A Critical Cinema 2: Interviews with Independent Filmmakers

doing a film based on

The Metamorphosis,

the Kafka story where the main character changes into an insect. I wasn't interested in illustrating Kafka, but in using the notion of metamorphosis. I had my camera set up in Montparnasse. It was Sunday, I remember, and I was going to shoot film. I walked to the kiosk in Montparnasse and bought a

Paris Match

. In this

Paris Match

there was an essay on Pope Pius XII, with a lot of photographs. My vision was that this film would go from live action into animation or vice versa, and back again. The idea was just as general as that. But after buying the

Paris Match,

I saw the possibility of doing a number on Pope Pius. My anti-Catholicism was pretty fervent in those days. Pius XII was accused of reneging on allowing Jews to escape from Germany and was generally very aloof and removedpious in the worst sense. So with all these pictures in my hand I went to the studio. I picked up Hulten on the way and talked to him about what I wanted to do. He suggested a way of organizing a little sequence, and I cut the photos out and put the thing together. He helped me conceive narratively, which I don't think I would have done normally. But the sacrilegious part was all mine. Pontus and I had gotten drunk together around that time and I went into the church in Montparnasse to slip goldfish into the holy water. Hulten was the lookout. I got the fish into the basin, but it was shallow, and they went out the other side, and onto the floor. I scooped them up, got them into the plastic bag, and we took off. I remember writing a letter to the pope asking how much it would cost to be excommunicated. That was the mood behind that film. The actual esthetic had to do with transformation. It ended up being the pope juggling his head. It wasn't what I had expected it to be.

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MacDonald:

While metamorphosis is usually central in your filmswe watch the constant shifting of one thing into anotherduring the early part of your film career it was already taking two different forms, each of which tended to be primary in one film or another. In some cases you worked with generalized shapes:

Form Phases I, II,

and

IV

are examples. In other cases

Image by Images, Inner and Outer Space,

and

A Man and His Dog Out for Air,

for examplethe metamorphosis of the drawn line is the focus.

Breer:

Well, the linear ones come from my wanting to be simple, wanting to make a film with a pencil, or in this case, with Flomaster pens. I really got to be an expert with those pens. I called myself a Flo Master. Anyhow, I liked the idea that all I needed to make a film was paper and ink, or pretty close to it.

A Man and His Dog Out for Air

was a popular success, relatively speaking. It wasn't the first time I got noticed, but it had a large audience in New York, including people who wouldn't normally have reacted to avant-garde painting or avant-garde anything else. I thought maybe this was a special way of expressing myself simply, directly, and primitively, that could get a broader audience. And it was agreeable to sit and draw on cards or paper all day long. Those films came more from sitting at a drawing table or a desk, looking out the window, and having a nice time. And later committing it to film.

When I was making the collage films, I was more involved with what I was going to see on the screen at the end, which had more to do with editing and with thinking in terms of that big rectangle up on the wall with people looking at it. I alternated methods. I'd get tired of doing film one way, and the next time I'd do it the other way.

I just had a flash about something you said about metamorphosis. Metamorphosis is just a natural thing. In animation you make each frame, and for something not to be dead on the screen, it has to change. One of my tricks used to be to see if I could trace an image as exactly as possible. I knew it would still vary a little bit and that that variation would give it a sort of breathing presence on the screen.

Breathing

[1963] is an example. In trying to copy, I found I couldn't, and I liked the idea that it was impossible. Whether I tried to hold the images absolutely still or let them fly off in every direction, metamorphosis was what was going to happen anyway.

The tendency for someone who's just starting to animate will be to begin on the left side of the page and move something very laboriously a little bit at a time over to the right side. As you get more sophisticated, you plan ahead so that you know where the thing is going to be on the other side long before it gets there. And instead of starting at point A, maybe you'll start at point O or point L, somewhere in the middle of an

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action, and work it backward and forward. But if you choose to be simple, naive, direct, open, and follow your nose, your nose will take you places you can't foresee, and that leads to so-called metamorphosis. That's where the spirit of spontaneity comes in. In my films spontaneity is mostly in the beginning stages; then in the editing I contradict my spontaneity by encapsulating these bursts of spontaneity in a structure of some kind. A structure can come either through the editing or the planning; in my case, it usually comes through editing.

MacDonald:

You always seem at pains to show figuration and narrative as one of a very large number of possibilities that an animator can work with. We always know that you could do conventional animation if you wanted to.

Breer:

One thing about narration is its effect on figure-ground relationship. One common form of narration is to have a surrogate self on the screen that people can identify with. In cartooning it's a cartoon figure. Grotesque as he or she might be, the figure becomes an identity you follow. If that figure is anthropomorphic or animal, it has a face, and that face will dominate, the way an active ingredient in a passive landscape dominates the field. It sets up a constant visual hierarchy that to me is impoverished. I want every square inch of the screen potentially active, alivethe whole damned screen. I don't want any one thing to take over. The problem with narration is that the figures always dominate the ground. In the theater, the actors have their feet planted on the stage, and there's a large space above them. That space is justified because the actors are three-dimensional, living, breathing, sweating human beings who make sound when they move and have real physical presence. It doesn't matter that gravity keeps them all at the bottom of the stage. But when it comes to a flat screen, I don't have to have gravity