left only with the spectacle of this possibility, as in the end of the film, with the diver swimming inside the hull, suggests that there is no fetishization without myth or mystery. In a post-apocalyptic world where the God able to save humanities has disappeared, destroyed in the destruction of his/her own myth, A Movie appears to state that we are left with the sole option of transforming ourselves into the new God. Duncan, who proclaims that Conner bypasses the pieties of postmodern thinking, because with “extraordinary subtlety and sophistication, [Conner] rekindles old-fashioned mysteries,” (Duncan p134), also observes that A Movie duplicates the genesis and the apocalypse exhibited in religious iconographies and in worn-out biblical scenes. Christianity appeals to Conner as an elaborate mystery. “There is always a conundrum, a mystery and hocus-pocus in an established religion. Is it much different watching a professional magician as opposed to a priest presenting the Host, and saying “This is the flesh of Christ and blood of Christ . . . EAT AND DRINK IT?” (Conner quoted in Duncan p134). Here, narcissistic characteristic translates into the metamorphosis of the magician, the filmmaker, into the high priest of mankind. In the interview, Conner betrays enigmatic and shamanic aims about his authorial intention in making A Movie when he asserts to have intended to create a universal film (Conner quoted in Atkinson p78). [5]  Watching his name heading the entire film allows Conner to save himself and to act as a savior.

This belief, needless to say, reflects the fear of destruction and personal disappearance when historical settings come invading, annihilating, or threatening the private world. When the phenomenology of the individual, lost in the collective history, is reflected in the work of art, the artist is left stranded in his quest for self-definition. Whose history must he, as an individual, account for? The role of the historical context in which the film was created must be taken into consideration. Antinomical perspectives are intermingled. The unsettled political climate in the aftermath of WWII destabilized the individual. The lack of a clear sense of identity is echoed in the depiction of conflicts and scourges. Yet, the film’s footage sways between balance and disorientation. The footage assumes a worldly perspective, whereas the medium creates the illusion of absolutism. The worldly perspective embraces the apocryphal representation of reality, a world of verisimilitude and fiction originating from the recycled production of one man. No one in the world lives with the absoluteness of a global perspective. Daily lives are confined to regional and local habits (what Bakhtin calls the prosaics). The world’s totality is not experienced in daily life; this totality is only experienced in the fictionalized rendition of our daily reality. Mass media reinforces this imagined vision of the totality by way of intense dissemination. Needless to say, this historical vision is the product of hegemonic discourses of power, as well as our propensity for self-delusion. A Movie recapitulates this ambivalent aberration. The purpose of the film may be purely innocent and non-didactic. Its consequences, however, are reflected in the shaping and depiction of its reality. Indeed, the footage, testimonies of the collective past, encloses the individual in a collective past and creates a duplicity that negates the possibility for an independent and local present (gesellschaft).

So too, Conner consolidates the mysterious tension by suppressing language. There is something disturbing about watching violent images without original sound, watching iconic celebrities such as T. Roosevelt speaking without sound. The film does not contain any form of phonemic language. Respighi’s symphony replaces it. Make-belief becomes the primary mode of compensation for the viewers. They have to tune into the musical moods. In this context, language itself appears as a threat to the individual. The silence of the politician emphasizes the seductive power of visual and verbal discourses over the collective and community, the one of gemeinschaft. But Conner goes a step farther. The absence of language is explicit because language also negates one’s personal experience. Indeed, the formulation of one’s experiences brings about the old philosophical debate as to the inner impossibility of accordance. How does one survive independently when languages, universal in nature, do not reflect personal experience? Whether communal or individual, we all share the same language. This question equates the very stuff of historical writing, which A Movie depicts in the most abrasive fashion.

Here, both enclosures, historical and linguistic, raise suspicions about the true nature and structure of societies and individual will. The absence of language enhances Conner’s name and its relation to culture. Where Conner stands, when a mass media culture silences him or substitutes his voice within a globalizing discourse (how the artist, the viewers, define themselves), are questions which underscore the potent threat of the emerging society of the late Fifties. This was a society that permeated and was radically transforming all aspects of local community and personal lives. The absence of language makes the film universal while duplicating the universality of the mass media, but with the advantage that through silence, the film ‘s aura of mystery is preserved and heightened, while its violence is made more apparent. The universal film transcends its moments and violence becomes is agent.

The discourse of violence takes full maturity at this stage. The silent narrative device emphasizes the images’ diegesis. The intertextual quality of found footage (with all the images relating to real events from sociological or historical stocks) undermines the assumptions underlying the traditional historicity of Western culture’s inherent mythologies.[6]

The universal film epitomizes, therefore, the inherent nostalgia existing at the core of Conner’s jocular work. The film becomes humanity’s film because the individual accounts for nothing. The fragmented footage impedes us from grasping a perfect reflection of a unified self. As a result, the narcissistic self’s longing for a subduing reflection remains, over and over again, unfulfilled, vainly carrying on a search for proper identification.  It is this unfulfilled condition that lies at the root of violence and its continuum. It suppresses an author who can only refract the image of the world encompassing him, while promoting the creator’s self-delusion by giving him the impression that he has a perfect grasp on history’s totality. Within such an environment, we are left without a possible clear meta-reflection and have to opt for the safety of self-entrenchment or the confusion of kaleidoscopic inferences. This idea is reflected in Atkinson’s remarks which invests the work with postmodern credit: “It’s Postmodernism incarnated: found footage cannot help but inherently address the manner and relevance of visual representation, and its own scavenged nature,” (Atkinson p78). It is this constant absence of self-reflection, the lack of a collective and unified reflection, that fuels the estheticization of the discourse of violence. Faced with the emptiness of meaning in the present, we nostalgically look toward the past to unveil answers and, in the process, indulge in a sort of unabashed revisionism of history and oneself, a nostalgic imperative. While the “Quest for identity, (…) always produces violence,” (McLuhan p4), the medium allows us to remodel an ideal, whether imagined or deluded, representation of oneself.

* * * *

This lengthy discussion and analysis of Conner’s formal strategy for the representation of violence in A Movie allows me to eschew another one on Report. Indeed, many of the techniques found in A Movie are echoed in Report. Still, what makes Report worth investigating is its complexity in representing violence. Conner appears to go a step further than he does in A Movie. The film deals with a real event, the assassination of President Kennedy. Conner gives an uncanny account of the portrayal of the slaying. While I have talked a lot about the threat to the individual, the Cold War era, the status and place of the estranged artist in society, the assassination theme gains amplitude in Conner’s case. The subject of assassination bespeaks the murdering of the artist and individual. In Report, Conner investigates how the media fabricates heroes and icons to further its own ends, which results in a decontextualization of the death of the murdered president. Indeed, in Report, Conner does not only give his version of the event but also criticizes harshly the media’s use of the medium, for narrating the event.

The subject of assassination still preoccupies Conner to the present day. In addition to the eight versions of Report, so far produced, Michael Duncan reports that Conner also has a film entitled Television Assassination (1963-1995). The film was part of a unique retrospective devoted to Conner’s works at the Walker Art Center.[7]  The fourteen-minute film “deconstructs footage of the Kennedy assassination. (…) Through stutterlike editing of the key sequences, Conner creates a disturbing, numbing account of the traumatic event—and the media’s crass collusion in the madness,” (Duncan p134). The film consists of an 8mm looped footage of the murdering of Lee Harvey Oswald, filmed straight off a TV screen and projected onto a white screen. Television Assassination, like Report, underscores the disillusion Conner must have felt after Kennedy and Oswald’s deaths. Both films make a daring ideological statement with their elaborate cinematic assemblage set against a corrupted media.

The subject of iconography in films provides a starting point from which we can delve into a discussion of the work. At the time of his death, on Nov 22, 1963, in Dallas, John Fitzgerald Kennedy was an extremely popular president (credited with having won the presidential election because he was better looking on television than Nixon during the presidential debate. Nixon though is known to have better performed for the audience listening on the radio). This anecdote emphasizes the power of the visual media, and television especially. Whether or not the media helped Kennedy to further his ambitions, one thing that remains certain is that the media capitalized on his death and elevated him to the status of the mythological hero. Conner’s version parodies the event, initiating with tragedy, growing into mourning, and concluding in utter confusion. Yet, far from being serious, he mocks the eidetic quality of the media reconstruction of the assassination. His version of the violent event condemns the role and ends of the media, capitalizing on the event in order to once again legitimize its own survival, power, purpose, and vision of excess. Report shows that Kennedy’s murder had in fact become a ritualized media event.

Indeed, Conner attacks the credibility of the Media, and specifically those manipulation that give the eidetic appearance of establishing truth, while in truth seeking to package the man’s death. The filmmaker rejects this hypocrisy. Conner’s goal was to gather popular images that permeate the unconscious in order to better expose them. It is no surprise that Conner ‘s rendition of the assassination differs from others’ and is what won him a reputation for bad taste. As Grindon remarks, avant-garde filmmakers resemble the irrational Dadaists: “by transforming their mode of expression into unacceptable activities, they expressed their ferocious discontent,” (Grindon p 32). Conner leaves the viewers perturbed, ecstatic, or lost. Overall, the film is endowed with cynicism, sardonicism, and nostalgia. Conner explains:

The problem in making the film was that in order for me to do the film, I would have to go through the same processes that these people were using to exploit Kennedy.  If the film was completed then he was dead as they had made him and so it took me two and a half years to finish the film.  That has something to do with why it changed.  Part of the reason why it changed was I didn’t want to stop the changes . . . like life is change and when Report was finished then he was dead.

(Conner p18).

A grant from the Ford Foundation made the completion of the film possible. Conner was able to access classified footage from a News Parade compilation reel. The title Report adds ambiguity to the film. On the one hand, we have the report of the gun-shot that lasts less than a second, and then, the film about the event that will go on living forever. The film is composed of two parts radically different in tone and style.  The first one consists of a macabre and tragic litany over the murdering of Kennedy, the second a mockery of media and its claim to reconstruct the tragedy. Part one’s controlled tone contrasts with part two which progresses towards confusion. The film has a cyclic quality. Part one, the murdering of the president, precedes part two, his arrival in Dallas, the inaugural procession, and the Washington funeral. Part two is disruptive, ironic, and caustic.

The film contains the complex duality of a minimal inserted loop combined with a rapid montage. The first part of the film functions primarily through repetition. It exploits the minimalist montage. Five distinctive scenes stand out: the motorcade driving by with JFK’s waving hand and Jackie smiling; Jackie opening the hearse-looking ambulance door; a white screen with a stroboscopic light, pulsing with various degrees of gray shade; the gun on displayed at the police station; and a long loop of Academy leaders.

Right from the start, Conner rejects the eventfulness of the assassination subject, the fact that the event has a precise beginning, outcome, and resolution. As previously mentioned, the film works by expansion.  Not only are we no longer with a film made mainly from footage amalgamated from disparate events and sources, but also, Conner has moved away from his eisensteinian “fast cut” technique, where images are juxtaposed against an uninterrupted soundtrack. Sound plays a major part in the shaping of the film’s tone. Unlike in A Movie where the musical soundtrack merely coerces the moods, Report’s soundtrack provokes both emotional and detached reactions. The crippling tragedy is contrasted with a commentary encouraging dissociation with the images.

The soundtrack consists of a news broadcast of the passing motorcade narrated by a hoarse reporter. Conner creates disjunctures. The track is locked in present time while the pictures undergo repetitions, and ironic juxtapositions, which strengthen the mode of temporal disjunction. The sound track is split in two. Like in A Movie, the images and frames have been laid out on a pre-existing soundtrack. What happens before the shooting also comes after the death of the President, in part two. The sound, nonetheless, remains linear within each segment and acts as their foundations. In the first segment, the voice-over of a newscaster commenting on the killing, accompanied by the eyewitness testifying that gunshots have occurred and giving the description of one of the potential killers (Lee Harvey Oswald?) coaxes a strong emotional response.

Thus in the first part, Conner attempts to recapture the feeling of tragedy.  The film starts before the shooting. The film opens with the motorcade driving by. The Title “Report” appears. The sound is delayed, and when it comes through the speaker it sounds like a conflagration. The newscaster announces that millions of people are waiting for the president to drive by. The motorcade scene is repeated over and over again. There is a reverse insertion of the image of the car as if the filmmaker has been careless or awkward. The disturbing repeated images during part one forces us to focus on the soundtrack. Trivial comments explain the efficiency of the Secret Service, the beaming First Lady, the radiant President. The scene is repeated until the act has been committed. At this stage, the images flicker on the screen, giving the impression that the film is skipping, coming out of the sprockets that hold it in place. Head, Finish, chunks of scratched leaders, and pockmarked surfaces, are replaced with a flickering white screen with a gray shade in the middle. The commentator struggles to make meaning of the situation. He hesitates to describe what is happening. The pulse of the stroboscopic light increases as the reporter grows more and more agitated, inferring the scope of the disaster.

The disparate images of the first segment, the looped images, the strobe-light white screen (reminiscent of the Op Art’s emphasis on retinal stimulation), and the Academy leader, give us the sensation that, far from disconnecting the viewers, Conner wants to encourage reflection about the event and to experience the news as if it had just happened. For example, by staring at the flickering light, one has the sense of seeing a network of neurons. Small, shiny, phosphorescent lightning-shape ramifications waver within an oval shape, reminiscent of a brain. Perhaps this is Conner’s intentional hint at the president’s wounded brain and/or the viewers’ brains being the victim of the media machine. “Something terribly wrong has happened,” reports the confused newscaster. “Severe gunshot wounds. Stand by. Stand please. Something has happened.” Conner spares no one in heightening the emotional impact of the tragedy. Even if the viewers look away, they are forced to deal with the intense audio testimony.

When it becomes obvious that the President has been seriously wounded, the screen is covered with a gray shade. The flickering light of white and gray surfaces symbolizes the dying victim. As the eyewitness describes the circumstances, Kennedy reappears on the screen, waving his hand again, smiling. Strong discomfort results. The reporter telling us what sort of weapons the police are carrying is contrasted with images of the gun in the police station. The images of the convertible Limousine driving by with the First Lady smiling, and those of the gun displayed at the police station, mimic the aggressive flicker of the strobe-light. Looped Academy leaders succeed. All the articles read about the role of looped Academic leaders referred to the president’s dying heartbeat. The loop is repeated twenty-three times, from ten to three, hitting the number 3 each time the reporter mention the president’s death. The number of loops could also refer to the 23^rd of Nov, 1963, as shown in the second part. As the reporter’s voice announces that Father Oscar Huber has administered the last rite of the Catholic Church, the emotional involvement is unavoidable. “It is official, the President is dead.” The reporter reports that tears are streaming down the faces of men. “President Kennedy has been assassinated.” Silence follows, with only the Academy leader continuing to loop. After being repeated so many times, the Academy leaders create a lethargic and deadening effect.

Grindon claims that Conner allows an open space in which one can retrieve an appropriate personal response (Grindon p39). Conner capitalizes on the feeling experienced at the moment of the murder rather than submitting the viewers to a false and deficient reconstitution of the event. The academy leaders strengthen this point. They also create a sense of anticipation because the president has not died yet. The anticipation whets our appetite. We want something to happen. We expect an outcome. The viewers are hooked to the countdown process, hoping that after the countdown something will appear. Nothing appears. The film echoes death at this point. It is the death of the media subversion. Time and space have been eradicated so that the physicality of the images also disappears. The reporter falls silent while the Academy leader continues to run, and we are left stranded with our own thoughts.

In part two, Conner no longer attempts to coax the viewers into an emotional recollection. Conner has no interest in using the images to advance the investigation.  This is where Conner’s warning against the abuse of the media comes to life. As Simon remarks, “the film is structured as a critique of dominant groups and their organization and use of the assassination,” (Simon p141). Conner was more interested in intervening to expose the commercial exploitation of the murder he saw the media manufacturing. His intervention aimed at preserving a sense of mystery around the assassination so that the images would not be removed from their context.

In part two, the images no longer correspond to the newscaster’s voice.  Instead, Conner subverts the voice-over with disjuncted insertions, mimicking a possible interpretation of the event. He imbues the aural descriptions with visual effluvia of diverse origins and time, which give the film a tone of pending disaster. “Report accuses the media of being an obstacle to information necessary for understanding the murder,” (Grindon p 40).  The questionable the veil of the truth, practiced by shadowy power, is explicit with the footage of the pope, the corrida, The Bride of Frankenstein, and the computer secretary, for example, which seek to ridicule the reconstruction.

But it is the newscaster’s voice that makes part two a bitter criticism of the commercialization and ritualization of Kennedy’s killing. The editing pace increases and the tone, far from the tragic beginning, becomes derisive and playful. Conner contrasts every comment the newscaster narrates with humorous images, endowing the second part with a strong ideological tone. Examples abound: the reporter announcing the perfect weather is superposed with a nuclear explosion; talks about police restraining the crowd shows WWI soldiers fighting in trenches; the dying bull is matched with the reporter talking about JFK’s steak dinner; the door of a fridge opens as the voice-over reports on the doors of the police car flying open, etc. Conner does not spare the viewers with his visual diatribes.

The concept of murder as a blood-sport spectacle is also rampant during the second part. The bleeding bull and cheering public give the murdering an ecstatic quality. The matador poses as a legitimate form of an acceptable ritualized killing. Part two opens with a picador on horseback, swaying back and forth, as if the horse was drunk. Troupes are marching, following the president’s hearse. But President Kennedy is once again alive, coming out of Air Force 1 and meeting with the Catholic Pope Pie 23rd. Most likely, there exists a link between the juxtaposition of these images. Bullfighting being highly catholic sport survives and thrives on death rituals, like the Catholic Church which capitalizes on the painful death of Jesus Christ along with his martyrdom. The Juxtaposition of the dead president and the ancient arena dress the segment with entertainment value. Several toreros receive blessings before fighting and executing the bull. People clap, cheer, and become excited at the prospect of putting the beast to death. The bull collapses to its knees after the coup de grace has been inflicted, blood spurting out of its body. The toreador’s happy and smiling face underscores the dissociation between the blood ritual and the animal’s suffering.

Conner makes the link between the spectacle of death and the media’s commercial machine. The sequence is followed by a telegraph pole, and by people watching an old newscast reel. “… materialistic elements in society have ritually slain the hero.” (Grindon p41.) We hear the voice of distraught witnesses on the audio track as the public in the arena waves handkerchiefs and pays tribute to the toreadors. The hearse moves backwards, in negative form. Lee Harvey gets shot. Conner uses a freeze frame of the killed man’s contorted face with his killer, Jack Ruby. This brief scene is followed by an insert of the “House where Lincoln died,” clearly stipulating that ritualized killing has happened before and will happen again.

            The tragic deformation of the event is contrasted with the newscaster’s trivial commentary. The reporter describes how Kennedy is wearing a dark suit, while Jackie, a bright pink suit, which matches the roses she is receiving. A close-up of a bouquet of roses is inserted. The fashion descriptions match the matadors’ tinseling attires. Rees speculates that the film, with its increasingly jumbled montage, and random synchronization, is perhaps a larger metaphor for the event described (Rees p319). This disjunctive technique aims at confusing and criticizing the Media, best portrayed by the reporter’s empty and superficial comments on Jackie’s garments and the president’s eating habits, which do not fit the setting. The innocent commentaries contrast with the pending disaster. The screen is flooded with an abrupt transition of diverse footage.

The reporter then goes on to give the trajectory of the presidential Limousine. “The car starts moving.” We see the hearse driving down Washington Avenue. “The President has left.” Then the soap bubble explodes. JFK is dead in a casket.  But the reporter continues to say that he is walking. The hearse moves backward in negative. “President is crossing fences, shaking hands.” The Book Depository building where the gunshots have occurred is seen upside down. The police look up, searching for a suspect. The Limousine passes once again with JFK waving his hand and Jackie smiling. The intro scene is played over and over again, but with a slight delay. Each time it is repeated, the sequence starts from a later point and lasts a little bit longer. The film progresses with the car moving towards the camera. The car passes in front of the camera and, finally, moves away from the camera. We already infer the passengers’ outcome. The emphasis on this ominous repetition endows the sequence with bitter discomfort.

Despite its sardonic tone, Report comes also across as a nostalgic tribute. Repetitions insist on the nostalgic aspect of the tragedy. Through the countless passing of the Limousine, Conner exudes a desire to transgress the truth and to prevent it from happening. Frames are removed as the car passes. Eventually the car passes by with the inevitable feeling that the murder will happen. Regardless of our attempt to stop time, the President has to meet his destiny.

Furthermore, the repetition of the images encourages the sounding of truth, as if with each new passing, the images would yield a new clue, something unseen before. Hence the close-up and slow motion of the bullet piercing the bulb, the needle blowing the soap bubble. The camera may be able to reveal something that the eye cannot see, something new about the sad tragedy that awaits on Dealey Plaza. [8]  The images of the swimmer diving in reverse carry similar urgency. The swimmer has already dived but the technology allows him to fly backward onto the diving board, to undo the action. These short scenes bespeak a need to get near a truth and to erase the historical murder. The power of the images at normal speed greatly undermined reality. Along with reversed and repeated scenes, the slow motion endows part two with nostalgia.

In Report, Conner also attacks false patriotism and its established clichés. The representation of the media’s subliminal power is portrayed through numerous hints. A zoom-in on the Statue of liberty reminds the viewers of what the landmark stands for. But the most radical and overwhelming attacks are the snippets from The Bride of Frankenstein. The professor’s crazed look (reminiscent of the sadistic expression of the man staring out of the window in Dali’ Un Chien Andalou) as he stares at Kennedy’s casket covered with an American flag, while the apparatus belches out sparks and lightning, points out to the myth making process. Violence becomes the focus of attention. We know ahead that the doctor gives birth to a monster. Conner’s subversive montage questions the magic of media construction: how Kennedy is used to solace a nation while at the same time the media uses him to disseminate its products. The film is sprinkled with old commercials to illustrate this point: a Tappan fridge along with a beautiful model, the logo of diverse brands, “S.O.S” pads, “WISH” soap flakes. Again, science and technology can resurrect the dead body, can fabricate machine to resuscitate dead corpses, but their illusory intents betray other aims. Death is veneered and veiled with the aura of a commercial spectacle.

 “Events are transformed into comfortable symbols—the Kennedy’s smile, the hero funeral, the mourning wife—and develop political iconography that explains the murder as patriotic martyrdom while smothering troubling questions and probing doubts.”  (Grindon p43).

Business is also greatly emphasized in the film’s second part.  The newscaster talks about the Kennedy’s arrival at the Trade Mart, suggesting the business drive of the media and the affiliation between politics and business. The media machine is in place. There is a dissolve over a frame of several telegraph poles and workers. One of the workers plants an unfurled American flag on top of a pole. But of all the hints, the IBM secretary represents the most dangerous one. She is the member of the business cast. She incarnates the deceitful aura of the media, the beauty and appeal of the medium. She is attractive, innocent, enticing, and has the power to push a “Sell” button to sell her products. The film concludes with a zoom-in to a close-up size shot of the secretary’s fingers pushing the “sell” button.

Because of its circular construction, tragic at the beginning and sarcastic and cynical at the end, Conner created a polemical film. The viewers become increasingly uncertain about the outcome of the event. Conner manages to use the medium against itself in order to expose its subconscious decontextualization. Report provokes the audience and mocks the media. At the end, Conner manages to never kill JFK. The viewers are enticed to watch the film again to infer their own construct.

* * * *

This thesis has dealt with Bruce Conner’s works, A Movie and Report, and their esthetization of violence. By first showing Conner’s artistic background, I have shown how A Movie represents a major artistic development at the time of its conception, mainly for its fusion of life and art. Through the incorporation of the filmic medium and found footage in his artistic approach, Conner facilitates the effacement of boundaries between low and high art. The thesis proceeds to demonstrate how A Movie bears all the premature signs of a postmodern aesthetics. By tackling the definition of violence, the analysis of the footage’s content, the major importance of metaphors, and the underlying structure of the medium (such as sacrifice, reflexivity, the idea of spectacle, the commodification of the art objects, as well as the embedded irony), I have shown how through the medium the film’s violence contributed to its estheticization.

Finally, I have showed how in Report Conner questions the medium by separating the aural and visual recording, making thus a sharp satirical and disparaging statement about the commercialization of the JFK assassination.  Unlike with A Movie, in Report, Conner makes a direct attack on the corruptive process of the fabrication of truth. His aim is to delve below the consciousness in order to rescue the viewers from the easy and seductive manufacturing of myths. The film forces the viewers to question their own understanding of JFK’s assassination. The film shows that truth is not singular and that the representation of violence bespeaks of its own seductive power. As Moritz has clearly inferred, after a thorough scrutiny of Conner’s film output, Conner appears as a humanist. “His work functions as a warning system, sensitizing us through his brilliant use of manipulated found footage, to the nature of public media’s entropic vision,” (Moritz p39).

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