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MacDonald: Recreation
was made in France?
Breer:
Right. I could tell from feedback at cine clubs that it was pretty outrageous.
MacDonald:
Another aspect of
Recreation
and
Jamestown Baloos
that seems new to you is a kind of self-reflexivity about filmmaking.
Breer:
I wrote a manifesto during
Jamestown
. I thought I was developing a whole new language (I didn't realize at the time how influenced I'd been by Fernand Leger's
Ballet Méchanique,
[1924]). Anyhow, the manifesto was about painting being fossilized action, whereas film was real action, real kinesis. Rather than a diagram or a plan for change, film was change. And that was the exciting new thing about it. At the time, I was thinking of Rauschenberg in particular, who was doing what I thought were essentially post-Schwitters [Kurt Schwitters] combine paintings, not something new. Rauschenberg was being touted, but I felt I was doing
real
collages that had all the Rauschenberg combinations but were also dynamic and rhythmic, a real step forward from Schwitters, who I admired very much.
MacDonald:
It's also another step in the development of metamorphosis. When you begin using imagery recognizable from pop culture in a new context, you're changing its meaning and impact. And also, in terms of timing, the viewer's mind is always behind in understanding what's just been presented: in both
Jamestown Baloos
and
Recreation
we're often seeing something new, and at the same time trying to think of the implications (original and new) of what we just saw.
Breer:
There's another thing too, that has to do with trajectory, with cutting on motion. If you have something continuing across the screen so that the continuity of the action itself dominates the content of what that thing is, you can change the thing that's moving, from one frame to the next. I've heard that old cartoonists used to play with that as a gag. As a bird would fly across the screen, they'd replace one of the images of the bird with a brick. Because of the motion of the bird, nobody would see the brick. That's an option you don't have in a static picture.
MacDonald:
An obvious example is in
Gulls and Buoys,
where the character riding the bicycle changes continually.
Breer:
That's me riding the bike, rotoscoped. I change radically each time. Some of this has to do with a psychological phenomenon: the eye oscillates, wiggles, at the rate of twenty-five or thirty times a second. They've discovered that the retina teases an image out of the void by oscillating over perceptual thresholds. In an experiment, a gadget was fixed to the subject's face so that it could read this very fine oscillation of the eye and translate it mechanically to the target image the person was looking at. The image would move every time the eye moved, in other words, remain fixed in relation to the retina. The image consisted of a