The Great Recycler: the late Bruce Conner made lasting art out of junk.

• Author: Walker, Jesse

WHEN THE Wichita-bred filmmaker Bruce Conner moved to San Francisco in 1957, he was stimulated by the bohemian individualism of the Beat scene, by the bustling avant-garde art community, and, above all, by the city's garbage men. "In San Francisco," he told an interviewer in 1983, "the trash was picked up by an organization call the Scavengers Protective Association. They went around the city with big trucks, gathering the trash by emptying trash cans into big flat burlap sheets....They were using all the remnants, refuse, and outcasts of our society." Inspired, Conner and some friends created a trash-picking alliance of their own, the Ratbastard Protective Association, for "people who were making things with the detritus of society"

By July of this year, when Conner died at age 74, he had become the acknowledged master of turning detritus into art. No director has surpassed his ability to assemble preexisting found footage into something entirely new. Beginning with A Movie in 1958, he made a series of experimental films, from his Zapruder-meets-McLuhan short Television Assassination to his Devo video Mongoloid, that laid the groundwork for the current explosion of remixes and mash-ups.

He wasn't the first person to use recycled footage, of course. "Other filmmakers have done it before" Conner told another interviewer in 1974. "But mainly in a comic sort of way. I'd seen a Marx Brothers movie in which Groucho said to Harpo, 'There's a revolution going on. We need help.' Harpo goes out and pins a 'Help Wanted' sign on the door. Suddenly you see tanks and airplanes and soldiers and elephants all coming to their aid. After that I started thinking ... I became aware that [by] putting in an image from a totally different movie you could make it more complex. Like taking the soundtrack from one film that was made in 1932 and put[ting] it on top of images from a movie made in 1948, and intercutting other images together with it. I had this tremendous, fantastic movie going in my head made up of all the scenes I'd seen ... a three-hour spectacular."

Conner didn't limit his recycling work to film. He created weird, witty collages that would have made Max Ernst proud, pictures in which a nuclear explosion wears a suit, a pair of mechanical contraptions have a shootout, or a giant hand operates some buttons on Jesus' back. And he made grotesque but...