Robert Breer

FROM: O’Pray, M. ‘Avant-Garde Film Forms, Themes and Passions’ (2003) Wallflower Press. Pages 64 - 68

Originally influenced by Mondrian and Kandinsky, Robert Breer’s paintings were in the “hard edged abstraction mode of the neo-plasticians.” He became interested in filmmaking in the 1950s producing films similar to Richter’s experimental work in the 1920s.

In Breer’s “non- literary” and “non-dramatic” film Form Phases (1954), geometric shapes move in space using colour. Breer’s early films were in the “absolute cinema tradition of of the German graphic animation movement of Richter, Ruttmann and Fischinger. Later in his career, he acknowledged “the Hollywood cartoon tradition.”

Breer’s film Recreation (1956-7) was akin to the Man Ray and Leger’s work and the Dada tradition.

According to O’Pray, during the 1960s, the Pop art scene influenced Breer’s work which became more “culturally sensitive”, personal and self-deprecating. He used his family and domestic settings as sources of inspiration for his films which were partially documentary in style. Whilst there are similarities with of Brakhage, the work of the latter, according to O’Pray was void of Breer’s wit and self-deprecation.

A Man and his Dog Out for Air

O’Pray claims that Breer’s film, Form Phases IV (1954) with its hand-drawn curving lines which change shape, “can be seen as a precursor of his classic A Man and His Dog Out for Air (1957)” where a black line on a white background transforms into a variety of shapes and drawings, which echoes Fischinger’s work. O’Pray says,

“Shifts from two- to three-dimensional space are continual and momentary, teasing the viewer.”

This film is also characterised by “live action sounds” such as the loud twittering of a bird. Len Lye, Fischinger and Harry Smith used music to accompany abstract graphic films. According to O’Pray, Breer’s use of noises such as “taps running” and “dogs yapping” rather than traditional music, means that “the internal rhythms of the film are not distorted.”

Furthermore, O’Pray suggests that although Breer’s “more personal expressive approach” is similar to Brakhage’s work, they differ with regard to their “forms, themes and passions.”

Breer used roto-scoping to produce “natural movement” however, O’Pray argues that there is also “a chaotic aspect to the drawings that is definitely hand-made.”

O’Pray suggests, that Breer revived the “true graphic tradition of American cartoon, lost in the early 1930s.” According to Norman Klein,

“ ‘While [the pre-1934 cartoon] makes allusion to story, its primary responsibility is to surface, rhythm, and line’ (1993: 5). ”

O’Pray argues, “ the same could be said of Breer’s films.”

O’Pray concludes that,

“in the work of both Breer and Brakhage, strong modernist values are established in the film avant-garde. For the first time formalist exploration and innovation is in the service of an intensely personal cinema.”