Sonic Cinema: Loose Connection

A rare screening of Tony Conrad’s audiovisual experiment Loose Connection (1973/2011) preceded by a live solo performance by violinist Billy Steiger.

Shot in 1973 and revisited in 2011, Loose Connection is an experimental documentary of family life in Midtown Manhattan, where Tony Conrad lived with Beverly Grant and their son Ted. Taking a self-built rotating camera around his locale of West 42nd Street, Conrad interrupts the viewer’s spatial orientation with fragmentary, flickering images, anchored by the staccato noise of the street.

Though it shares a formal lineage with Conrad’s earlier films such as The Flicker (1966), as well as Michael Snow’s mechanical experiments, the documentary elements of Loose Connection give it unexpected warmth. Conrad’s openness about the production process and conversations with curious passersby lend the film a personality akin to the home movie or diary film as much as structural filmmaking, pushing the film beyond the austere formalism typically associated with the tradition.

Perhaps best known for his stroboscopic film The Flicker (1966) and his music with the Theatre of Eternal Music, also known as the Dream Syndicate, and German experimental rock band Faust, Tony Conrad (1940–2016) pioneered work with visual phenomena and sustained tone that helped shape decades of experimental film and music that followed. Moving just as freely between film & video, music, sculpture, and public access television, his multidisciplinary practice resists easy categorisation, often challenging the modes of production and relationships of power embedded within media forms.

A familiar presence at Cafe OTO, Billy Steiger is an artist working across performance, recording, drawing, and printmaking. This work often takes systems of reproduction, transmission and mediation as both material and subject.

Programmed by Oliver Dickens for Sonic Cinema. Special thanks to Colin Orihuela (Greene Naftali), Billy Steiger, and Jackson Burton.