View online December 3–18, 2016
Bruce Conner, TAKE THE 5:10 TO DREAMLAND (still), 1977; courtesy Conner Family Trust, San Francisco; © Conner Family Trust, San Francisco
The filmmaker Jonas Mekas, a contemporary of Bruce Conner, once said, “The state produced by a film like 5:10 TO DREAMLAND is very similar to the feeling produced by a poem. The images, their mysterious relationships, the rhythm, and the connections impress themselves upon the unconscious. The film ends, like a poem ends, almost like a puff, like nothing. And you sit there, in silence, letting it all sink deeper, and then you stand up and you know that it was very, very good.” A sense of loss and longing associated with childhood memories permeates this short film, set to an elegiac electronic score composed for the work by Patrick Gleeson. The “5:10” of the title might refer to a train or bus schedule, but it also corresponds to the exact length of the film—a short ride that nonetheless takes the viewer effortlessly and evocatively across time and space to an American “dreamland” somewhere in the Midwest.
