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there's a logical progression from figurative to abstract in the history of art, and that this progression was unidirectional; fine art had to be abstract, and illustration or illusionismincluding topical satirewas a step backward or a step down, a slightly lower form of expression. In this hierarchy political film is lower as an art experience than abstract film, because it quickly becomes irrelevant. Abstract art film wasn't subject to aging, and therefore was a higher form that could address itself to all humanity and all situations. Now I see that idea as another chimaera, a delusion. But in
Jamestown
I thought I could escape this supposed truth by having lower and higher forms in the same film: I could combine all levels of experience and all levels of ambition, from low vaudeville to high art, to make an analogy for real life. It was a great rationale for combining all my urges: to cartoon, to allude to my experiences in various degrees of depth and penetration, and to integrate all that stuff into a unit of experience by means of pacing, rhythm, and texture.
MacDonald:
I guess I assumed that the more obvious politicalness of it had something to do with your coming back to this country and becoming reimmersed in American political life.
Breer:
Well my politics were extremely simplistic. For all of my Marxist artist friends, Marxism didn't really take seriously on me. I had conventional liberal viewsI still have them, I guesswhich
are
pretty cool on capitalism. I'm very antiauthoritarian, but I've never sorted out my politics, and I'm always embarrassed to put politics up front in a film.
At one time I was hired to do twenty political cartoons for PBL [Public Broadcast Laboratory], when they had their Sunday night prime time series on big issues: birth, death, and so forth. David Brenner was the producer. Two of the cartoons got done:
PBL 2
[1968], the one about racism; and
PBL 3
[1968], about television. I have only a magnetic striped copy of
PBL 3
. The series was promising, but it got axed. The fourth show was going to deal with the Pentagon, and it was going to be a fairly critical, liberal view of the Pentagon. Word came from Washington that all the footage had to be prescreened, and everybody was embarrassed. That, along with the roasting the series got in the public press, ended the project.
I found that those little cartoons came easily, but I also suspected myself. I suspect pieties; I suspect the motivation behind the pieties. So I'm always a little embarrassed and suspicious of myself when I do polemical projects. I've gone South without
PBL 2
just so I wouldn't trade on easy political emotion. A really political person gets off on relationships to large social movements. That's not my thing, and yet I feel that at times the elitism of Pure Art needs to be questioned too, and put in its place.