A Critical Cinema 2: Interviews with Independent Filmmakers

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:

Gulls and Buoys

(1972),

Fuji

(1974),

Rubber Cement

(1975),

LMNO

(1978),

TZ

(1978),

Swiss Army Knife with Rats and Pigeons

(1980),

Trial Balloons

(1982),

Bang!

(1987),

A Frog on the Swing

(1988) . . .

I talked with Breer in January and February 1985.

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MacDonald:

One influence that seems clear in your first films,

Form Phases I

and

Form Phases II

is Emile Cohl.

Breer:

I hadn't seen Cohl's films at that point. After I did

A Man and His Dog Out for Air,

Noel Burch, who was also in Paris at that time, asked me if I'd seen Cohl. When I said no, he took me over to the Cinematheque, and we saw Cohl's films there.