September 19, 2010
Looking for mushrooms
Bruce Conner, USA, 1967, 13 min
Music by Terry Riley
‘Expecting a nuclear disaster, Conner moved down to Mexico in 1962, where he spent his time looking for mushrooms with Timothy Leary. Later, Conner added footage of similar hunts in Frisco and in 1997 he decided to set it against a 1968 Terry Riley soundtrack. The result is a strange combination of typical ’60s psychedelic editing with what might appear to be a road movie interested in exotic landscapes. A classic of American avant film’.