Hailed as one of his generation’s most influential artists, Bruce Conner nevertheless has been a rather elusive figure in the world of American underground film. Overshadowed by such peers as Andy Warhol, Stan Brakhage, Kenneth Anger and Maya Deren, Conner has shunned the spotlight for decades, preferring instead to let his work in a wide range of media – printmaking, drawing, sculpture, collage, photography and film – speak for itself. Happily, a major retrospective titled 2000 BC: The Bruce Conner Story Part II, launched by Minneapolis’ Walker Art Center in 1999, finally gave him the attention he so richly deserved (even if there was no ‘Part I’ – a typical Connerian twist). This essay builds on the momentum generated by 2000 BC by focusing on the defining achievement of Conner’s career as an underground filmmaker: Report (1964–67), his highly personal meditation on the John F. Kennedy assassination. By providing a close textual reading of Report and finding its place within its historical and cultural context, I hope to show that Conner captured and critiqued the complexities of the time in a powerful and uniquely filmic way.
EARLY HISTORY AND EMERGING STYLE
Born in McPherson, Kansas in 1933 and raised in Wichita, about sixty miles away, Conner began thinking ‘outside the box’ at a very young age. His earliest teachers admired his imaginative artistic expressions, but by the time he had reached the third or fourth grade, a deadening conformity had all but enveloped his school and threatened to vitiate the youthful artist’s emergent talents.1 Chafing against the conservative values that permeated the American Midwest during World War Two and the postwar years, Conner found himself a social outcast for much of his pre-adolescence and young adulthood. ‘When I was in Wichita, if you were even interested in poetry, classical music, art, you were called a queer, a commie, or just a jerk,’ he told interviewer Peter Boswell.2 After desultory stints as an art student at the Universities of Wichita, Nebraska, and Colorado, Conner decided on a new course of action; frustrated by the general conformist spirit of the times and the escalating rhetoric of the Cold War, he moved to San Francisco in 1957 in the hope of linking up with peers who shared his views on art and politics.
It proved a momentous decision, for Conner almost immediately became associated with that city’s celebrated art and literary scene, a renaissance dominated by such avant-garde figures as Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Robert Duncan, Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg. Conner’s artistic career quickly attracted serious attention, with his earliest successes taking the form of intricate sculptural assemblages consisting of ‘found’ items such as bicycle parts, broken toys and women’s undergarments. When he branched out into filmmaking in 1958 (beginning with the singularly titled A Movie), Conner discovered that his ideas about assemblage could cross media lines with relative ease. He had established the conceptual foundation for a decidedly different kind of film.
FILMIC FRAGMENTATION
Conner has proven to have few equals when it comes to creating films that intentionally destroy the illusion of reality commonly found in mainstream movies. His signature style, developed over a period of about forty years, is an extension of his sculptural techniques; he combines ‘found’ or ‘discovered’ fragments of other people’s films (sometimes with his own original footage mixed in, sometimes not) to create new cinematic entities. The juxtapositions created in these compilation films are frequently unexpected and startling, often leading to what critic Carl Belz has called ‘a combination of grim satire and morbid irony’.3
In the process of reworking footage from such items as cartoons, television commercials, old Hollywood movies and newsreels, Conner has gone out of his way to include recognisable emotive or associative concepts, which he then isolates from any former frames of reference. When these concepts are edited together as a montage and exhibited on the screen in his trademark rapid fashion, a new structural relationship emerges and offers many interesting effects. As Brian O’Doherty has pointed out, these re-edited images often engage the spectator’s imagination in an unusual and provocative manner; they ‘send the mind pinwheeling out of the movie on a tangent while the next sequence is also demanding attention – a very new kind of split-level effect the way Conner does it.’4
In addition to altering the values of his found imagery, Conner has used such unusual material as Academy leader (the ‘10-9-8-7…’ that begins every film but is usually for the projectionist’s benefit only) and sequences of solid black or solid white frames in which the screen appears to go blank. He has also frequently employed the process of ‘looping’ (i.e. repeating) the same shots until they seem more film than reality. By incorporating all of these special images and techniques, Conner effectively exposes film (if you pardon the pun) for what it is: a medium, not reality. We, the audience, are constantly reminded that we are watching a movie: a representation of reality, rather than a window on it. Under Conner’s skilful editing, the various items and devices are unified in purposeful and concentrated efforts.
A PRODUCTION HISTORY OF ‘REPORT’
Report is an outstanding example of this general approach, but ironically Conner, who threw himself into the project within days of Kennedy’s death, originally wanted the film to be an extended piece of fairly straightforward reportage. At the time of the assassination, Conner happened to be living in Brookline, Massachusetts – JFK’s birthplace – and intended to make a documentary about the impact of the assassination on the presidential hometown. ‘I lived seven blocks from where he was born,’ he said. ‘I decided then that I would dedicate myself to recording what had happened and what would happen in Brookline because he was going to be buried there and I would live there for the next two or three years to work on that film and make a pilgrimage to the grave every day with my camera and show what had happened.’5 The Kennedy family decided to bury JFK in Arlington National Cemetery instead of Brookline, however, forcing the filmmaker to change his plans.
Conner received an experimental-film grant from the Ford Foundation in 1964 and, reconceiving his film, decided to use part of the Ford money to acquire the rights to assassination-related television imagery. He had to rethink Report yet again, though, after the networks refused to cooperate. As he told interviewer Robert Haller:
I went to CBS and NBC and tried to get footage out of the day he was shot, and they didn’t want to give anything to me. They wanted to have a script first (this was the material from the four minutes after he was killed). They were very up-tight and paranoiac. They wanted a script and they kept shoving me from office to office until I finally figured out they just didn’t want to have me using the film, or seeing it, or having anything to do with it.… So, I ended up making Report [by] getting parts of films that were available to the public, a year later.6
What resulted was no less than eight different versions of Report, which, in Conner’s words, came out ‘one after the other. I would take a print and then I would take the footage and change it and I would make another print.’ Confessing that he was ‘obsessed’ with the project and did not want to let go for fear that Kennedy would truly be ‘dead’ for him once he finished, the filmmaker produced the eight Reports from 1964 until 1967, eventually settling on the eighth version as his final and disposing of the other copies. For Conner, completing the film meant finally coming to terms with Kennedy’s death: ‘When Report was finished then he was dead, so it took two and a half years for me to acknowledge that he was dead.’7
The final version of Report, which built on the others and runs 13 minutes, emerged as a strange hybrid of Conner’s creative impulses; the film was and is partly a documentary, but it also follows the lead of his earlier films by relying heavily on re-edited excerpts from newsreels, old Hollywood movies and television ads to provide poignant commentary on the JFK assassination and US society in general. It is a documentary with a difference, as Roy Huss and Norman Silverstein observed shortly after the film’s release:
Documentarists always engage in such manipulation (i.e. juxtaposition), but Conner here creates a new kind of documentary by means of rapid cutting and crosscutting, nonsynchronous sound, disrupted time order, repeated segments of action, and reversed motion. The assassination of President Kennedy is, to be sure, ‘reported’, through authentic footage of the motorcade and a tape of the radio coverage of those confused events. However, Conner entirely reshapes this material to bring out its essence.8
Conner has rejected surrealism as a label for his work – ‘I don’t think I’m a surrealist; I’m a realist,’ he told Mark Caywood in a 2000 interview9 – but nevertheless Report is somewhat of a surrealistic documentary in that it deals partially with actual newsreel footage and radio commentary of the event yet often jumbles the chronological order and relative synchrony of these items in a dreamlike fashion. In fact, the film on first viewing may appear to have been put together rather casually; Conner not only fractures the time order with apparent randomness but also intersperses with the JFK motorcade footage a wide variety of concepts which seem to have nothing to do with the assassination at all. On further examination, however, we find that many of these supposedly unrelated concepts either become instantly analogous to the assassination or serve as ironic statements on American society during the early 1960s.
A CLOSER LOOK
Report wastes little time getting to the actual moment of JFK’s murder. The film’s first sequence begins with a medium shot of President and Mrs Kennedy taken by a newsreel camera as their open-top limousine passes through Dallas’ Dealey Plaza. Mrs Kennedy is the nearest of the two to the camera, and her face is directly angled at it. She smiles and waves as the camera follows the limousine. She partially blocks President Kennedy from our view near the end of the shot as a result of the movements of both the car and the camera, but we can clearly see him brush his forehead – a simple gesture that soon takes on a foreboding quality in Conner’s hands.
At this point, the soundtrack comes alive with ambient motorcade noise and the voice of a radio reporter commenting on the presidential visit. This shot of the Kennedys is repeated (‘looped’) several times and the off-screen reporter says, ‘It appears as if something has happened in the motorcade route.’ A moment later, after Conner has reversed the shot in mirror-image fashion, the reporter notes that ‘there has been a shooting’.
This combination of sound and image is the first of Report’s many abrupt and contradictory juxtapositions; we see pre-assassination images but hear post-assassination commentary. Report gives us precious little time to process this aural-visual conflict, however, since it then goes off in an entirely unanticipated direction. Though the soundtrack continues to provide the radio coverage of those confused moments immediately following the shooting, Conner replaced the newsreel imagery with several minutes’ worth of ‘flicker’ footage – footage consisting entirely of frames of pure black and pure white, alternating at a stroboscopic rate to create, in Boswell’s words, ‘a rhythmic sequence that evokes the dying President’s slip from consciousness. During this sequence, the entire room in which the film is being projected becomes a flickering black-and-white environment.’10 It is a stunning segment, with its intentional ambiguity inviting a variety of responses. As Carl Belz has suggested:
The section of ‘blank’ footage occurs… just after ‘something has happened’ to the motorcade and during the chaotic and foggy moments which followed. In other words, as the ‘live’ action vanished into a veil of unknowable disorder, the visual material likewise blanks out. The newscaster’s words ‘something has happened’ then take on multiple implications. As the flashing greys persist upon the screen, people in the audience actually begin to wonder if ‘something has happened’, not only to the President, but to the film itself.11
The flickering slows and stops after a few minutes, rendering the screen opaque. The radio commentary, which up to this point has covered the unfolding events at Dealey Plaza and Parkland Hospital, switches to the Texas School Book Depository and the blankness of the screen is replaced by a looped image of an officer holding Lee Harvey Oswald’s rifle aloft. The commentary returns to the hospital, and we are shown the looped image of Mrs Kennedy unable to open the locked door of the ambulance that holds the body of her husband.
Report repeats the earlier newsreel footage of President and Mrs Kennedy in their limousine just moments before the shooting, and the accompanying soundtrack consists of various eyewitness accounts of the assassination. In yet another unanticipated strategy, Conner then inserted snippets of Academy leader to offer a seemingly endless repetition of a countdown in one-second increments that begins with the number 10 and ends at 3. Though the leader’s general image – a frame-filling circle that has both a horizontal and a vertical line intersecting it – very much resembles the crosshair pattern of a rifle’s scope, it functions mainly as a clock ticking away the seconds of the President’s life; indeed, the official death announcement on the soundtrack occurs during the Academy-leader sequence.
Though Conner has been dismissive of this first section of Report – ‘There’s no real film there,’12 he suggested – it powerfully captures the turmoil and uncertainty of the moments immediately following the assassination. Its effectiveness depends heavily, though, on the audience’s prior knowledge of the events of that day in Dallas. For example, we see JFK repeatedly brush his forehead through the looping effect, and, as we hear the assassination commentary, we begin to wonder if Conner had access to previously unscreened footage and will actually show the moment of JFK’s death from a perspective other than the one we know all too well: the one represented in the famous amateur film shot at Dealey Plaza by Zapruder. (He does, actually, but not in a traditional sense.) Similarly, Conner looped a shot of the presidential limousine as it approaches the camera, an effect that causes the vehicle to appear to snap back after it moves forward a little. The limo does make progress but only slowly and in a highly fragmented way. By looping the shot numerous times but allowing it to run a little bit longer each time (thereby enabling the vehicle to move forward but gradually and fitfully), Conner gave form to the audience’s desperate, and futile, wish to pull the President back from impending doom.
Despite this section’s highly provocative qualities, it is the second section that truly demonstrates Conner’s virtuosity as an image manipulator. It abounds with puns and ironic and satiric statements, which Conner created by editing a diverse range of appropriated images – some less than a second in length – to the banalities of the pre-assassination radio commentary. In other words, Conner cut the visual images, many of which would be meaningless outside of the context of Report, so that they would link up closely with certain phrases uttered by the announcer on the soundtrack. Indeed, the major ironies of Report arise from the juxtaposition of the announcer’s pre-assassination remarks (which have an innocently positive tone, since he is obviously unaware of what is to happen) with the harsh visual realities of the events surrounding the assassination – such as the moment when Jack Ruby shoots Oswald, a television image that was seared into the American public’s collective memory – and various outside concepts. With the awareness that the announcer’s running commentary reproduced below is about such items as President and Mrs Kennedy’s arrival at Love Field, the crowds who showed up to greet the couple, the weather at Dallas, and the security precautions taken for the presidential visit, here is a partial list of Report’s contrapuntal puns, offered in no particular order:
| Audio |
Visual |
| ‘…Air Force Jet 1…’ |
A title that reads ‘END PART 1’; ‘Jets’ breakfast cereal commercial |
| ‘…placards held high…’ |
Marching pickets |
| ‘…the doors fly open…’ |
Refrigerator doors opening; close-up of a ‘Ry-Krisp’ cracker being broken |
| ‘…a split-second timed operation…’ |
A bull gores a matador |
| ‘…nothing left to chance…’ |
Texas School Book Depository |
| ‘…a bright sun, the weather couldn’t be better…’ |
Atomic bomb ‘mushrooms’ |
| ‘…to witness the arrival of the President and his First Lady…’ |
JFK’s caisson pulled by horses |
| ‘…Just to be sure you find yourself in the proper location, we’ll give it to you once again…’ |
Jack Ruby shoots Lee Harvey Oswald |
| ‘…Mrs Kennedy has just been presented with a bouquet of beautiful red roses…’ |
Bouquet of roses on the floor of the empty presidential limousine; the word ‘TRAGEDY’ is superimposed |
| ‘…when the President stops moving, that’s when we become concerned…’ |
President’s flag-draped casket |
| ‘…the President’s steak [dinner]…’ |
A scene from a bullfight |
| ‘…tight security…’ |
WWI battle scene from All Quiet on the Western Front |
| ‘…children trying to get over the fence…’ |
WWI soldiers machine-gunned while trying to cross barbed wire (from All Quiet) |
| ‘…so [the Kennedys] can make their way downtown…’ |
JFK’s horse-drawn caisson moving through Washington DC |
| ‘…gunmetal-grey limousine…’ |
Oswald’s rifle held aloft |
| ‘…if there’s any trouble…’ |
Woman holding box of ‘S.O.S.’ pads |
| ‘…one of those impromptu moments for which the President has become known…’ |
JFK’s horse-drawn caisson moves from the Capitol |
Some of the puns are mere parodies and plays on words; others, however, are more resonant and give indications of Conner’s attitudes and opinions on the assassination and US society in general. For example, wars, weaponry and destruction, and America’s fascination with them, collectively form a key motif in Report. The film is absolutely loaded with such images, with many but by no means all appearing in the puns noted above. Among the more prominent are World War One battle scenes from the classic 1930 Hollywood movie All Quiet on the Western Front, atomic bomb ‘mushrooms’, a bullet penetrating a light bulb in extreme slow motion, armed policemen and, perhaps most conspicuously, the looped (and thereby forcefully transformed) image of an officer holding Oswald’s rifle high above his head. According to critic David Mosen, the film reflects a major American preoccupation:
In Conner’s eyes society thrives on violence, destruction, and death no matter how hard we try to hide it with immaculately clean offices, the worship of modern science, or the creation of instant martyrs. From the bullfight arena to the nuclear arena we clamor for the spectacle of destruction. The crucial link in Report is that JFK with his great PT 109 was just as much a part of the destruction game as anyone else. Losing is a big part of playing games.13
In addition to the puns, many of which seem to be transmitted at an almost subliminal rate, Report’s second section contains at least one extended ironic statement: a ‘mad doctor’ sequence. Conner lifted the scenes for this sequence from the 1935 Hollywood film Bride of Frankenstein, in which Dr Henry Frankenstein (played by the British actor Colin Clive) attempts to instill life into his latest charnel-house creation. The shots that Conner inserted into Report show the doctor throwing the switch that activates his electrical life-giving apparatuses. Significantly, Conner did not include any footage that shows the monster actually coming to life. Conner intercut still shots of JFK’s casket lying in state with these ‘mad doctor’ scenes. An important piece of commentary during this sequence is ‘When the President stops moving, that’s when we become concerned’. Moments before the sequence begins, we see the brief flash of a cartoon star with the word ‘WISH’ on it.
This last item conceivably represents a strong wish on the part of the audience to find a way to instill life back into the late President; however, the only ‘solution’ that Conner offers his audience in this dreamlike movie is the stereotypical mad doctor routine. Dr Frankenstein’s electrifying attempts at inducing life into a corpse have become clichéd after all these years and, out of the context of Report, would be funny, yet the film forces its audience to turn to the mad doctor’s techniques as its only hope. Conner shows this desire to be futile, as he did earlier with the attempt to hold back the presidential limousine through the looping process.
Several analogies emerge from the mélange of images offered by Report. Surprisingly, Conner deals with the obvious Kennedy-Lincoln comparison only briefly. (He references Abraham Lincoln in just two scenes: one of the Lincoln Memorial, and the other of a house with a large sign in front of it reading ‘House Where Lincoln Died’.) The strongest analogy within the film presents itself in a rather unusual form: a bullfight.
The bullfight sequence, a major part of Report’s second section, intriguingly matches the JFK assassination on a number of levels. Both events are preceded by scenes of huge cheering crowds. Both the bullfight and the motorcade are heavily stage-managed events, scheduled and planned out well in advance. There is the pomp of a parade in each. Both the matador and Kennedy obviously appreciate the jubilant cheers from the respective crowds that have turned out to see them (Conner reinforced this notion by inserting a shot of the matador grinning broadly and strutting before the crowd, while the radio commentary at that point, referring to Kennedy, contains the line, ‘He is walking and shaking hands’). Violence erupts against the main figure in each of the otherwise very controlled productions (i.e. the bull goring the matador, the President’s assassination). Finally, the bull is killed just moments after it has gored the matador, which compares with Oswald’s murder shortly after the assassination. Though the extended analogy ultimately breaks down (unlike the motorcade spectators, the bullfight audience expected a show that flirted with violence, and JFK certainly did not taunt Oswald the way the matador goaded the bull), the bullfight sequence is the most visually apparent comparison with the assassination in Report.
Scattered throughout the film are fragments of television commercials, and they collectively lead to another analogy: President Kennedy as a ‘packaged commodity’. Such instances include a brief segment from a ‘Jets’ breakfast cereal commercial coupled with the announcer’s description of JFK’s arrival via Air Force Jet 1, and a shot of a refrigerator’s doors magically opening (while a stylishly coiffed and dressed suburban housewife reacts in delight) combined with a further description of Kennedy’s arrival, ‘…the doors fly open…’. This concept of the President as commodity is strongly reinforced in the final scene of Report, when a woman whom we have glimpsed throughout the movie presses a button on a cash register-like machine. The camera zooms in for a close-up of the machine and reveals that the button reads ‘SELL’. This concluding image, combined with the radio reporter’s final observation that the JFK motorcade is en route to ‘the Trade Mart’, suggests that, from the media’s perspective, the President was a commodity to be sold to their audiences like anything else.
Conner’s decision to juxtapose patently commercial images against those of JFK was quite conscious on his part. In the weeks and months following the shooting, he became increasingly upset by the rampant commercialisation of the Kennedy myth. He was disturbed by what he saw as ‘all the grotesque and sacrilegious and immoral things that were done’ and the hypocritical attitudes that guided them. ‘The excuse was that it was respect for the dead and his memory and stuff,’ he lamented. ‘Jack Kennedy banks, and all sorts of memorabilia and nonsense documentaries and gooey posters.’14 Fellow underground filmmaker Stan Brakhage stated flatly that ‘the exploitation of President Kennedy’s death’ was Conner’s primary concern in Report,15 and Conner could not agree more: ‘When I started, the big problem was that I had to show what had happened: the exploitation of the man’s death [emphasis in original text]. That’s what I had to show. That’s what I wanted to show and I had to show it because nobody else was. There was tons of other information coming through the media – but this exploitation was the most obvious thing to me.’16
A central irony of Report, and one clearly not lost on Conner, is that the film could be seen as a contribution to the glut of Kennedy-inspired pop-culture artifacts that he so detested. ‘The problem in making the film was that in order for me to do the film I would also have to go through the same processes that those people were using to exploit Kennedy,’ he noted.17 Unlike ‘those people’, however, Conner created a reflexive work, one that critiques the society responsible for the very images he used to create it. In fact, Conner painted such a bleak picture of US society in this otherwise ambiguous and open-ended film that he invites us to take a considerably darker view of the ‘JFK as commodity’ concept. Conner could be seen as intimating that the assassination was brought about by a conspiracy against the President, rather than by the efforts of a lone gunman. A group of influentials may have decided to get rid of, or ‘sell’, the President, as one would do with stock holdings. Taken in this light, Report’s final scene becomes the most horrifying one in the entire film; the decision to murder the nation’s chief executive is now framed in terms of a business transaction.
FINAL THOUGHTS
Report is perhaps the most outstanding example of the many films, underground and otherwise, that utilise the contrapuntal arrangement of images and sounds to create sociological statements in the form of irony, metaphors and analogies. What makes the film special is Conner’s ability to intertwine images of fact and fiction to such an extent that a new ‘reality’ takes place. Conner shows that the images are just that: images. One might argue from a Bazinian standpoint that the images of JFK are ontologically bound to the ‘real’ JFK, but ultimately they are flickerings of light and shadow, albeit ones heavily invested with prior associations and thus ripe for artistic manipulation. Bruce Jenkins put it well when he wrote:
In Conner’s world of heroes and villains, distinctions between the real and the fictional… become inextricably merged. Cognizant that the cinema (and television) is already once-removed from reality, Conner is able to endow his icons, whether historical or imaginary, with the same force and the same substance.… The complex ideographic language he forges from bits and pieces of reality and fiction forms the basis for a [representation] about our media-bound culture that neither fiction nor reportage alone can render sufficiently.18
In so doing, Conner has bent the culture back upon itself in a highly compelling and thought-provoking way. Though the results have proven quite unsettling for some viewers,19 Report, like any exceptional work of art, has enabled others to see an aspect of their world in a totally unexpected way and, perhaps more importantly, prompted them to question it.