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Bauermeister (they were married at the time), and he was enthusiastic about the film and claimed to be enthusiastic about the sound track. He said he was inspired to make a new sound track for it by chopping up all of his sound compositions collage-style to fit the film. I was flattered, and we talked a little bit about it, but it never happened. I always wondered whether he just wanted to get rid of that critical voice. He was a famous, impossible egotist, though in spite of that we were friendsalthough I found him intolerable at times: my own egotism versus his, maybe. At the world's fair in Osaka in 1970 he did the German pavilion. We were staying in the same hotel and ran into each other. I described our Pepsi pavilion, with thirty-seven speakers around our dome, and he said he had forty-seven, or whatevermore. It got to be ludicrous, that kind of jockeying for superiority.
MacDonald: 66
seems a logical film to come after
Fist Fight,
which seems almost its opposite.
Fist Fight
seems to have emptied out a whole collage part of you.
Breer:
Exactly. First effulgence, then something dry and astringent. I think that, to survive, an artwork has to have excessive input. You've got to put everything into it each time. You can't ride on past laurels. You've got to start from scratch again and on a tack that'll identify the new thing as clearly different from the old thing, and quite often it is almost the opposite. For
66
I had practically a gimmick: long static shots of slick, crisp imagery, with very short gunbursts of interruption.
I guess you go through stages. First of all, you're worried about your identity as an artist. In a sense you don't know who you are and what you're going to do. After a while you're happy that you've discovered what you can do best and are milking this vein, and then a while after that, you realize you're trapped, and you can't get out no matter how fucking hard you try. I'm in that last stage. But I still try. That's the only thing worth doing. There's no point in repeating myself, so I still try to change. I might use a gimmick to get into another vein, as I did with those three abstract films following
Fist Fight, 66, 69, 70,
and later
77
. In the last few years I've combined things more and more. I no longer do a collage film, then an abstract film, then a collage. These days I might take the middle of an abstract film and turn it into a lyrical landscape film. Who's to say I can't? I'm the boss of my films.
MacDonald:
Individual films also reflect this need for change. For a while,
69
is a consistently hard-edged film; then it shifts into something else.
Breer:
Do you know the joke about the two explorers who get captured by the natives and tied to trees? The chief tells the first one, "You have two choices: death or ru-ru." The explorer thinks a bit and says, "Well, ru-ru." "Wise decision,'' says the chief, who unties him. Then the