Movies: Tony Conrad

The visual track of Weak Bodies and Strong Wills comes from my 1973 film, Enlightenment through Experience: Interim Semester at Albright College. The found film images had been kept in a closet at Albright College, where I was invited to teach a work...

If the intersection of desire and authority is phallus, the intersection of absence and vigilance is vagina. The tape’s laconic title (I saw, I conquered—but I didn’t come) encodes its vaginal pretense. In effect, Vidi Vici is a male artist exploring...

This version of the Dick and Jane and Baby Sally tale was influenced by Dorothy Bloch, who stresses the role of childhood fear that the parent will kill the child. An alternative title, “The Scissors Bird,” is intended as a reference to “The Story of...

A trisection of the spectators’ power over their own image language: word, trance, and command are installed as valences of the artist’s license, revealed as figures of parental authority. How peculiar that people like being an audience because they ...

This exquisite single shot is a complement to Combat Status Go. Here the viewer is positioned casually, even though every other element in the film experiences a painful precision: piano, gun, wardrobe; conversation directed at (and across the bow of...

The story of Joan of Arc as applied to the present revolution in arts and more. The Gothic is applied to the War in Vietnam. The film is experimental in the sense that in it the visual becomes tactile....

Stroboscopic vertical lines on a loop accompanying minimalist drone music compositions....

Negative image is shot from a small rear-projection screen, the film comes out of the camera continuously (in the dark room) and is immediately processed, dried, and projected on the screen....

A Dracula parody where the camera moves to the eye of Count Flickerstein and the image changes to static-like patterns....

Straight and Narrow is a study of subjective colour and visual rhythm, although it is printed on black and white film, the hypnotic pacing of the images will cause most viewers to experience a programmed gamut of hallucinatory colour effects. Through...