Let Art Flourish, Let the World Perish
For Morgan Fisher, Another Movie is anything but another movie. The result of a decades-long reconsideration of the art and persona of Bruce Conner, Fisher’s first new film in 15 years attempts to reckon with a work of such time-honoured merit that its mere existence feel courageous. Conner’s epochal debut A Movie (1958), a 12-minute montage of disaster-related found footage set to Ottorino Respighi’s Pines of Rome, simultaneously crystallized a genre and incited what is now recognized as the second generation of the postwar American avant-garde, to which Fisher’s first decade of meta-materialist film work both epitomizes and deconstructs movie-by-movie, methodby-method.
“The motif of fascism in A Movie is very pronounced,” Fisher would say in a 1983 interview (published in 1987) with Film Quarterly, as he was beginning work on his own seminal experiment with found footage, the personal-poetic watershed Standard Gauge (1984), a portion of which is dedicated to a serendipitous encounter with a piece of discarded celluloid related to one of A Movie’s most recognizable visual motifs: the Hindenburg. “People must realize what it is they’re responding to and don’t want to face it in the film because it means having to face it themselves,” he continued. “[A Movie] is haunted by a kind of dreadful euphoria.”
It is from this theoretical base that can be understood as both a belated response to Conner’s aesthetic spectacle and a reclamation of Respighi’s music. In Conner’s hands, , reduced by almost ten minutes to accompany his dazzlingly destructive image track, became, in a sense, cinema’s quintessential aural accoutrement: opulent, rousing, and versatile—though this versatility is something only Conner seemed capable of fully exploiting. As a piece of program music, is meant to describe a series of scenes related to Roman military glory, which Conner set aside in favor of adapting the more extravagant elements of the score to his collage of careening cars, mushroom clouds, and downed dirigibles. Fully resurrected, Respighi’s 1924 tone poem for orchestra is given pride of place in Fisher’s bold reimagining, which allows the three movements first utilized by Conner to play out in full over a black screen, while the omitted passage is set to a gorgeous black-and-white image of the moon (the first piece of original footage shot and released by Fisher in over 30 years) moving across an Italian hillside—a simple but striking visualization
