Robert Breer
Directing
Biography
Born in 1926 in Detroit, Robert Breer has spent fifty years building up a totally atypical body of work which plays with different genres and abolishes the notions of space and time. Starting off as a painter, he then deconstructed his neoplastic works and ended up with kinetic objects. He dealt next with the thresholds of awareness and perception, both as a sculptor and a film-maker. His films are composed of a jumble images that pass at great speed, while his Floats move almost imperceptibly, in accordance with an unpredictable logic. Robert Breer developed his light yet rigorous style while associating with the New York underground in the Pop years. Continuing his subtle exploration movement, he still today causes the space of reality-irrevocably unstable-to waver.
Known For
A compilation of over 30 years of private home movie footage shot by Lithuanian-American avant-garde director Jonas Mekas, assembled by Mekas "purely by chance", without concern for chronological order.
As I Was Moving Ahead, Occasionally I Saw Brief Glimpses of Beauty
A film collage tracing the story of the lives, loves, and deaths within the artistic community surrounding Jonas Mekas.
He Stands in a Desert Counting the Seconds of His Life
Experimental filmmaker Pip Chodorov traces the course of experimental film in America, taking the very personal point of view of someone who grew up as part of the experimental film community.
Free Radicals: A History of Experimental Film
Jonas Mekas assembles 160 portraits, appearances, and fleeting sketches of underground and independent filmmakers captured between 1955 and 1996. Fast-paced and archival in spirit, the film celebrates the avant-garde as its own “nation of cinema,” a vital community existing outside the dominance of commercial film.
Birth of a Nation
Conceivably the best of all of Breer’s films to date – has more to do with figuration, according to Breer’s formulation regarding titles with letters or numbers. This becomes clear right away as the title letters are intercut with a flurry of fish swimming past the frame lines, which are made all the more literal through the associative chain established by a snippet of Schubert’s Trout Quintet heard on the soundtrack, along with footsteps – which continue over a profusion of other shapes, colors, and objects, including the title letters again. -- Jonathan Rosenbaum
Lmno
A live action footage of a smiling, bespectacled (presumably) Western tourist set against the familiar cadence of an accelerating train revving up as it leaves the station sets the mesmerizing tone for the film's abstract panoramic survey of an Ozu-esque Japanese landscape of electrical power lines, passing trains, railroad tracks, and the gentle slope of obliquely peaked, uniform rooflines as Breer distills the essential geometry of Mount Fuji into a collage of acute angles and converging (and bifurcating) lines .
Fuji
A number of simple mechanical objects spiral out of a spray-paint nebula then implode into pure pattern and line.
77
First shown on January 30, 1967, FOR LIFE AGAINST THE WAR was an open-call, collective statement from American independent filmmakers disparate in style and sensibility but united by their opposition to the Vietnam War. Part of the protest festival Week of the Angry Arts, the epic compilation film incorporated minute-long segments which were sent from many corners of the country, spliced together and projected. The original presentation of the works was more of an open forum with no curation or selection, and in 2000 Anthology Film Archives preserved a print featuring around 40 films from over 60 submissions.
For Life, Against the War
An experimental film in which a photograph of an airplane turns into a wire diagram, then into an animated plane in flight, and then it explodes into words.
Bang!
Robert Breer animation from 1969. 16mm, color, silent, using spray paint & stencils.
69
A free flow from photography to geometric abstraction hand-painted by Breer. - Harvard Film Archive
Eyewash
Featuring a commentary by Noël Burch (in nonsense French), Recreation's rapid-fire montage of single-frame images of incredible density and intensity has been compared to contemporary Beat poetry.
Recreation
No description available.
Image by Images II
While birds can be heard singing a shrill song, lines crisscross wildly as if they aimed to form shapes. Their efforts seem hopeless until the very end.
A Man and His Dog Out for Air
No description available.
Inner and Outer Space
No description available.
Image by Images III
An animated fable centered around a backyard pond shown intermittently in live-action scenes.
A Frog on the Swing
Short hand drawn representation of a cat
Cats
Cut-outs of war machines and the figure of Napoleon – contributors to an anti-war theme – encounter abstract shapes, line drawings, old-master landscapes, short bursts of ‘real-time’ landscapes and shakily photographed gestural watercolors. … ‘a synthesis of all previous techniques.’
Jamestown Baloos
Breer's extraordinary autobiographical film combines personal and family photos with intense colors, textures and geometric abstractions. Originally presented as part of Karlheinz Sotckhausen's 1964 premiere of Originale. - Harvard Film Archive