BREAKAWAY

by Bruce CONNER
1966 / 16mm / b&w / sound / 1S / 6' 00

A hallucinatory music video that deconstructs the body of dancer and singer Toni Basil, aka Antonia Christina Basilotta, as she is nude, almost nude and dressed, wearing a white a slip or polka-dotted tights. By fragmenting each of her movements with a sequence of isolated frames, the film brings about, through a stroboscopic effect, a body that dances, floats, flies. It lasts only the length of the song, that is two-and-a-half minutes, before the film takes off again, this time backwards, images and sounds mixed to compose a surprising palindrome. Although the music video does not change too much in its visual function (since the image was already fragmented), its audio function disappears, leaving behind a shapeless heap.



No print in distribution