I too have seen only few Conners,and recall just as little.

Must disagree with you about the Brakhages ("it's hard to distinguish one from another"), if only based on seeing his SCENES FROM UNDER CHILDHOOD four years back in NYC. Certainly one of most impactful movie theater experiences in my life (up there with seeing SHADOWS OF OUR FORGOTTEN ANCESTORS and AU HAZARD BALTHAZAR.) Brakhage did things in that movie that are astonishingly beautiful.

DIGITRAMP--in rough summation, my argument isn't against the "beauty" in brakhage, but that his "beautiful" moments are approximately identical from film to film

And the award for Most Absurd Comments of the Year goes to...

PG: "...in retrospect it's hard to distinguish one from another, separate out what the films individually do"

Seriously? Of course with someone who made over 400 films, there will be some that resemble others. But you can't recall how "Mothlight" differs from "Anticipation of the Night" or "Act of Seeing..." or "Window Water Baby Moving" or "Chartres Series" etc etc. (If you were to generalize about indistinguishability among some of his handpainted works, you *may* have a slightly better case.)

And good to hear you can be so confident about what Conner's films "essentially" were, even though you're "pretty sure" you've seen "at least one or a couple".

Such is the State of Film Criticism, 2008.

JASON--not to grasp at straws, but you're right, i WAS thinking mostly of the hand-painted work ... also, if i can tread on territory where i'm obviously not well learned, films from about 1980 on * i've seen only a handful of his earlier works, most having little to do with the point i was (perhaps foolishly) trying to make ... so thanx for the necessary corrective

If you ever get a chance to look at Conner's very powerful 1967 REPORT (not easy to do, alas), about the John F. Kennedy assassination--or his recently re-edited EASTER MORNING (1966), shown as part of the opening night program of the Onion City Film Festival--I can't imagine you confusing these films with any of Conner's others.

I am not a fan of experimental film generally, but I think Conner is one of the most underappreciated major filmmakers of the 60s-- Marilyn Times 5, Report etc. had huge subterranean influence not just on film but on the culture generally, teaching us to play with old stock footage and its attitudes for our own sarcastic ends. What Kubrick did in Strangelove by turning a cold war thriller novel into satire, Conner did literally with stock footage from that era. Obviously he owed a LOT to Joseph Cornell but he added his own hipster sensibility to it that the whole field of new wave music videos, to name one thing, owed a ton to.

As it happens, when I was running a film society in his hometown of Wichita, KS in the mid-80s, I met him at his mom's house, a perfectly ordinary and cheerful middle class house except for the artworks scattered about by a devoted son. It was a great pleasure to have coffee and doughnuts with him and Mom, talking art and seeing bits of his impressionistic documentary on gospel music.