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Robert Breer
Robert Breer is the most accomplished contemporary in a tradition of experimental animation that begins with Emile Cohl and Winsor McCay and includes, among others, Hans Richter, Viking Eggeling, Oskar Fischinger, Len Lye, the Whitney brothers, and Jordan Belson. What distinguishes Breer's work, however, is his decision to use frame-by-frame filmmaking to conduct explorations of the viewer's perceptual and conceptual thresholds. Breer's gift is to be able to do exploratory film work with a wit, a technical dexterity, and a knowledgeability that make his films accessible to a much broader audience than most experimental/avant-garde filmmakers can attract. During the middle part of his career he was also a sculptor, designing and building elegant (and amusing) "floats" that move very, very slowly along the floor or ground. The largest of these were made for the Pepsi-Cola Pavilion, designed for Expo '70 in Osaka by the Experiments in Art and Technology group. In fact, one of the more fruitful ways of thinking of Breer is to see him as an artist fascinated with making things move and with the ways in which their motion can affect those who perceive it.
Breer's first films
Form Phases I
(1952),
Form Phases II, III
(1953),
Form Phases IV
(1954)seem closely related to Richter's
Rhythm 21
and some of Fischinger's work: shapes of colored paper are moved around to create continually changing abstract configurations that intermittently draw the viewer's awareness to the materials and processes used. The films seem to flip back and forth between exercises in two-dimensional design and indices of the three-dimensional materials and processes being used. As he became increasingly interested in film (before beginning