After a half-century of filmmaking, Robert Breer, who has also made paintings, murals, sculptures, installations, and pre-cinema devices, has suggested he will make no more films. Perhaps it is finally time for the film and art worlds, always slow to recognise original masterpieces, to at least try to apprehend the full extent of his achievement, not as an ‘animator’ but as one of the dozen or so greatest filmmakers in the whole history of the medium.
While Breer’s films show concerns specific to animation, they ultimately engage filmic space, filmic imagery, and filmic time. The greatest art can produce an ecstatic effect in the viewer, and Breer’s films do so more explicitly than most, by constantly leaping out with a surprise that can sometimes bring a smile, at whatever rhythm and space and subject has been presented for the last few seconds — something unexpectedly different. The viewer, who had been captivated by one type of imagery and rhythm and space, is suddenly lifted off his feet, turned upside down, shaken so hard that the change is emptied from his pockets, and deposited on the floor with a loving thud — only to discover that the floor is rapidly vibrating, and in totally unpredictable ways, while a beeping toy phone is walking towards him on little feet.
The ecstasy these changes produce is of a particular kind. It isn’t only that the world seems indescribably more alive, as also happens when watching a Brakhage film — for Brakhage, too, tends to violate whatever ‘style’ seems to be operating at each moment. Nor is it simply that the world according to Breer is full of shapes that seem infinitely transformable, a common attribute of “creative” (as opposed to commercial) animation. Nor is it only that his many techniques consciously refer to filmmaking processes, a “truth to materials” attitude consistent with the fact that Breer, who began making films while living in Europe, identifies his work with the Bauhaus aesthetic. It is, rather, that his work gives us a new definition of how the parts of an artwork might relate to the whole. Simply put, his films are beautifully balanced between classical unities based on consistent rhythms, shapes and colours rhyming with each other, and parts building toward a larger whole, and the opposite of all that, impossible contradictions of form and shape and rhythm that seem to be tearing the film apart at every moment that it is also coming together. If one accepts that the kinds of relationships between parts in an art work define a particular kind of thinking, then Breer gives us a “thinking” unlike any other, in which unity and disunity coexist in a beautiful and miraculous balance. Then, in some of his last works, the formal poles of unity and disunity start to become connected to ideas of success and failure, in a deeply moving acknowledgement by an older man of the limits of human achievement.
Born in 1926 in Detroit, Breer moved at around seven years old to a Detroit suburb, growing up in relative affluence. His father, Carl Breer, was an engineer and “co-founder of Chrysler,” Breer says. According to Chrysler, their 1934 Airflow model, streamlined for better aerodynamics, had its origins in Carl Breer’s observations of the patterns with which geese flew through the air. “Scared shitless” by the nuns in his Detroit Catholic school and schoolyard fights, he ran away at around 6, was picked up by the police, and has an “incredibly vivid visual and aural memory” of listening to the police car radio from the back seat as he was driven home.
The recreation room basement in their Grosse Pointe home “housed my model airplane making workbench.” He also “spent hours on Fats Waller-inspired – endlessly repeated – piano-banging. It never got any better.” Breer made perhaps hundreds of model airplanes, “later destroyed systematically by lighting them on fire and throwing them out the windows until my parents bedroom window awning caught on fire.”
Breer’s father noticed him drawing and sent him to art classes at the Detroit Institute of Arts, starting at the age of 10. When “puberty took over,” the airplane fantasies ended, and Breer also rejected the Catholicism under which he had been raised. He was the “official and unofficial artist (mostly cartoonist)” in high school. “I was voted class wit, and had practised being funny I suppose in self-defence, growing up in (except for my Irish-humoured mother) my straight engineering family.”
Enrolling at Stanford in engineering in 1943, Breer switched to art after a year, and was the cartoonist for the school paper. Drafted two weeks after the end of World War II, he was “mostly miserable until toward the end of my service when I was the artist in the Fort Jackson, South Carolina silkscreen shop.” A high point was meeting General Eisenhower, and “being photographed with him admiring my charcoal portrait of him done on official orders and which I had copied from a Time magazine snapshot.”
Returning to Stanford in 1947, Breer had his first exposure to Mondrian on a trip to San Francisco: “It was a big revelation to me that art could be totally abstract.” He began painting abstractly, but the art department at Stanford was realist, and the department head “explained to me (having discovered my first abstract painting — inspired by Mondrian, no doubt) that I would have to drop my studio classes if I insisted following abstraction. I did and he dropped me from art classes when, by some miracle, the new Humanities chairman set me up in a faculty studio to paint as I wished with a young art faculty teacher to check on me once a week or so.”
Upon graduation in 1949, Breer moved to Paris, meeting artists such as Victor Vasarely, Hans Arp and Yves Tinguely. His early paintings presented hard-edged shapes, but often with hints of irregularity and disparity that removed them from Mondrian’s purism. His first films, the Form Phases series that began in 1952, initially retained the look and feel of his paintings. But soon Breer had discovered the transformations in time that film and animation make possible. Or, as he has put it, “I suppose Form Phases showed some trepidation in that new medium until I said what the hell!”
With A Man and His Dog Out For Air, Breer began creating sequential drawings on paper or cards and filming them. In this animation ‘classic,’ abstract lines dynamically reshape themselves into the eponymous subject at the end, joking on our need to try to see recognizable things in abstract lines. But the joke was to get reversed in the later films, in which drawings or photographs of recognisable objects or scenes often lead to, or even morph into, abstractions.
Early in the three-part collage-like Jamestown Baloos (1957), there is a black and white still of Venice. A few rapid sections that include text and other things lead to a white string on black followed by a black string on white. These are felt as abstract lines that relate to the film’s other uses of abstract forms — but they are also physical objects, strings, and the images insist on their intrusive three-dimensional physicality. They are followed by more black and white abstractions that appear to be fabric cutouts. These form an important context for the second part, colour abstractions that appear to be brush paint daubs, but the string makes one wonder, and gives everything one sees some imagined physicality.
Here Breer starts to argue with the idealism of painters like Mondrian. To the imagined unity of things in a realm beyond the visible that Mondrian’s paintings aspire to evoke, Breer counterpoises his ‘kitchen sink’ approach, all the messy physicality of things in the world. Yet just as Mondrian’s grids seem to stretch way beyond the edges of the canvases, like pieces of some much larger unity, Breer’s inclusive approach creates films that seem to try to reach out and embrace everything, both the world of objects and its opposite, the world of ideal forms. The vanishing and mysteriously returning military music sets the tones for Breer’s future sound tracks, which frequently join sound and silence, unpredictability and gentle humour.
In 1959, Breer returned to the US, surviving with various jobs, eventually teaching at Cooper Union for many years (it cannot be pointed out often enough that even the greatest and most celebrated of avant-garde filmmakers, Breer and Brakhage among them, could never make a living from their work alone). Blazes (1961) presents a mix of stills that resemble abstract paintings, combined in various ways including intercutting superimposition. At first, the film seems to invoke the constructive nature of painterly abstraction, different forms building to larger unities in space. And at times, these paintings do seem to mesh. But Breer’s filming is itself disruptive, with moves past the designs and zooms in and out of focus. More significantly, the “meshing” of forms seems at every moment also a coming apart, as shapes don’t match up but rather work against or pull away from each other, and as Breer’s interventions represent a further diversion. There’s a simultaneous meshing and unmeshing. Wherever we are, the film seems to be saying, let’s go somewhere else. The ecstatic intensity it achieves at its every moment fully justifies Breer’s description to Guy L. Coté in 1962 (Film Culture 27) as “a form of visual orgasm.”
As Breer told Coté, he prefers to think in terms of the word “unrelationship,” a cinema that offers as an alternative to the rational, word-and-meaning based structures of literature, “a type of cinema built around the art of the non-rational, non-reasonable associations of images.” He defines his work in opposition to the purity of the “abstract art” that formed him early on, in which “red is red.” For him, “blood is red, and red is red, and the confusion is possible and right.”
69 (1968) begins in a manner that could be mistaken as a “successful,” almost academic version of what Blazes might have been mistaken as aspiring towards, in that four abstract shapes enter in succession, three (including a column) that seem to rotate in depth, and a fourth, a wheel, that crosses sideways. As P. Adams Sitney points out in Visionary Film, the play between these elements establishes a “dialogue” between the “literal flatness of the screen and its illusory depth,” and Breer himself has talked of his interest in “thresholds.” Indeed, every second of his films seems tenuously perched upon a knife-edge, its foot in each of two contradictory representational systems or universes — except there are several such ‘thresholds’ operating at once. In terms of being true to the materials of cinema, Breer perches his works on the thresholds between depth illusions and cinema’s actual flatness, and between stillness and movement. The latter, of course, is key to the animation process, but instead of using animation to produce ‘realistic’ illusions of movement, Breer is constantly playing at the edge of film’s flickering nature as a succession of stills, now showing us stills, now making them start to seem to move, now offering a moment of almost natural movement, and now collapsing that movement into stills again. The depth/flatness threshold functions similarly: just when the illusion of depth seems to be establishing itself, that flat wheel comes in and travels once again across the flat screen.
Sometimes Breer’s films seem almost like toys that never quite succeed, contraptions that never quite ‘get going’, model planes that crash after only the briefest of flights. But it’s never one ‘crash’: the ecstatic nature of his work is that his films are taking flight and ‘crashing’ at every instant of their unreeling, and the ‘crashes’ are experienced as being every bit as pleasurable, just as cinematically rich, as much a part of the films’ unity-in-disunity fabrics, as the ‘flights’. Indeed, the flat wheel in 69 is in some ways, by virtue of its surprise and contrast with the other movements, the most exciting moment of the opening.
The other principal point about 69 is that, having established his interpenetrating elements in a way that even with the contrasting wheel seems to be “building” to a larger space, Breer proceeds to take everything apart, by disconnecting the merging forms and through diversionary side-trips that are so often a source of delight in his work. Late in 69, we briefly see a field of out-of-focus coloured shapes whose ‘all-over’ effect is like nothing that came before. Seeming almost like decals, their centres come into focus only briefly. Coming in a film that’s mostly in black and white, this moment vibrates with colour, also causing the viewer to think, “What?” or “Wuzzat?,” to quote from two of the titles in Bang! (1986).
After this and other complexities and surprises, 69 ends with the return of the very first shape we saw, the rotating column. There are different ways of taking this, but there are times when it has seemed to me to be the profoundest moment of the film, when it seems not the return of stability but rather an evocation of the taking apart that followed it, and thus a lesson in how everything that we see, even what seems like the most regular of forms, can lead down the rabbit hole, or to its own undoing.
With 70 (1970), Breer began experimenting with sheets made with a colour photocopier, and the fuzzy textures and fields of random dots thus introduced gave his imagery a new complexity. There’s a play, another ‘threshold’, so to speak, between negative and positive space, as he alternates between coloured shapes with these fuzzy textures surrounded by white and similar shapes in white surrounded by the fuzzy colours. But the shapes are hugely more varied than this description, and the film seems to be pulling out of itself at every moment. The effect here, and elsewhere in his work when he flickers between similar shapes with different colour schemes, is to undercut the solidity of his objects, to suggest that everything seen is forever changeable — and to place the viewer’s ecstasy in the instant, the fraction of second, as it’s at, or close to, the speed of film’s 24fps flicker that we are continually pulled out of one form, one representational system, and into another. That no representational system has solidity also evokes the idea of nothingness, of the void, and indeed the neutral white grounds on which Breer’s films so often proceed have a habit of suddenly seeming emptied-out.
With Gulls and Buoys (1972), Breer introduced a new element into his work, rotoscoping, one that would influence the look of his films in succeeding decades. As he explained it at the time, rotoscoping – tracing images from realistically-photographed movies – was used by commercial animators to obtain more ‘realistic’ movements, but his intention was to use it to opposite ends. Fuji (1974) begins with a home movie shot from a train in Japan, a woman’s face with an overexposed landscape behind her. Almost immediately, we see a man running, from the same home movie footage. Breer then proceeds to offer his own sketchily-drawn rotoscoped images taken from this and related footage, such as the train conductor and Mount Fuji itself, the latter shown with an emphasis on the triangle of snow at its peak. Throughout, the drawing and movement offers enough to suggest actual scenes and everyday movements, but is rough enough and flickers enough to also reveal the nature of the medium. Thus our natural tendency to want to see realistic movements is constantly being argued with, as we are returned to film rhythms with our desire to ‘soar’ into some other world taken apart.
Starting with Mount Fuji’s snow-capped triangle, Breer abstracts it into pure line. He also begins with pure lines and morphs them around until they merge with Fuji’s peak. This double directionality forms yet another threshold, one Breer hinted at earlier by asserting that red can be both “red” and “blood,” the threshold between representation and abstraction, between images that refer to the world of nameable objects (and Fuji seems to clearly reference not merely the idea of a mountain, but this mountain’s depiction in the Japanese prints of Hokusai and Hiroshige) and an alternative, imaginative world in which objects can be seen as pure colour and
pure shape.
Fuji holds both in exquisite tension with each other, until its very end, when the home movie of the opening returns. As in 69, the image is now totally transformed, alive with new possibilities. And here, too, there is a lesson in daily seeing, a lesson that suggests more of an affinity with the worlds of Brakhage and of Ralph Waldo Emerson than with the European graphic cinema in whose context Sitney discusses Breer. To be fair, Sitney’s discussion of Breer’s work ends just before he started rotoscoping. Simply put, the idea here, one that Brakhage espoused for his own work, is that viewing certain films can transform daily eyesight, making the viewer’s visual world more alive. And indeed Fuji has surely done that for me, suggesting ways of seeing daily objects and movement in terms of geometrical forms.
As Breer has written, “Once I avoided conventional narration and replaced it with real time I could put the images together in non sequitur impositions. This might be what you call ‘daily seeing.’ It might be similar to the visual and aural experience of ordinary daily life – collision of experiences – not necessarily chaotic.” And indeed, the falling-apart effects in his films are never experienced as aesthetic disunity. As Breer suggested to Coté in 1962, his films may seem disordered only when one fails to sense “the aesthetic relationships which have in fact been put into the materials... My films are, if nothing else, formal: they are concerned with overall form... even if it’s anti-continuity, it still has a form.”
Breer continued to extend the achievement of Fuji in his later films, which become even more eclectic, even more inclusive. It was the multiple-tool, everything-but-the-kitchen-sink aspect of the famous Swiss Army Knife that doubtless served as a partial inspiration for Swiss Army Knife With Rats and Pigeons — the title a joke on how a Swiss Army Knife alone would not be inclusive enough for Breer. A photo of the red knife suddenly becomes a drawing, in which the red field drifts off into a moment of pure ‘red’. But the knife is also a tool, for cutting, carving, making and it becomes an apparent metaphor for Breer’s own constructions near the film’s end, when we see rapidly flickering drawings of a park. Somewhat in the style of impressionist paintings, their ever-changing vibrations achieve amazing intensity, while the intercut knife serves as a reminder that everything in the film is an artificial construction.
Bang! (1986) remains, for me, alongside What Goes Up? (2003), Breer’s greatest achievement. Here Breer explicitly personalizes his juxtapositions of formal unities and disunities, thematising it as a questioning of all human achievement. Repeated home movie footage of Breer as a boy paddling a canoe, juxtaposed with some of his youthful cartoons, suggests a not entirely positive childhood — we never see Breer actually get anywhere in his canoe. Early on, a rich bouquet of red flowers leads to some mostly black shapes, with a bit of red — a hint of the flowers’ red continuing, but only a hint, nothing like the rich intercutting of photographs and rotoscoped drawings in some earlier films. There are sports images, such as a football game (and Breer was, he admits, captain of his high school football team). A poster-like image of Hitler with planes suggests negative uses of the airplane flight that so fascinated Breer as a child, as do photographs of crashed planes.
A child’s toy, a red phone that walks across the floor beeping, becomes, like the Swiss Army Knife, another metaphor for and joke on, Breer’s art. He much earlier made motorised sculptures that traversed floors, but silently and very slowly, moving just at the limit of human perception, sculptures his phone seems to joke on. In a card with a photograph of flowers, the centre portion of it rotates circularly, while the rest of the card remains static — Breer built a little machine that made this image possible. The film had opened with a bang sound followed by the printed title ‘What?’, a title that now returns, suggesting a state of continuing befuddlement. Breer answers his questions with a series of graphic representations of the word ‘Nothing’, some in rather pompous richly-coloured three-dimensional lettering, suggesting a core theme of his art, and one that links him to Brakhage as well, that the kinds of verbal meanings we assign to known objects are inadequate, and their inadequacy is suggested not by Breer’s abandoning them, which he does not, but rather by the way he holds them in tension with abstract graphic elements, some drawn from them and some invented, as well as with moments of empty space
and silence.
What Goes Up?, like most of Breer’s films less than 10 minutes in length, has an emotional dimension not previously present in his work. It also has the feeling of a late, ‘testament’ film; while comparisons may seem absurd at first, I don’t think it’s absurd to think of What Goes Up? alongside von Sternberg’s Anatahan or John Ford’s Seven Women. It also suggests a ‘personal’ theme, that of an artist who, desperately trying to touch the world, realizes he can do so only through his art. There is a cut from a photograph of Breer taking a snapshot to a drawing of a nude woman, for example. Later a nude woman seems to occasion an image of a penis growing erect, done with clay animation, a medium often disdained as crude and identified with animation in its more commercial dimensions, and which Breer had previously abjured. In images of Mondrian paintings, they seem to “ascend,” moving up in the frame in a joke on the supposedly transcendent spirituality of Mondrian-like abstraction, which Breer opposes by balancing the abstract and the physical as co-equals, both ‘blood’ and ‘red’. The idea that late films can feel ‘autumnal’ is also dealt with explicitly here — with actual photographs of autumn trees and autumn leaves. Just as Breer can move away into abstraction, so he can move back to become surprisingly literal. The autumn leaves are seen in photos, and in drawings, and at a key moment near the end an image shows an actual autumn leaf sitting on a photo of autumn trees, a literalisation of the idea that touching the actual can only be achieved through art.
I can think of a few filmmakers whose work offers universes as complete as Breer, but none whose work seems more ‘complete.’ Breer weaves together daily seeing and abstract forms, depth and flatness, movement and stillness, sound and silence, coming together and falling apart, success and failure. Sitney has suggested that the project of avant-garde cinema is a mimesis of human consciousness, and along with Brakhage, Breer offers as complete a realisation of that aspiration as we have yet seen — in the form of “visual orgasms” which, filled with delight and surprise, also cause the viewer to reflect on seeing and thinking.
© Fred Camper 2007
This text originally appeared in the festival catalogue.
Unattributed quotes from Breer are from an email correspondence with the author, 2007.
