COSMIC RAY | MoMA

Film

Bruce Conner. BREAKAWAY. 1966. 16mm film transferred to video (black and white, sound). © Bruce Conner 2016. Courtesy Conner Family Trust

Conner’s COSMIC RAY (1961), VIVIAN (1964), and BREAKAWAY (1966) are liberating studies of the female body in motion and influential examples of the appropriation of popular music in experimental cinema. They are paired with Gunvor Nelson’s Schmeergunz (1966), in which culturally dominant images of female bodies are contrasted with bodily functions, and The Golden Positions (1970), James Broughton’s ecstatic catalog of hippie-human forms. Conner was a juror at the First Erotic Film Festival in 1970, when Broughton’s film won first prize.

Program approx. 60 min.

Dara Birnbaum (American, b. 1946), one of the first artists to appropriate television imagery in the 1970s, will introduce the September 18 screening. Birnbaum also contributed to the publication BRUCE CONNER: IT'S ALL TRUE.

COSMIC RAY. 1961. USA. Directed by Bruce Conner. 4.5 min.

16mm.

VIVIAN. 1964. USA. Directed by Bruce Conner. 3 min.

16mm.

BREAKAWAY. 1966. USA. Directed by Bruce Conner. 5 min.

16mm.

Schmeergunz. 1966. USA. Directed by Gunvor Nelson. 15 min.

16mm.

The Golden Positions. 1970. USA. Directed by James Broughton. 32 min.

16mm.

This film accompanies BRUCE CONNER: IT’S ALL TRUE and Movie in My Head: Bruce Conner and Beyond.

Sat, Sep 24, 2016, 1:30 p.m.

MoMA, Floor T2, Theater 2

The Roy and Niuta Titus Theater 2
Mon, Sep 19, 2016, 4:00 p.m.

MoMA, Floor T2, Theater 2

The Roy and Niuta Titus Theater 2
Sun, Sep 18, 2016, 2:00 p.m.

Introduced by artist Dara Birnbaum

MoMA, Floor T2, Theater 2

The Roy and Niuta Titus Theater 2

Licensing

If you would like to reproduce an image of a work of art in MoMA’s collection, or an image of a MoMA publication or archival material (including installation views, checklists, and press releases), please contact Art Resource (publication in North America) or Scala Archives (publication in all other geographic locations).

MoMA licenses archival audio and select out of copyright film clips from our film collection. At this time, MoMA produced video cannot be licensed by MoMA/Scala. All requests to license archival audio or out of copyright film clips should be addressed to Scala Archives at [email protected]. Motion picture film stills cannot be licensed by MoMA/Scala. For access to motion picture film stills for research purposes, please contact the Film Study Center at [email protected]. For more information about film loans and our Circulating Film and Video Library, please visit https://www.moma.org/research/circulating-film.

If you would like to reproduce text from a MoMA publication, please email [email protected]. If you would like to publish text from MoMA’s archival materials, please fill out this permission form and send to [email protected].