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to make films he was a painter living in Paris), Breer began to explore a variety of techniques. For
Un Miracle
(1954) he cartooned with paper cutouts to create a tiny satire of Pope Pius XII. In
Image by Images
(1956),
A Man and His Dog Out for Air
(1957), and
Inner and Outer Space
(1960), the focus is the drawn line and Breer's ability to use it to create a continuous metamorphosis of two-dimensional abstract design and three-dimensional illusionism.
To define Breer as an animator, as I have done, is misleading, for beginning with
Recreation
(1956) and
Jamestown Baloos
(1957) he began to explore the impact of radically altering the imagery in successive frames in a manner that has more in common with Peter Kubelka's films and theoretical writings than with any area in the history of animation up to that point. If Breer's earliest films can be seen, in part, as an attempt by a painter to add motion to his work, these films seem an attempt to reveal film's potential in the area of collage. Instead of creating a homogeneous, conventional film space into which our eyes and minds can peer,
Recreation
and
Jamestown Baloos
create retinal collages that our minds subsequently synthesize and/or decipher. In
Eyewash
(1959) and later in
Fist Fight
(1964), Breer used his single-frame procedure to move out of his workspace and into the world in a manner that seems related to the hand-held, single-framing style Jonas Mekas was using by the time he made
Walden
(1968). In many of these films, Breer includes not only drawing and the movements of cutout shapes but imagery borrowed from magazines and objects collected from around the home. One is as likely to see a real pencil as a drawn pencil; in fact, the inclusion of one kind of image of a particular subject is almost sure to be followed by other kinds: a drawn mouse by a real mouse or a wind-up mouse, for example. Of all the films of Breer's middle period,
Fist Fight
seems the most ambitious. Thousands of photographs, drawings, and objects are animated into a fascinating diary of Breer's environment, his background, and his aesthetic repertoire.
By the mid sixties Breer was moving away from collage and back toward abstraction in
66
(1966),
69
(1968),
70
(1970), and
77
(1977). Not only is
69
the most impressive of these (among other things it creates a remarkably subtle palette of shimmering color); its paradoxical structure enacts a procedure which seems basic to much of Breer's work.
69
begins as a rigorously formal work: a series of perspectival geometric shapes move through the image again and again, each time with slight color, texture, and design variations. But as soon as we begin to become familiar with the various shapes and their movements, Breer begins to add details that undercut the hard-edged formalist look and rhythm established in the opening minutes. By the end,
69
seems to have turned, at least in part, into its opposite: the shapes continue to rotate through the frame, but