User Reviews

The music gives all the power to this scrapheap of footage. The footage is dumb and represents no meaningful connections or contrasts, except to the extent that you, the viewer, project into it like a rorschach inkblot, in which case you, the viewer, deserves credit for its "brilliance" (the brilliance of your own associations) - not Bruce Conner. Conner had no hand in controlling the associations people create in the footage. He followed no rationale, principle, method, theory, etc. Therefore, a gust of wind blowing film stock into a pile of fragments deserves as much credit for "directing" or "authoring" the meaning. You might as well remove his name from the film entirely and replace it with one word: "Arbitrary." Or sell the musical score by itself as a profoundly haunting composition. All praise to the composer of the music. None to Bruce Conner.

I've seen a tape with a dozen of Bruce Conner's experimental "music-clips" and this one captured me most. Its slow somnambulic rhythm, its animalistic jungle sounds as well as the eerily mixed images create a dream mood that comes closest to my actual dreaming-feeling. The long black phases between the sequences are as important as the images themselves because they leave empty space where the "echo" of the last image can seep through without interfering with the following image. But our logical mind still somehow feels compelled to construe some kind of sense, parallel, or some erratic story out of it. Surrealist or Dadaist have also tried similar things (Le chien andaluz, ballet automatique) and some of David Lynch's films (Lost Highway, Eraserhead) also have a similar atmosphere, but this one is my favorite dream clip (but sadly only a few minutes long, but doesn't every dream end too early?)