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MacDonald: Breathing
is a tour de force of drawing. It reminds me of Lye's scratched imagery in
Free Radicals
[1958] and of the directly scratched jazz passage in the middle of [Norman] McLaren's
Hen Hop
[1942].
Breer:
I was sent a copy of
Hen Hop
in 35mm, and I turned it into a mutoscope as a gift to McLaren for this big tribute they had for him in Canada. I cut up his hen so it hipped more than it hopped.
Breathing
is 35mm. I drew the whole thing, and then shot it in 16mm several times, until I got all of the images lined up in their proper order. I didn't want to waste the 35mm time.
MacDonald:
Why did you make this particular film in 35mm?
Breer:
Because I wanted absolutely the sharpest, best image I could get. I wanted to do
A Man and His Dog Out for Air
better.
Breathing
is kind of a throwback in that sense. I wanted to use high contrast film and the sharpest lens possible and the most stable camera. The drawback with my Bolex windup camera is that the shutter exposures are not consistent; there are slight variations, flicker. Shooting in 35mm gives you just that much more resolution. I wanted a super slick film for very simple drawing. I used soundtrack film, which is absolute black or white, and I rented a 35mm Oxbury for a day, at ten dollars an hour, which seemed like a hundred dollars an hour at the time, from Al Stahl, who had about six of them in a row down at 1600 Broadway. I went in there one morning with boxes of cards and by nighttime I'd shot eight thousand of them. I couldn't stand. I couldn't walk. But when I got the film back, I had to make only one cut. The result was so good that the film was used to focus the projectors at Lincoln Center.
When I started making that film, we were in this little summer house in Rhode Island. I'd rented a barn space. I put a sign on the wall, saying "This film is what it is what it is." In fact I had several of those signs on the walls to keep me on target and not allow me to digress from line drawing into craziness.
MacDonald:
At times, it's hard to believe that the imagery isn't rotoscoped.
Breer:
I didn't know from rotoscoping. I do remember the exquisite pleasure in taking a flat line and making it come at you. Rudy Burckhardt mentioned to me one time that that was his favorite film of mine, and especially when that elbow shape suddenly comes into 3-D and swings around.
MacDonald:
That's the movement that reminded me of
Free Radicals
.
Breer:
Lye made
Free Radicals
by laying the strips out on a table and scratching and listening to the music. He didn't have the advantage I had of being able to see consecutive images, so his film really is a tour de