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green rectangle with a red circle inside. As soon as that image got stabilized in terms of the retina, as soon as the retina wasn't oscillating over the surface anymore, the red circle dropped out. The color differentiation was gone. That physiological process goes on all the time. It's interesting that it's almost the same rate as twenty-four frames a second, but maybe that's not related. The important thing is that the thresholds are needed. In order to establish
this,
you have to have
that
. I had a scientist following me around at one point. He got excited by my films because he hadn't thought of the consequences of this kind of rapid change. And
I
never thought about consequences; I just thought about how it looked to compose this way. But in teaching it over time I've picked up on what's going on.
MacDonald:
What was Noel Burch's commentary in
Recreation?
I don't know enough French to understand it.
Breer:
It's nonsense poetry: the words are puns that refer to the images. I made the film silent, as usual. I showed it that way for a while, but speculated on a soundtrack, and Noel got interested somehow. I don't remember the exact circumstances, but he went off and typed up a text, brought it back to me, and I suggested he record it. In those days I usually used a microphone on the projector: I'd record on the sound strip. In this case, though, I edited the sound so that I could synch the words exactly with the events. After it was recorded, Noel had second thoughts, so I didn't use the soundtrack out of deference to him. Then later, after I moved back here, I asked him about it, and he said he liked the track after all. So I added the sound and a credit, "Text by Noel Burch."
MacDonald: Recreation 2
[1956] seems like an afterthought.
Breer:
I never show that film. I should've ditched it. I learned from doing it not to try and do sequels. I was just using up the leftover energy from
Recreation
.
MacDonald: Jamestown Baloos
is an antimilitaristic film. In your earlier work you had been into abstraction. Here you're more directly political.
Breer:
I have mixed feelings about that. For one thing, there are some figures in
Jamestown Baloos
who are no longer known. Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus walks through with his briefcase and dark glasses. Governor Soapy Williams of Michigan rams his finger up the nose of the horse that a nun is sitting on: the horse lurches and the nun falls offsomething like that. They called him "Soapy" because the Williams family had a soap company. I had no particular contention with Soapy Williams. It's just that at the time he was a familiar figure. After I made that film, I realized that a lot of those political allusions were gone, irrelevant. I'd begun with an assumption that is no longer valid: that