Recreation
. I don't know what the other films are.
MacDonald:
Of course, it goes the other way too: a lot of things in avant-garde film were done first by totally anonymous commercial people, who did their work without any long-term recognition either.
Breer:
Good point. I went to an advertising agency one time, and they said, ''We like your stuff a lot, but our clients are very conservative." The guy there cited the case of Len Lye and his little Chrysler film: Lye was given an award for the best advertising film of the year, by whatever society or committee does that, but the award was withdrawn because Chrysler hadn't accepted the ad, which wasn't broadcast and so wasn't eligible for the prize. Lye was very bitter about it. He thought he deserved that award, and then he had to be contemptuous of it at the same time. Lye had had big audiences at the beginning; his films ran in first-run theaters, and then later he had to become this "elitist," far removed from all that.
MacDonald:
On the
Fist Fight
sound track there are voices apparently talking about the Stockhausen performance.
Breer:
I took stuff out of the actual performances; you hear the participants. The voice at the end criticizing the film was an English actor.
Stockhausen hadn't been there for the performances, so he hadn't seen the finished film. Later he came out to my house with Mary
Page 41
Bauermeister (they were married at the time), and he was enthusiastic about the film and claimed to be enthusiastic about the sound track. He said he was inspired to make a new sound track for it by chopping up all of his sound compositions collage-style to fit the film. I was flattered, and we talked a little bit about it, but it never happened. I always wondered whether he just wanted to get rid of that critical voice. He was a famous, impossible egotist, though in spite of that we were friendsalthough I found him intolerable at times: my own egotism versus his, maybe. At the world's fair in Osaka in 1970 he did the German pavilion. We were staying in the same hotel and ran into each other. I described our Pepsi pavilion, with thirty-seven speakers around our dome, and he said he had forty-seven, or whatevermore. It got to be ludicrous, that kind of jockeying for superiority.
MacDonald: 66
seems a logical film to come after
Fist Fight,
which seems almost its opposite.
Fist Fight
seems to have emptied out a whole collage part of you.
Breer:
Exactly. First effulgence, then something dry and astringent. I think that, to survive, an artwork has to have excessive input. You've got to put everything into it each time. You can't ride on past laurels. You've got to start from scratch again and on a tack that'll identify the new thing as clearly different from the old thing, and quite often it is almost the opposite. For
66
I had practically a gimmick: long static shots of slick, crisp imagery, with very short gunbursts of interruption.
I guess you go through stages. First of all, you're worried about your identity as an artist. In a sense you don't know who you are and what you're going to do. After a while you're happy that you've discovered what you can do best and are milking this vein, and then a while after that, you realize you're trapped, and you can't get out no matter how fucking hard you try. I'm in that last stage. But I still try. That's the only thing worth doing. There's no point in repeating myself, so I still try to change. I might use a gimmick to get into another vein, as I did with those three abstract films following
Fist Fight, 66, 69, 70,
and later
77
. In the last few years I've combined things more and more. I no longer do a collage film, then an abstract film, then a collage. These days I might take the middle of an abstract film and turn it into a lyrical landscape film. Who's to say I can't? I'm the boss of my films.
MacDonald:
Individual films also reflect this need for change. For a while,
69
is a consistently hard-edged film; then it shifts into something else.
Breer:
Do you know the joke about the two explorers who get captured by the natives and tied to trees? The chief tells the first one, "You have two choices: death or ru-ru." The explorer thinks a bit and says, "Well, ru-ru." "Wise decision,'' says the chief, who unties him. Then the
Page 42
Successive frames from Breer's 69 (1968).
Page 43
whole tribe beats him up and abuses him sexually and completely destroys him and throws him down dead in front of the other explorer. The chief asks the second explorer which
he
prefers, death or ru-ru? The second explorer is very shaken up by what he's seen and finally says, "Death." And the chief says, "Very wise decisiondeath it isbut
first,
a little ru-ru." I love that joke. In my work there's always a little ru-ru.
69
undoes itself. It starts out like a system, then the system breaks down and goes to hell. During the editing I came up with the idea that it should break down, so I shuffled the cards. I thought it served me right to undo my own pretense at formal purity.
MacDonald:
When exactly did you shuffle the cards?
Breer:
First I shot each sequence several times. I was thinking of serial repetitions and building a texture. But I got bored with that, so I said "What if." I started shuffling the cards and shooting them in random sequences and shuffling more and more.
Also, there were some accidents. This was before dimmers were available and I had a parallel circuit for the lights and a double-throw switch, so I could put them on half-light (Stan Vanderbeek had shown me how to do that). I shot a sequence on the low light by accident, and it was brown and dismal looking, but somewhere during that scene I had turned the lights on for a second and there was a flash of proper lighting embedded within this dark stuff. Instead of dismissing all that material, I took advantage of it in the best tradition of experimental filmmaking. I went back and deliberately shot a lot of stuff at half-light, with a few sprinklings of properly lit imagery.
MacDonald:
You're very early in experimenting with flicker effects. They're an element in some of the earliest films, and you come back to flicker often.
Breer:
If you question everything, you'll question why you have to eliminate flicker. Flicker is disturbing, but it has an impact, and it doesn't make you have flat feet, or burn your retina. It's just another tool we've overlooked. I question all the time. It started out with my questioning the existence of God when I was a little kid. I read something by Sinclair Lewis when I was twelve or thirteen years old and challenged God to strike me dead. I gave him about fifteen minutes, thinking if he was all that powerful, that'd be plenty of time. And nothing happened, and I went down and told my parents I wasn't going to church anymore. I never had believed in God, but I'd been too scared to announce it. Of course, I had some awful experiences as a little kid at Catholic school, so I already had bad vibes about religion. But I questioned and got away with it.