An Evening with Morgan Fisher

An Evening with Morgan Fisher

Point Counterpoint: Avant-Garde Film Scores, 1955–1973 culminates in a special Modern Mondays evening with the Los Angeles–based artist Morgan Fisher, who presents the North American premiere of his latest work, Another Movie (2017), in dialogue with Bruce Conner’s A MOVIE (1958). In his 50 years of making films, paintings, and installations, Fisher has explored the defining properties of each artistic medium in ways that are conceptually provocative, sensual, and even humorous. Reflecting on the relationship between sound and image, he will introduce his 1973 film Pictures and Sound Rushes as a prelude to considering the use of Ottorino Respighi’s symphonic tone poem Pines of Rome (1924) in Bruce Conner’s classic experimental film A MOVIE and in Fisher’s Another Movie, made some 60 years later. Fisher writes, “Conner turns the music to his purposes by putting images to it that are radically different from the four scenes Respighi said his music describes. Another Movie uses Respighi’s composition in its entirety, and it literalizes the third movement, which Conner omitted. This leaves the rest of Respighi’s music to be haunted by our memory of Conner’s indelible imagery—by turns pathetic, exotic, ridiculous, comical, catastrophic, grotesque, banal, glorious.”