A Critical Cinema 2: Interviews with Independent Filmmakers

Form Phases I

. Strange way to work, but I didn't know about using an animation stand yet. In some ways though, by seeing my images projected on a screen before they were shot, I could better visualize the end result. I still have a flipbook made up of those slides bolted together in sequence.

MacDonald:

Did film grab you right away?

Breer:

By the time of

Jamestown Baloos

I was enthusiastic. But at first I was scared of the camera. I had an aversion to photography, partly, I suppose, because of my father's enthusiasm for it. The only big fight I ever had with him was over his taking pictures of me, and of stopping things to take pictures of the family. He came to visit me in Europe, and we'd go to a restaurant, and he'd stand on the next table and take pictures. It was embarrassing. It seemed to me then that he photographed everything before he reacted and could only react

after

he'd developed his pictures. That was counter to my feeling of how life should be experienced. I didn't like the idea of the lens between me and what I was looking at. I wouldn't even wear sunglasses. It's a wonder I ever got into film.

MacDonald:

From what you say, I assume that the history of film was not particularly interesting to you. Film simply became a way of doing things with painting that you couldn't do on a still canvas. And the filmmakers whose work seems related to your early films tend to have come to film for the same reason. Fischinger, for example.

Breer:

In a way, I suppose that's true, but somebody I always mention as having a powerful influence on me was Jean Vigo, who didn't make animated abstract films. His spirit of free association in

A propos de Nice

[1930], for instance, and the kind of cutting he does there, moved me. And I liked

Zéro de Conduite

[1933], his anarchism, his humor, and his esprit. I could identify with him. I have an aversion to just purely abstract films. That's why I have trouble with Fischinger. I admire him in some ways and find him something of an abomination in others.

Page 20

I did bring to those early films all these post-Cubist notions of space. Making

Form Phases I,

I realized that whatever moves destroys everything else. You have to counter one movement with another. If you have one thing moving in an otherwise static field, the static field dies. You know the usual opening shot of a conventional film, the helicopter shot of a car going down a highway seen from aboveyou watch that car. It's a tiny dot on a huge screen, but you're glued to that one thing and everything else is peripheral. Once I was making films, I learned that I couldn't work with the stable kinds of relationships I'd worked with in my painting. I had to rethink things completely. And that's when I went for an all-over active screen and for real hectic films. Then I could play with the agitation itself in dosages, rather than try to think in terms of static compositions in which elements move.

MacDonald:

Most of your films are not about particular topics. Was there a specific incident involving Pope Pius XII that caused you to do

Un Miracle?

Breer:

It must have been inspired by something I saw, but I'll be damned if I know what. I had had this vision of doing a film based on

The Metamorphosis,

the Kafka story where the main character changes into an insect. I wasn't interested in illustrating Kafka, but in using the notion of metamorphosis. I had my camera set up in Montparnasse. It was Sunday, I remember, and I was going to shoot film. I walked to the kiosk in Montparnasse and bought a

Paris Match

. In this

Paris Match

there was an essay on Pope Pius XII, with a lot of photographs. My vision was that this film would go from live action into animation or vice versa, and back again. The idea was just as general as that. But after buying the

Paris Match,