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Breer:
Oh sure. That comes out of my paintings.
Form Phases I
was a painting before it was a film. I used its composition for the film. I moved the shapes around and had them grow and replace each other. I went from making paintings to animating paintings. For me, that was the whole point of making a film.
I was very involved with the abstract, geometric, post-Cubist orthodoxy: a painting is an object and its illusions have to acknowledge its surface as a reality. The tricks you use to do that are Cubist tricks: figure/ground reversals, intersections, overlappings. Of course, [Hans] Richter did all this in 1921 in
Rhythm 21
. I guess it's pretty obvious that I'd seen that film by the time I made
Form Phases IV
. I got to know Richter later in New York, but I remember that film having a big impact. I lifted stuff right out of it.
MacDonald:
How long had you been painting in Paris before you began to make films?
Breer:
I went to Paris in 1949. I started abstract concrete painting in 1950, about six months after I arrived. Until then I had painted everything from sad clowns to landscapes. The first film was finished in 1952.
MacDonald:
In
Fist Fight
there's an image of a gallery with Mondrianesque paintings . . .
Breer:
Those are mine. That was my gallery, though by that time I wasn't rectilinear the way Mondrian is. The Neoplastic movement with [Victor] Vasarely and [Alberto] Magnelli had happened, and I was aware of their new take on constructivism.
MacDonald:
I was going to ask you about Vasarely. There are places in
Form Phases IV
and also in
Image by Images
[1956] and
Motion Pictures
(1956) where one striped design passes over another to create an optical effect that reminds me of Vasarely.
Breer:
My earliest paintings in Paris were influenced by early Vasarelynot by what got to be called "op art," but by his earlier paintings, which were very simple and much less systematic than the later op works. By the time I was making films, I wasn't interested in Vasarely, though maybe there's some residue.
The movement show at Denise René Gallery opened in 1955. And to go along with it, Pontus Hulten was supposed to organize a film show. He's an art historian and until recently was the director of the Beauborg Art Museum in Paris. He did the Machine show at MoMA [The Machine as Seen at the End of the Mechanical Age, 1968]. Pontus got sick, and I picked up the pieces a little bit and helped him. We were drinking buddies in Paris. He was a collaborator on my Pope Pius film [
Un Miracle
], and he used my camera to make an abstract film called
X
. He also made
A Day in Town
[1956], a Dada-surrealist film that ends with a fire engine burning. Anyhow, the two of us made a document of Denise