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When I got back to America, I was interested in having a show of films and objects. I found a vinyl that looked and felt just like paper, but was a lot tougher, so the subsequent mutoscopes were made with vinyl leaves, and I improved the mechanism too. I mass-produced a bunch of boxes and cranks for them, and I showed them [in 1965] at the Bonino Gallery, along with a lot of other kinetic sculpture (an earlier show of the paper mutoscopes had been scheduled in a Paris gallery in the spring of 1958 but never happened). I never made any more mutoscopes after that.
One guy wanted to exploit the mutoscopes as toys. He thought he could peddle them as a do-it-yourself kit for children. He did a patent search on his own and found out that I had come up with a couple of patentable items. I'd made some improvements on the 1898 model. Of course, I didn't have any delusion that I was inventing anything entirely new. I just thought I could explore my ideas about continuity and discontinuity. One of the advantages of the mutoscope was that you could sit there cranking the same cycle over and over and, through subjective changes, you would discover new images, so the piece would seem to be constantly renewing itself. I never thought of the mutoscopes as replacements for cinema. They were a way to get the magic of flip cards out of the flip-book into a contraption that was easier to work with, could be nailed down in an art gallery, and could work in daylight. I also liked that you could stop on a frame and study it. Mutoscopes had certain advantages over just plain film. I also did a few wall pieces that you riffle your hand along, a variation.
MacDonald:
How was it, coming back here?
Breer:
When I came back in 1960, we had two kids and a house on loan up in Rhode Island, near Jamestown (where we'd stayed a few years before, and I'd made
Jamestown Baloos
). The house wasn't heated, so we could only stay there until the end of October. Then I rented an old farmhouse in Westchester that had rats in the basement, which is where I worked on film. I used to chase them around with a broom. I made
Inner and Outer Space
there and also the Tinguely film [
Homage to Jean Tinguely's Homage to New York,
1960].
I began to hang out with pop artists. I didn't know many of the independent filmmakers. I had met some in Brussels in 1959, but I didn't connect very strongly with them yet, though Amos [Vogel] must have been throwing us together at his Cinema 16 screenings.
When I got back here originally, I thought I had a connection. In France someone had sent me to Henri Langlois. He was enthusiastic about my filmshe and Lotte Reiniger who was there too. Langlois said they were the best experimental films he'd seen since 1928. He wrote a letter to Richard Griffith at MoMA in New York, and sent a reel of my