Live Cinema Event
The Exploding Digital Inevitable
Dir. Ross Lipman, US, 2017, 49 min.
Co-presented with the Department of Cinema and Television at Drexel University
The Exploding Digital
Inevitable is a performance essay by noted filmmaker/archivist Ross
Lipman. Integrating live narration with
an array of movie and audio clips, still photographs, and rare archival
documents, it tells the riveting story of Crossroads' unique production, while
simultaneously deconstructing the massive cultural spectacle of the original
Bikini Atoll tests themselves--the single most recorded event in human
history. Along the way it chronicles the
extraordinary collaboration of Conner with Riley and Gleeson, including original
interviews with both composers. It ultimately looks at the Atomic Era as only
one incarnation of the human race’s ongoing mad journey to destruction, a
journey that apparently continues through the present moment. Let’s hope we’re wrong about that.
Preceded by:
Crossroads
Dir. Bruce Conner, US,
1976, 37 min. b&w
In 1976 groundbreaking collagist, sculptor and filmmaker
Bruce Conner released his magnum opus, a 36-minute assemblage of US government
footage of the iconic Bikini Atoll atomic bomb test. If Conner invented the
modern found footage film with A Movie
in 1958, he re-invented it with Crossroads.
His editing of the film's brilliant "dual" score--by seminal
minimalist composer Terry Riley and synthesizer pioneer Patrick Gleeson--evokes
a surreal beauty latent in the devastating images that comprises one of the
most profound meditations on the nuclear era extant.
Special thanks:
Michelle Silva, Jean Conner, Michael Kohn