Bruce Conner's A MOVIE is a 1958 experimental visual collage film made up of snippets of found footage, carefully selected from archives, short film, newsreels, B-movies, soft-core pornography and other sources, all conscientiously cut to a musical score featuring Respighi's Pines of Rome. Conner was known as a farceur who overturned Hollywood cinema's conventions, Conner's successful combination dramatic flash frames and a soaring audio of the opening sequence, tells the story of a film that is forever about to start, but refuses to do so. the 12 minute film is made up of approximately 180 different clips, in addition to sections of leaders and a number of titles. This collection of rapidly moving images is forever incomplete; the expeditious and concussive distribution of imagery makes it practically impossible for the spectator to keep up with everything passing through their vision. Due to human nature, we try to build a narrative out of the explosions, car chases, leaps into voids, as well as all kinds of other evocative images, but we can never truly piece them together to tell a story. I really like this idea of slightly hinting at a potential narrative with a miscellanea of random found footage, but not actually giving a story for the spectator to follow.
