Actually, before
Pat's Birthday,
I shot a live-action film that became a segment on the first installment of
David Brinkley's Journal
. I had moved into a little house in Palisades that had been owned by this TV producer, Ted Yates. When Maya Deren's Creative Film Foundation awards were announced in the
New York Times,
and he saw my name, he decided to look me up [Breer won the Award of Distinction for
Inner and Outer Space
from the Creative Film Foundation in 1961; in 1957 he had won a Special Citation for
Recreation
]. He looked at some films and signed me up to edit some footage that was part of a gangster film he was doing with Ben Hecht. I forget how that project fizzled, but anyhow, he got himself hired to produce
David Brinkley's Journal,
a spin-off from
The Huntley/Brinkley Report
. I told him about the massive kinetic art show in Stockholm, which had been put together by Pontus Hulten, who at that time was director of the Moderna Museet in Stockholm. I was taking part in that show, and I guess he thought it would be an interesting subject. He hired me as a coproducer. It was a hurry-up job, and suddenly I found myself in Stockholm in the middle of the museum with a five-person crew who didn't speak Englishall these people waiting for me to say the fatal words: "Lights, camera, action!" I didn't know how to say them in English, much less in Swedish, but I shot the filmor rather my cameraman shot it on a new Arriflex which, we found out a month later, he couldn't focus. The stuff was developed in New York, and it wasn't until I got back here that I realized that most of this guy's footage couldn't be used. Fortunately, I'd taken my Bolex and shot a lot of footage. That became the backbone of a fifteen-minute
Brinkley Journal
segment. I hired Mimi Arshum, a friend of Sasha Hammid's, and a good editor, because I didn't know what the hell I was doing. She helped me put together a tentative assemblage, which we took to Washington. As soon as Brinkley started watching, he said, "Where's the
Page 33
establishing shot?" I knew I was in trouble. I'd syncopated everything. I even had a pixilated sequence of the king of Sweden arriving at the museum and jerking through the whole exhibit shaking hands rapid fire with all the other dignitaries. Brinkley looked at the whole thing, said some patronizing word to me, and we knew that was that. The assemblage was eventually given over to their editors, over my not quite dead body, and they cut the film. It appeared on television, with a conventional talking-heads interview with Hulten which they'd gone back to Stockholm to shoot. It was my footage, cut along the lines of my assemblage, but without the rhythms. I sat there watching it, cringing, with my parents in Michigan. They were proud: my name was in the credits. I did get paid, but I felt like I'd been raped. When I tried to get the footage later, they wouldn't cough it up. I
was
able to buy that new Bolex, the Rex model. Up until then I'd been using an old non-reflex model that belonged to my father. I shot
Pat's Birthday
with that new camera, and I still have it. At the rate of ten minutes of film a year, I haven't worn it out yet.
After I got my new Bolex, I took to loaning out the old one. One of the first borrowers was Carolee Schneemann. She went away with Jim Tenney for the summer and came back with the footage later used for
Fuses
[1967]. I remember her showing me this film of her and Tenney endlessly fucking, and wanting to know how I felt about it. Finally I realized that they'd had to stop and wash clothes and cook food and do other things in between the fucking, just like the rest of us, and I got over my depression.
Anyway, to get back to
Pat's Birthday:
when I'd gotten to New York, I'd met Oldenburg and other pop artists. We used to go to parties and hang out. I was on the fringe. Then they came to some of my films. I'd been introduced to Oldenburg as a guy who owned a movie camera, and he wanted to employ me (for no pay) to shoot his happenings. This is 1961, 1962. I said nix. I'd just done that film with Tinguely [
Homage to Jean Tinguely's Homage to New York
] and realized, once again, that I didn't like to use my camera as a substitute witness for myself. And I'm not a good live cameraperson anyway. But I went to all the happenings. In the spring when he'd finished them, we talked about making a real film together. I suggested doing it out in my neighborhood in Palisades, in Piermont, where
The Great Train Robbery
[1903] was shot and where Woody Allen shot
The Purple Rose of Cairo
[1985]. Allen turned that little town into a Depression town. The local joke is that he had to upgrade it about ten years to make it look right.
So Oldenburg and I hung out there and talked, and then on our appointed day a week or so later he arrived with Lucas Samaras, and Pat [Oldenburg], and one or two other people. He had a big duffel bag full
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of props, which he dumped on the floor, and we started from there. We shot for a week or ten days, about three thousand feet. I just followed him around with my camera. The golf scene was my one contribution to the action.
As we were shooting, I'd get the rushes every morning and everybody would show up to see them, which was a big mistake. I didn't know enough to realize that you don't show actors their rushes because when you cut out their best scenesand I was pretty ruthless about thatthey hate you.
I took about six months to edit the film. I agonized over it, though it was also thrilling. I developed an elaborate theory, which I won't bore you with, called "discontinuity," having to do with cutting on the basis of the interior feel of the shot rather than on either the plastic or the rational explanation of the sequence. It was no giant breakthrough, except for me. Also, I cut so as to obfuscate narrative. I did realize that if you're going to cut against narrative, it's got to be a positive thing. When you're disrupting the narrative expectations of the audience, you've got to do it in a way that makes interior sense of some kind. It was a matter of making a structure that had consecutive form, where one thing certainly led to the next, but where the specifics were chosen in ways other than story. You might go from a light frame with a lot of angular action to a lush dark one with rather static images as a matter of counterpoint. In a sense you do build up expectations and you've got to make good on them in the terms you finally set up.
I wrote something about those ideas, saying that time doesn't move forward, that things
are
going, but sideways, obliquely, down, and backward, not necessarily ahead. The sense of motion is the issue. That idea seems hard to defend, because our locomotion drives us forward with our face looking toward new things. But since that movement is toward oblivion, in my philosophy anyhow, it might as well be backward. It's a delusion to think that you're getting anywhere. Of course, there is an accumulation of experience.