Rambler: Spoofing the Avant-Garde in Jane Conger Belson's Odds & Ends

Rambler: Spoofing the Avant-Garde in Jane Conger Belson's Odds & Ends
Art & Trash, episode 37
July 19, 2024 [Patreon]

Jane Conger Belson, later Jane Conger Belson Shimané, entered San Francisco’s underground film scene in the mid-1950s through her common-law husband Jordan Belson, a painter and abstract animator whose light shows were a focal point in the city’s evolving intermedia counterculture. She made only two films, Logos and Odds & Ends, although claims have been made that she had three more films in progress circa 1960, when she and Belson parted. With the dissolution of their marriage she stopped making films. Brief though Conger Belson’s participation was, her films reflect an iconoclast sensibility common to the times.

In this video essay, Stephen Broomer discusses Jane Conger Belson's films in relation to the beat culture that had overtaken San Francisco in her day, with a focus on her collaboration with sound artist and comedian Henry Jacobs, and her playing the Holy Fool as maker of the essential 1959 film Odds & Ends.

Odds & Ends was preserved by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences with the support of a National Film Preservation Foundation grant. The film can be viewed in the fourth volume of Treasures from American Film Archives. filmpreservation.org/dvds-and-books/treasures-iv-american-avant-garde-film-contents

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