“Constructing Contradictions: The Collage Films of Robert Downey, Sr.” In Truth & Soul: A Robert Downey, Sr. Reader, edited by Kier-La Janisse and Clint Enns (Pender Island: Spectacular Optical, 2025), 218-229.

Robert Downey Sr.’s films exist on the fringes of the underground. Despite his ventures into the mainstream, his roots remain firmly planted in the independent and experimental spirit of the New American Cinema. His collage films—No More Excuses (1968, co-directed with Robert Soukis) and Two Tons of Turquoise to Taos Tonight (a significantly shortened director’s cut of his 1975 film Moment to Moment, re-released in 2012)— engaged with the possibilities of non-narrative cinema in an era when the boundaries between underground, experimental, and independent filmmaking were in dynamic flux. These works operate as accumulations of disparate moments, stitched together through associative editing, tonal disjunctions and, in Downey’s particular case, a delirious embrace of the absurd. Like his contemporaries in the underground, Downey sought to undermine the conventions of Hollywood storytelling, but his approach was uniquely infused with a kind of manic vaudevillian humour— drawing both from the counterculture and pop culture in ways that are both satirical and inspired. But what distinguishes Downey’s work within the broader history of collage film is its refusal to settle into a purely critical or oppositional posture.

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Ultimately, Robert Downey Sr.’s collage films resist interpretation not because they lack meaning, but because they insist on multiplicity. No More Excuses and Two Tons of Turquoise to Taos Tonight are not puzzles to be solved or arguments to be decoded— they are accumulations of affect, contradiction, and irreverence, propelled by an artist unwilling to separate the sacred from the profane, or the personal from the political. Downey’s work doesn’t offer conclusions so much as provocations, disruptions, and flashes of strange, fleeting clarity. His cinema, like the world it reflects, is a place of absurd collisions and fragile connections. To demand coherence from these films is to miss the point. Their power lies in their refusal to resolve, in their willingness to sit with discomfort, and in their ability to find humour within chaos.