ROBERT BREER: DADANIMATOR
The arc of Robert Breer’s creative life is so anchored in the
fine art world of painting, sculpture and avant-garde film that to
savor it fresh again, at this festival, is to be reminded of the deeply
complex lineage all animators share. Having completed his latest film
in 2003, 50 years after his first, Breer continues to demonstrate and
embody the vitality of experimental animation, even as that term
undergoes reappraisal.
Born in 1926, Breer grew up building model airplanes and drawing
cartoons in Detroit where his father was one of the principal engineers
at Chrysler, chiefly responsible for introducing aerodynamics to
automobile design. As an undergraduate art major at Stanford he was
attacked for painting like Mondrian, instead of following the social
realism of his teachers. In 1949 Breer came to Paris and studied on the
G.I. Bill at the studio of Ossip Zadkine. He immersed himself in the
hard-edged abstraction of Neo-Plasticism, producing and exhibiting
elegant canvasses of flat, angular shapes which seem in retrospect
ready to slip into motion. He began a series of film experiments in
1952, and in 1955 made “Image Par Images,” the first fine art edition
flipbook for the influential Le Mouvement exhibit, the first
show of kinetic art (which included Duchamp, Calder and Tinguely, among
others). By 1956 Breer had exclusively moved to (“backed into,” as he
says) filmmaking and, upon relocating to New York in 1959, broadened
his work to include kinetic sculpture and mutoscopes.
The shift to animation involved a radical reinvention of accepted
practice. Instead of merely dissecting and rearranging his formal
designs as a temporal collage, Breer intervenes during shooting and
editing -- spontaneous, playful actions resembling jazz improvisation.
There is a pervasive feeling of randomness colliding with order;
structures and relationships appear and recede slyly, subverting
expectation. Design, like his sense of timing, becomes compressed, a
shorthand. Challenging the cinematic mandate for narrative continuity,
Breer creates a cinema of discontinuous, saccadic angularity, formal
yet brimming with personal reference and wit.
Like Emile Cohl (the caricaturist who reverted to stick-figures), whom
he consciously mimes in LMNO (1978), Breer undergoes a
kind of regression from the established elegance of painting to the
more primitive, intimate gesture of the sketch, often with blunt
markers and crayons on index cards. Like his friend Jean Arp, who
famously tore up his canvas and flung the pieces on the floor to
discover a more satisfying design, Breer often employs chance
procedures in sequencing to create a wide range of visual
experience--from collisions of disparate sequential themes to
suggestions of simultaneity.
It is impossible to see Breer’s films without being reminded of the art
world movements and ideas that influenced him: Dada’s anarchy, Abstract
Expressionism’s action, Pop’s appropriational fun, Minimalism’s
severity. Yet this heady mix is often tossed up with snatches of
cartooning as children, rats, pocket knives, cats and nudes tumble
through the timescape. How do we interpret these icons? Are they
aspects of a personal narrative, breathing the complications of
familial life and love? Symbols of a footloose nation teetering
nonchalantly between war and peace? Illustrations of what art critic
Harold Rosenberg called the “anxious object”? Or, as William Carlos
Williams put it, “No ideas but in things”?
Breer’s “things” take on a loaded intensity in Recreation (1956)
which features a fragmentary voice-over text delivered in an affectless
monotone which may or may not be a description of the cascade of images
to follow. The mechanical tempo of the voice, the propulsive staccato
of the individual, unrelated frames yields a vision of hallucinatory
intensity: the viewer struggles to impose order and meaning only to be
tripped up by the sudden appearance of a toy chicken. Unlike Form
Phases IV (1954), the series of spatial games which are
clearly extensions of Breer’s painting concerns, Recreation
represents his effort to construct a stacked collage in time, a series
of “unrelationships”, similar to the mutoscopes and wall-mounted
flipcard constructions to come. As further evidence of symbiosis
between filmic image and object, Breer enlarged every frame to 35 mm
and mounted them between sheets of Plexiglas to “re-create” a composite
window for installation.
The other film from the 50s, A Man and His Dog Out for Air (1957),
composed of squiggly ink lines that cavort on a white field, is
dedicated to his young daughter. It takes the form of a busy, abstract
doodle which ultimately resolves into its eponymous scene, redolent of
Calder’s circus.
Using innocent names like “creepy,” “rug,” or “float,” Breer has, since
the 1960s, created kinetic sculpture in a dazzling array of scale and
multiplicity. Designed to resemble overturned teacups, crumpled
sheeting, or other vaguely utilitarian detritus, they meander
automatically at a snail’s pace, altering direction when obstructed. In
all of Breer’s constructions we see both a keen attention to
engineering, materials, and craft, like other minimalist and serial
sculpture in vogue at the time. But Breer’s work tends toward the
unexpected, the parodic-- playfully out of control. The date films,
like 69 and 70 on the program, are elegantly designed
extensions of the sculpture: precise, hard-edged, repetitive, formalist
studies in line and shadow, intended for a gallery space inhabited by
floats.
Sound plays a critical role in Breer’s work: largely absent, intruding
casually at curious moments, often imitating machinery, random
ambience, snatches of conversation or radio. The tracks owe much to
John Cage in their refusal to organize the visuals into a dramatic
narrative. Fist Fight (1964) is one of the few examples of
continuous music which might shape the animation. But not only does
Breer subvert the music of Stockhausen (itself already the epitome of
“difficult”) by using a muffled microphone and including the audience’s
extraneous post-concert chatter, he plays Satie-like tricks by offering
one false start and climax after another.
The other anomalous example is the music video Blue Monday (1988),
a commercial collaboration with Weimaraner artist William Wegman for
the techno group New Order, in which the musicians take delight in
thumbing through Breer’s flipbooks.
During the 70s and 80s, as Breer’s work becomes more complex in
technique and personal associations, it also achieves the level of
poetry. He has in a sense found a groove: an effortless language
balancing mimesis and abstraction, photography and drawing, object and
image, sexual desire and the domesticity of family life. Home movies
loosely rotoscoped in crayon collide with mythic American icons of
baseball, airplanes, telephones and, well, take your pick. The
mysterious objects of Recreation, the eccentric rhythms of
perception, the witty scribbles, all have now taken on the familiarity
of street corner argot, graffiti for the mind, and while still open to
multiple interpretations, one feels able to speak more of content and
meaning than mere form.
To call Breer an experimental animator correctly places him in the
family of Richter, Fischinger and Lye. Yet regardless of the tools we
use, all animators can learn from Breer’s gift: his mischievous spirit
of inquiry, neither heavy nor aerodynamic, which conveys delight in
discovering simple truths.
GG
2004
PROGRAM
Form Phases IV. 3:30. 1954
Recreation. 2:00. 1956
A Man and His Dog Out for Air. 3:00. 1957
Blazes. 3:00. 1961
69. 5:00. 1969
70. 4:25. 1970
Fist Fight. 8:35. 1964
LMNO. 10:00. 1978
Swiss Army Knife with Rats and Pigeons. 6:00. 1980
Bang! 8:00. 1986
Blue Monday. 1988 (don’t know running time)
What Goes Up? 4:46. 2003
Ottawa International Animation Festival, 2004