A Critical Cinema 2: Interviews with Independent Filmmakers

There's another thing too, that has to do with trajectory, with cutting on motion. If you have something continuing across the screen so that the continuity of the action itself dominates the content of what that thing is, you can change the thing that's moving, from one frame to the next. I've heard that old cartoonists used to play with that as a gag. As a bird would fly across the screen, they'd replace one of the images of the bird with a brick. Because of the motion of the bird, nobody would see the brick. That's an option you don't have in a static picture.

MacDonald:

An obvious example is in

Gulls and Buoys,

where the character riding the bicycle changes continually.

Breer:

That's me riding the bike, rotoscoped. I change radically each time. Some of this has to do with a psychological phenomenon: the eye oscillates, wiggles, at the rate of twenty-five or thirty times a second. They've discovered that the retina teases an image out of the void by oscillating over perceptual thresholds. In an experiment, a gadget was fixed to the subject's face so that it could read this very fine oscillation of the eye and translate it mechanically to the target image the person was looking at. The image would move every time the eye moved, in other words, remain fixed in relation to the retina. The image consisted of a

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green rectangle with a red circle inside. As soon as that image got stabilized in terms of the retina, as soon as the retina wasn't oscillating over the surface anymore, the red circle dropped out. The color differentiation was gone. That physiological process goes on all the time. It's interesting that it's almost the same rate as twenty-four frames a second, but maybe that's not related. The important thing is that the thresholds are needed. In order to establish

this,

you have to have

that

. I had a scientist following me around at one point. He got excited by my films because he hadn't thought of the consequences of this kind of rapid change. And

I

never thought about consequences; I just thought about how it looked to compose this way. But in teaching it over time I've picked up on what's going on.

MacDonald:

What was Noel Burch's commentary in

Recreation?

I don't know enough French to understand it.

Breer:

It's nonsense poetry: the words are puns that refer to the images. I made the film silent, as usual. I showed it that way for a while, but speculated on a soundtrack, and Noel got interested somehow. I don't remember the exact circumstances, but he went off and typed up a text, brought it back to me, and I suggested he record it. In those days I usually used a microphone on the projector: I'd record on the sound strip. In this case, though, I edited the sound so that I could synch the words exactly with the events. After it was recorded, Noel had second thoughts, so I didn't use the soundtrack out of deference to him. Then later, after I moved back here, I asked him about it, and he said he liked the track after all. So I added the sound and a credit, "Text by Noel Burch."

MacDonald: Recreation 2

[1956] seems like an afterthought.

Breer:

I never show that film. I should've ditched it. I learned from doing it not to try and do sequels. I was just using up the leftover energy from

Recreation

.

MacDonald: Jamestown Baloos

is an antimilitaristic film. In your earlier work you had been into abstraction. Here you're more directly political.

Breer:

I have mixed feelings about that. For one thing, there are some figures in

Jamestown Baloos

who are no longer known. Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus walks through with his briefcase and dark glasses. Governor Soapy Williams of Michigan rams his finger up the nose of the horse that a nun is sitting on: the horse lurches and the nun falls offsomething like that. They called him "Soapy" because the Williams family had a soap company. I had no particular contention with Soapy Williams. It's just that at the time he was a familiar figure. After I made that film, I realized that a lot of those political allusions were gone, irrelevant. I'd begun with an assumption that is no longer valid: that

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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