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they sometimes ''wilt" into flat, two-dimensional, cartoonlike shapes. For Breer, the homogeneity of most film experiencesthe seemingly almost automatic tendency for commercial narrative films, as well as for documentary and experimental films, to establish a particular look and procedure and to rigorously maintain it throughout the duration of the presentationrepresents a failure of imagination that needs to be filmically challenged.
During the seventies and eighties Breer produced films that bring together many of the procedures explored in earlier work while continually trying out new procedures, new attacks on filmic homogeneity:
Gulls and Buoys
(1972),
Fuji
(1974),
Rubber Cement
(1975),
LMNO
(1978),
TZ
(1978),
Swiss Army Knife with Rats and Pigeons
(1980),
Trial Balloons
(1982),
Bang!
(1987),
A Frog on the Swing
(1988) . . .
I talked with Breer in January and February 1985.
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MacDonald:
One influence that seems clear in your first films,
Form Phases I
and
Form Phases II
is Emile Cohl.
Breer:
I hadn't seen Cohl's films at that point. After I did
A Man and His Dog Out for Air,
Noel Burch, who was also in Paris at that time, asked me if I'd seen Cohl. When I said no, he took me over to the Cinematheque, and we saw Cohl's films there.
MacDonald:
The similarity I see is the idea of animation being primarily about metamorphosis, rather than storytelling.
Breer:
I did what I've always done. I skipped cinema history and started at the beginning. I used very peculiar techniques because I didn't know how to animate. That I would do what Cohl did makes sense. You know Santayana's line about how, if you don't know something, you're doomed to relive it. I'm still working out things that people worked out years ago. My rationale is to not risk being influenced, but in truth it might just be laziness. I think it makes sense to do research. My old man was in charge of research at an engineering firm. The word was part of his title, and he used the word all the time. But I always associated it with the academy and with institutions and didn't want any part of it. I remember seeing a book,
How to Animate,
put out by Kodak I think. The kind of cartooning it was pushing turned me off so badly that I didn't want to learn
anything
they had to offer. I was afraid it would contaminate me.
MacDonald:
In
Form Phases I
you were already doing sophisticated work with figure and ground, and with the way the eye identifies and understands what it sees.