Bruce Conner, master of found footage cinema, is dead at 74

The legendary filmmaker-without-camera and "consummate cult artist" died last Monday at his home in San Francisco.

Conner's work beginning in the 1950s showed the way to what decades later became MTV-style video and the mashup mentality of the 21st century.

Many believe he was an artist on par with Robert Rauschenberg and Andy Warhol, yet Conner disdained promotion, at times leaving his name off his works, passing them off under the name of his friend Dennis Hopper, or promoting them at exhibits as "Works by the Late Bruce Conner."

"Breakaway," the 1966 film up top, stars Toni Basil.

Below,

his 1978 short for Devo entitled "Mongoloid."

Read his New York Times and Washington Post obituaries for the back story.

An appraisal by Times film critic Manohla Dargis appears in today's paper.

In an companion story Dargis wrote about where to find his elusive work, both online and in the real world.

Noodling around YouTube for examples I came across the piece below,

entitled "Erasing Dreamland (Accidentally Erased Bruce Conner)."

Mark Charles Brown, who posted it on November 29, 2006, had this to say about it:

"'Erasing Dreamland' was created using found footage from YouTube in order to forge a digital homage to the analog techniques of the artist and film maker Bruce Conner, specifically his film 'Take The 5-10 To Dreamland.'

"The creation of this film lead to the erasure of Bruce Conner's film from the YouTube network, 'due to its content being used without the artist's permission.'

"The film currently exists in copyright protection limbo, as the footage sampled was legally obtained from YouTube. As outlined within the Terms of Use agreement associated with uploading a video to YouTube, the content of Bruce Conner's film existed outside the realm of copy protection while it was still present on their network, regardless of Conner [below] not being the original poster of the film.

"Furthermore, the copyright management status of the video enters an even stranger space upon the realization that both films were created using found footage. Conner was notorious as an artist for using found footage in his films that he would obtain at thrift shops and secondhand stores (Bruce Conner Oral History). The digital recreation of 'Take The 5-10 To Dreamland' was created by searching through the metadata associated with videos on YouTube and sorting through the resulting clips for bits and pieces that would sync in time with Bruce Conner's film."

Got that?

If you still haven't had enough, hey, there's a girl you should go see who'll take you where you need to go.