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Hilary T. Harris, 34, also a New Yorker, is a slick and literate stylist and then some. His Seawards the Great Ships is a 29-minute color documentary on the shipbuilders of the Clyde in Scotland. He shows, rivet by plate, how ships are built. The picture won an Oscar two years ago. Harris also does shorter, impressionistic pieces. In Highway, he zips up, down, and under Manhattan's West Side Highway by night and day, sketching the rhythm of the roadway until it fairly comes alive. "My main preoccupation in film is with rhythm, and then color," he says. As if to prove it, he will use his $10,000 to make a film on the dance.
Jordan Belson, 37, will let almost no one (but foundations) see his movies unless they come to his studio in San Francisco for private screenings. His work is a brilliant arrangement of patterns of music, light, and color, a world of flashing pinpoints, symmetrical dots and fiery globes. "There is a crucible into which all phenomena can be resolved," says Belson. "If any medium can accomplish this, I am convinced it will be the film. My work penetrates deeper. It opens the doors to a universe that isn't even considered by people working in the medium."
Bruce Conner, 30, begins his A Movie (which lasts only twelve minutes) with a shot of a young and magnificently shaped woman sitting in profile, like Whistler's Mistress, wearing only a black garter belt. Cut. Savage Indians are next, seen slaughtering defenseless pioneers. An elephant charges furiously. Racing cars crash in clouds of dust and fire. A girl lies languidly back on a bed. Dissolve to a submerged submarine shooting a torpedo. The H-bomb goes off. Motorcycles race through mud. A biplane crashes into a lake. That famous Tacoma bridge whips in the wind and collapses. The Hindenburg bursts into flame. A ship sinks. A firing squad fires. Bodies hang upside down in Rome. Bruce Conner could be interpreted as a kind of Cotton Mather XXIII. His point seems to be that if you start with a beautiful nude, death and violent destruction soon follow.
Conner is a Kansan educated at the University of Nebraska. As a sculptor, he is represented at Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art. And as a filmmaker, he is no Puritan. His Cosmic Ray, four minutes long, is a collection of quick glimpses of photographically virgin (unairbrushed) nudes interspersed with scenes of naval engagements, Mickey Mouse, rocket planes, and the flag-raising at Iwo Jima. One girl rides a broomstick, a witch without a stitch. Some seem to be twisting with the camera. One lies supine, her hands slipping off her panties.