Tony Conrad
1940 - 2016
Jack Smith and the Destruction of Atlantis
Mary Jordan
Jack Smith, Nayland Blake
In this entrancing documentary on performance artist, photographer and underground filmmaker Jack Smith, photographs and rare clips of Smith's performances and films punctuate interviews with artists, critics, friends and foes to create an engaging portrait of the artist. Widely known for his banned queer erotica film Flaming Creatures, Smith was an innovator and firebrand who influenced artists such as Andy Warhol and John Waters.
Jack Smith and the Destruction of Atlantis
The Velvet Underground
Todd Haynes
Lou Reed, John Cale
Experience the iconic rock band's legacy in the first major documentary to tell their story. Directed with the era’s avant-garde spirit by Todd Haynes, this kaleidoscopic oral history combines exclusive interviews with dazzling archival footage.
The Velvet Underground
Escape From Rented Island: The Lost Paradise of Jack Smith
Jerry Tartaglia
Jack Smith, Mario Montez
In his essay film, Jerry Tartaglia, longtime archivist and restorer of the film estate of queer New York underground, experimental film, and performance legend Jack Smith, deals less with Smith’s life than with his work, analyzing Smith’s aesthetic idiosyncrasies in 21 thematic chapters. It's a film essay about the artist’s work, rather than a documentary about his life. An unmediated vision of Jack Smith, an invitation to join him in his lost paradise.
Escape From Rented Island: The Lost Paradise of Jack Smith
Straight and Narrow
Tony Conrad, Beverly Grant
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 the intermediary of rhythm, the maximal impact is drawn from the simplest of universal human images: straight horizontal and vertical lines. Set to a strong percussive musical background, rapidly alternating images of black and white straight lines are juxtaposed in precise rhythmic patterns to create specific colours... if you can watch without becoming hypnotised...
Straight and Narrow
Normal Love
Jack Smith
Mario Montez, Tiny Tim
The feature length Normal Love is Jack Smith’s follow up to his now legendary film Flaming Creatures. This vivid, full-color homage to B-movies is a dizzying display of camp that clearly affirms Smith’s role as the driving force behind underground cinema and performance art of the post-war era. The cast includes Mario Montez, Diane de Prima, Tiny Tim, Francis Francine, Beverley Grant and John Vaccaro. Smith was known to constantly re-edit the film, often during screenings as it was still unspooling from the projector. This print has been restored under the supervision of Jerry Tartaglia and is provided by Filmmakers Co-operative in New York City.
Normal Love
The Ballad of Genesis and Lady Jaye
Marie Losier
Genesis P-Orridge, Lady Jaye Breyer P'Orridge
An intimate, affecting portrait of the life and work of ground-breaking performance artist and music pioneer Genesis Breyer P-Orridge (Throbbing Gristle, Psychic TV) and his wife and collaborator, Lady Jaye, centered around the daring sexual transformations the pair underwent for their 'Pandrogyne' project.
The Ballad of Genesis and Lady Jaye
Tony Conrad: DreaMinimalist
Marie Losier
Tony Conrad
The latest in Marie Losier's ongoing series of film portraits of avant-garde directors (George and Mike Kuchar, Guy Maddin, Richard Foreman), DreaMinimalist offers an insightful and hilarious encounter with Conrad as he sings, dances and remembers his youth and his association with Jack Smith. - Harvard Film Archive
Tony Conrad: DreaMinimalist
The Genius
Emily Breer, Joe Gibbons
Joe Gibbons, Karen Finley
A ramshackle underground SF satire set and shot in the self-absorbed art world of lower Manhattan, written, produced, and directed by Joe Gibbons, who also plays one of the lead parts. Gibbons plays a mad scientist who's developed a technique for transferring personalities from one person's body to another; he becomes obsessed with an outlaw artist (played by performance artist Karen Finley) who destroys paintings in various galleries as a form of anarchist, anticapitalist protest.
The Genius
Music in the Afternoon
Steina Vasulka
Steina Vasulka, Tony Conrad
Fellow violinist and artist Tony Conrad, in collaboration with software engineer Tom Demeyer, made for Steina the instrument seen in this title. Conrad and the Vasulkas all taught at the University at Buffalo in the Media Study Department from 1976 to 1979.
Music in the Afternoon
In Line
Tony Conrad
Tony Conrad
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 enjoy their submission to the authority of the program. This ritual of being dominated is a conspiracy with themselves that we enjoy but refuse to acknowledge. “Oh, no. I don’t like TV because I’m submissive; it’s because it makes me feel good.” The programs are always carefully crafted to be sensitive to people’s selfprotectiveness, even if they offer a good scare, or a good cry. Well, if this is all true, what happens when, by chance, you submit to a program that refuses to be polite about your closet masochism? That tells all? —Tony Conrad
In Line
