and
intranational. In the modern world, after all, every geographic region is international in the sense that it includes people of a variety of ethnic heritages. Currently, several interviews for Volume 3 are underway, including discussions with John Porter (Canada), William Greaves (U.S.A.: African-American), Yervant Gianikian/Angela Ricci Lucchi (Italy), and Artavazd Peleshyan (Armenian). In the coming years I expect to interview filmmakers of an increasingly broad range of heritages and perspectives.
Of course, no survey of critical filmmakingespecially one produced by a single individualcan ever hope to be "complete." The immensity of this field and its continual expansion in so many directions is what
Page 13
made this project intriguing at the outset and what continues to make it exciting for me. My goals are simple: to share my fascination with some of the many remarkable contributors to critical moviemaking I have had access to, as a means of piquing the interest of filmgoers, film exhibitors, and teachers, especially those who can bring a remarkable body of films to a larger audience, and to provide those who have already developed a serious interest in critical forms of film with a more complete context for this interest.
Page 15
Robert Breer
Robert Breer is the most accomplished contemporary in a tradition of experimental animation that begins with Emile Cohl and Winsor McCay and includes, among others, Hans Richter, Viking Eggeling, Oskar Fischinger, Len Lye, the Whitney brothers, and Jordan Belson. What distinguishes Breer's work, however, is his decision to use frame-by-frame filmmaking to conduct explorations of the viewer's perceptual and conceptual thresholds. Breer's gift is to be able to do exploratory film work with a wit, a technical dexterity, and a knowledgeability that make his films accessible to a much broader audience than most experimental/avant-garde filmmakers can attract. During the middle part of his career he was also a sculptor, designing and building elegant (and amusing) "floats" that move very, very slowly along the floor or ground. The largest of these were made for the Pepsi-Cola Pavilion, designed for Expo '70 in Osaka by the Experiments in Art and Technology group. In fact, one of the more fruitful ways of thinking of Breer is to see him as an artist fascinated with making things move and with the ways in which their motion can affect those who perceive it.
Breer's first films
Form Phases I
(1952),
Form Phases II, III
(1953),
Form Phases IV
(1954)seem closely related to Richter's
Rhythm 21
and some of Fischinger's work: shapes of colored paper are moved around to create continually changing abstract configurations that intermittently draw the viewer's awareness to the materials and processes used. The films seem to flip back and forth between exercises in two-dimensional design and indices of the three-dimensional materials and processes being used. As he became increasingly interested in film (before beginning
Page 16
to make films he was a painter living in Paris), Breer began to explore a variety of techniques. For
Un Miracle
(1954) he cartooned with paper cutouts to create a tiny satire of Pope Pius XII. In
Image by Images
(1956),
A Man and His Dog Out for Air
(1957), and
Inner and Outer Space
(1960), the focus is the drawn line and Breer's ability to use it to create a continuous metamorphosis of two-dimensional abstract design and three-dimensional illusionism.
To define Breer as an animator, as I have done, is misleading, for beginning with
Recreation
(1956) and
Jamestown Baloos
(1957) he began to explore the impact of radically altering the imagery in successive frames in a manner that has more in common with Peter Kubelka's films and theoretical writings than with any area in the history of animation up to that point. If Breer's earliest films can be seen, in part, as an attempt by a painter to add motion to his work, these films seem an attempt to reveal film's potential in the area of collage. Instead of creating a homogeneous, conventional film space into which our eyes and minds can peer,
Recreation
and
Jamestown Baloos
create retinal collages that our minds subsequently synthesize and/or decipher. In
Eyewash
(1959) and later in
Fist Fight
(1964), Breer used his single-frame procedure to move out of his workspace and into the world in a manner that seems related to the hand-held, single-framing style Jonas Mekas was using by the time he made
Walden
(1968). In many of these films, Breer includes not only drawing and the movements of cutout shapes but imagery borrowed from magazines and objects collected from around the home. One is as likely to see a real pencil as a drawn pencil; in fact, the inclusion of one kind of image of a particular subject is almost sure to be followed by other kinds: a drawn mouse by a real mouse or a wind-up mouse, for example. Of all the films of Breer's middle period,
Fist Fight
seems the most ambitious. Thousands of photographs, drawings, and objects are animated into a fascinating diary of Breer's environment, his background, and his aesthetic repertoire.
By the mid sixties Breer was moving away from collage and back toward abstraction in
66
(1966),
69
(1968),
70
(1970), and
77
(1977). Not only is
69
the most impressive of these (among other things it creates a remarkably subtle palette of shimmering color); its paradoxical structure enacts a procedure which seems basic to much of Breer's work.
69
begins as a rigorously formal work: a series of perspectival geometric shapes move through the image again and again, each time with slight color, texture, and design variations. But as soon as we begin to become familiar with the various shapes and their movements, Breer begins to add details that undercut the hard-edged formalist look and rhythm established in the opening minutes. By the end,
69
seems to have turned, at least in part, into its opposite: the shapes continue to rotate through the frame, but
Page 17
they sometimes ''wilt" into flat, two-dimensional, cartoonlike shapes. For Breer, the homogeneity of most film experiencesthe seemingly almost automatic tendency for commercial narrative films, as well as for documentary and experimental films, to establish a particular look and procedure and to rigorously maintain it throughout the duration of the presentationrepresents a failure of imagination that needs to be filmically challenged.
During the seventies and eighties Breer produced films that bring together many of the procedures explored in earlier work while continually trying out new procedures, new attacks on filmic homogeneity: