Stated simply, Crossroads contains footage of the first underwater atomic bomb test at Bikini Atoll on July 25, 1946. This is a clinical description of a work that shows in ghastly repetition a fleet of warships tossed about a broiling sea as a nightmarish mushroom cloud swells skyward. Conner's ferocious attention to detail brings a careful solemnity to an examination of this unnatural terror as the cloud rises, countless times, pushing its uncanny mass across the once-quiescent atoll. Always shot from a great (airborne) distance, the Navy's footage effaces the destructive force, making it more a great sculpting power that uses the atmosphere as its medium. Conner's repetitious conjuring draws us into the very granularity of the image, then out again to the enormity of this man-made cataclysm. It is in this ritualized distance that we learn just how far from the truth we can be.

Edited by Conner. Music by Patrick Gleeson, Terry Riley. (38 mins, B&W, 35mm, PFA Collection, permission Canyon Cinema)