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René's movement show. Denise bought a couple rolls of film for us, and we used my camera. Later I did the editing. That show was the first time Vasarely showed those grids that would swing in front of one another. Maybe that was the first gallery show of exclusively kinetic art, although, of course, Denise was preceded in general by the futurists. But after the war, kineticism was one of the things she picked up on. [Jean] Tinguely was incorporated into her gallery after his first show.
On a visit home in 195152, I went to an art supply store in downtown Detroit and saw this device"Slidecraft" I think it was called. You could rent a projector and buy a bunch of frosted three-by-three-inch slides and draw on them. I made sequences and projected them singly onto a screen, and then filmed them off the screen, one at a time. That's how I made
Form Phases I
. Strange way to work, but I didn't know about using an animation stand yet. In some ways though, by seeing my images projected on a screen before they were shot, I could better visualize the end result. I still have a flipbook made up of those slides bolted together in sequence.
MacDonald:
Did film grab you right away?
Breer:
By the time of
Jamestown Baloos
I was enthusiastic. But at first I was scared of the camera. I had an aversion to photography, partly, I suppose, because of my father's enthusiasm for it. The only big fight I ever had with him was over his taking pictures of me, and of stopping things to take pictures of the family. He came to visit me in Europe, and we'd go to a restaurant, and he'd stand on the next table and take pictures. It was embarrassing. It seemed to me then that he photographed everything before he reacted and could only react
after
he'd developed his pictures. That was counter to my feeling of how life should be experienced. I didn't like the idea of the lens between me and what I was looking at. I wouldn't even wear sunglasses. It's a wonder I ever got into film.
MacDonald:
From what you say, I assume that the history of film was not particularly interesting to you. Film simply became a way of doing things with painting that you couldn't do on a still canvas. And the filmmakers whose work seems related to your early films tend to have come to film for the same reason. Fischinger, for example.
Breer:
In a way, I suppose that's true, but somebody I always mention as having a powerful influence on me was Jean Vigo, who didn't make animated abstract films. His spirit of free association in
A propos de Nice
[1930], for instance, and the kind of cutting he does there, moved me. And I liked
Zéro de Conduite
[1933], his anarchism, his humor, and his esprit. I could identify with him. I have an aversion to just purely abstract films. That's why I have trouble with Fischinger. I admire him in some ways and find him something of an abomination in others.