Artist and experimental filmmaker Bruce Conner has died at the age of 75. He’s maybe best known for his first film, the 1958 assemblage A Movie; his most recent film, Easter Morning, a pure cinema short shot in the 60s and recently released to celebrate Conner’s 50th anniversary, screened in competition last month at CineVegas. Ray Pride has much, much more at Movie City Indie. I’ve embedded one of Conner’s more surprising works, a short set to Devo’s “Mongoloid,” above.

In the 1960s and 70s, Allan King was at the forefront of a new way of doing documentary using cinema verite. Up until that point, cinema verite hinged on a central question that needed to be answered by the film, but King decided that the real life drama was the story in and of itself. This was very clear (and very successful) in the 1969 film A Married Couple, which Paul and I watched last night. I went into the film thinking it would be very interesting on an academic level, so I wasn’t prepared to be moved so deeply by the drama between Bill and Antoinette unfolding on the screen. King and his crew filmed the couple in their home for 10 weeks, until they appear to have completely forgotten the camera was present. The demonstrations of what goes wrong–and right–in a marriage are powerful. After the screening, Paul and I were very privileged to talk to Mr. King about the process of making A Married Couple and his particular understanding of marriage since making the film.

Starz Denver Film Festival, spout.com podcast