Looking for mushrooms

Looking for mushrooms is the first color film by Bruce Conner, consisting of footage he shot while living in Mexico (1961–62), as well as some earlier shots of him and Jean Conner in San Francisco. Building on rapid rhythms, introducing multiple-exposure sequences, it is a psychedelic, meditative travelogue of rural Mexico, while they roamed the hillsides seeking psilocybin, or magic mushrooms, sometimes joined by Timothy Leary, featuring sumptuously colorful images of the natural world, villages, and religious iconography.

Mea culpa

From the mid-1970’s, Bruce Conner immersed himself in the emerging music scene of his time, and collaborated, as a film maker for video clips, but also as a photographer with Punk bands such as, among others, Devo. In his first collaboration with David Byrne (Talking Heads) and Brian Eno, Conner used footage from educational films to create a rhythmically austere image-track for music from their pioneering concept-album My Life in the Bush of Ghosts.