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I did bring to those early films all these post-Cubist notions of space. Making
Form Phases I,
I realized that whatever moves destroys everything else. You have to counter one movement with another. If you have one thing moving in an otherwise static field, the static field dies. You know the usual opening shot of a conventional film, the helicopter shot of a car going down a highway seen from aboveyou watch that car. It's a tiny dot on a huge screen, but you're glued to that one thing and everything else is peripheral. Once I was making films, I learned that I couldn't work with the stable kinds of relationships I'd worked with in my painting. I had to rethink things completely. And that's when I went for an all-over active screen and for real hectic films. Then I could play with the agitation itself in dosages, rather than try to think in terms of static compositions in which elements move.
MacDonald:
Most of your films are not about particular topics. Was there a specific incident involving Pope Pius XII that caused you to do
Un Miracle?
Breer:
It must have been inspired by something I saw, but I'll be damned if I know what. I had had this vision of doing a film based on
The Metamorphosis,
the Kafka story where the main character changes into an insect. I wasn't interested in illustrating Kafka, but in using the notion of metamorphosis. I had my camera set up in Montparnasse. It was Sunday, I remember, and I was going to shoot film. I walked to the kiosk in Montparnasse and bought a
Paris Match
. In this
Paris Match
there was an essay on Pope Pius XII, with a lot of photographs. My vision was that this film would go from live action into animation or vice versa, and back again. The idea was just as general as that. But after buying the
Paris Match,
I saw the possibility of doing a number on Pope Pius. My anti-Catholicism was pretty fervent in those days. Pius XII was accused of reneging on allowing Jews to escape from Germany and was generally very aloof and removedpious in the worst sense. So with all these pictures in my hand I went to the studio. I picked up Hulten on the way and talked to him about what I wanted to do. He suggested a way of organizing a little sequence, and I cut the photos out and put the thing together. He helped me conceive narratively, which I don't think I would have done normally. But the sacrilegious part was all mine. Pontus and I had gotten drunk together around that time and I went into the church in Montparnasse to slip goldfish into the holy water. Hulten was the lookout. I got the fish into the basin, but it was shallow, and they went out the other side, and onto the floor. I scooped them up, got them into the plastic bag, and we took off. I remember writing a letter to the pope asking how much it would cost to be excommunicated. That was the mood behind that film. The actual esthetic had to do with transformation. It ended up being the pope juggling his head. It wasn't what I had expected it to be.