Bang!
(1986)]. And obviously that'll call for an asynchronous event of the same kind. When the telephone rings in
TZ,
you hear the voice saying, "Hello," first, and
then
the phone ringing. It always gets a giggle. It's deliberate that the sound-picture relationship is obverse, perverse, and sometimes absolutely synch.
Have you seen
70
recently? I decided to leave it silent, and I had the option of a black sound track or a clear one. For some reason I decided on a clear track, which, it turns out, picks up dirt and glitches, so that if you leave the audio on, there's sound. I show
70
now with instructions to leave the projector sound on. There's a breathing quality to the soundtrack, and it dispels the uncomfortableness of a nonsound film.
MacDonald:
Certain films seem pivotal for you.
Jamestown Baloos,
for example, and
Recreation
.
Breer:
Well, the only reason
Recreation
isn't pivotal is that I did a film before it which got lost. It was a little loop that looked like
Recreation
. Discovering the possibilities of the collision of single frames was a breakthrough for me. The loop got worn out, and I had to throw it away. I made
Recreation
trying to do the same thing, but longer, so it could be on a reel and be practical to show.
Jamestown Baloos
was more a matter of trying to control what I had discovered.
Page 25
MacDonald: Recreation
was made in France?
Breer:
Right. I could tell from feedback at cine clubs that it was pretty outrageous.
MacDonald:
Another aspect of
Recreation
and
Jamestown Baloos
that seems new to you is a kind of self-reflexivity about filmmaking.
Breer:
I wrote a manifesto during
Jamestown
. I thought I was developing a whole new language (I didn't realize at the time how influenced I'd been by Fernand Leger's
Ballet Méchanique,
[1924]). Anyhow, the manifesto was about painting being fossilized action, whereas film was real action, real kinesis. Rather than a diagram or a plan for change, film was change. And that was the exciting new thing about it. At the time, I was thinking of Rauschenberg in particular, who was doing what I thought were essentially post-Schwitters [Kurt Schwitters] combine paintings, not something new. Rauschenberg was being touted, but I felt I was doing
real
collages that had all the Rauschenberg combinations but were also dynamic and rhythmic, a real step forward from Schwitters, who I admired very much.
MacDonald:
It's also another step in the development of metamorphosis. When you begin using imagery recognizable from pop culture in a new context, you're changing its meaning and impact. And also, in terms of timing, the viewer's mind is always behind in understanding what's just been presented: in both
Jamestown Baloos
and
Recreation
we're often seeing something new, and at the same time trying to think of the implications (original and new) of what we just saw.
Breer:
There's another thing too, that has to do with trajectory, with cutting on motion. If you have something continuing across the screen so that the continuity of the action itself dominates the content of what that thing is, you can change the thing that's moving, from one frame to the next. I've heard that old cartoonists used to play with that as a gag. As a bird would fly across the screen, they'd replace one of the images of the bird with a brick. Because of the motion of the bird, nobody would see the brick. That's an option you don't have in a static picture.
MacDonald:
An obvious example is in
Gulls and Buoys,
where the character riding the bicycle changes continually.
Breer:
That's me riding the bike, rotoscoped. I change radically each time. Some of this has to do with a psychological phenomenon: the eye oscillates, wiggles, at the rate of twenty-five or thirty times a second. They've discovered that the retina teases an image out of the void by oscillating over perceptual thresholds. In an experiment, a gadget was fixed to the subject's face so that it could read this very fine oscillation of the eye and translate it mechanically to the target image the person was looking at. The image would move every time the eye moved, in other words, remain fixed in relation to the retina. The image consisted of a
Page 26
green rectangle with a red circle inside. As soon as that image got stabilized in terms of the retina, as soon as the retina wasn't oscillating over the surface anymore, the red circle dropped out. The color differentiation was gone. That physiological process goes on all the time. It's interesting that it's almost the same rate as twenty-four frames a second, but maybe that's not related. The important thing is that the thresholds are needed. In order to establish
this,
you have to have
that
. I had a scientist following me around at one point. He got excited by my films because he hadn't thought of the consequences of this kind of rapid change. And
I
never thought about consequences; I just thought about how it looked to compose this way. But in teaching it over time I've picked up on what's going on.
MacDonald:
What was Noel Burch's commentary in
Recreation?
I don't know enough French to understand it.
Breer:
It's nonsense poetry: the words are puns that refer to the images. I made the film silent, as usual. I showed it that way for a while, but speculated on a soundtrack, and Noel got interested somehow. I don't remember the exact circumstances, but he went off and typed up a text, brought it back to me, and I suggested he record it. In those days I usually used a microphone on the projector: I'd record on the sound strip. In this case, though, I edited the sound so that I could synch the words exactly with the events. After it was recorded, Noel had second thoughts, so I didn't use the soundtrack out of deference to him. Then later, after I moved back here, I asked him about it, and he said he liked the track after all. So I added the sound and a credit, "Text by Noel Burch."
MacDonald: Recreation 2
[1956] seems like an afterthought.
Breer:
I never show that film. I should've ditched it. I learned from doing it not to try and do sequels. I was just using up the leftover energy from