A Critical Cinema 2: Interviews with Independent Filmmakers

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.

MacDonald:

The similarity I see is the idea of animation being primarily about metamorphosis, rather than storytelling.

Breer:

I did what I've always done. I skipped cinema history and started at the beginning. I used very peculiar techniques because I didn't know how to animate. That I would do what Cohl did makes sense. You know Santayana's line about how, if you don't know something, you're doomed to relive it. I'm still working out things that people worked out years ago. My rationale is to not risk being influenced, but in truth it might just be laziness. I think it makes sense to do research. My old man was in charge of research at an engineering firm. The word was part of his title, and he used the word all the time. But I always associated it with the academy and with institutions and didn't want any part of it. I remember seeing a book,

How to Animate,

put out by Kodak I think. The kind of cartooning it was pushing turned me off so badly that I didn't want to learn

anything

they had to offer. I was afraid it would contaminate me.

MacDonald:

In

Form Phases I

you were already doing sophisticated work with figure and ground, and with the way the eye identifies and understands what it sees.

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Breer:

Oh sure. That comes out of my paintings.

Form Phases I

was a painting before it was a film. I used its composition for the film. I moved the shapes around and had them grow and replace each other. I went from making paintings to animating paintings. For me, that was the whole point of making a film.

I was very involved with the abstract, geometric, post-Cubist orthodoxy: a painting is an object and its illusions have to acknowledge its surface as a reality. The tricks you use to do that are Cubist tricks: figure/ground reversals, intersections, overlappings. Of course, [Hans] Richter did all this in 1921 in

Rhythm 21

. I guess it's pretty obvious that I'd seen that film by the time I made

Form Phases IV

. I got to know Richter later in New York, but I remember that film having a big impact. I lifted stuff right out of it.

MacDonald:

How long had you been painting in Paris before you began to make films?

Breer:

I went to Paris in 1949. I started abstract concrete painting in 1950, about six months after I arrived. Until then I had painted everything from sad clowns to landscapes. The first film was finished in 1952.

MacDonald:

In

Fist Fight

there's an image of a gallery with Mondrianesque paintings . . .

Breer:

Those are mine. That was my gallery, though by that time I wasn't rectilinear the way Mondrian is. The Neoplastic movement with [Victor] Vasarely and [Alberto] Magnelli had happened, and I was aware of their new take on constructivism.

MacDonald:

I was going to ask you about Vasarely. There are places in

Form Phases IV