A Critical Cinema 2: Interviews with Independent Filmmakers

I thought I could escape this supposed truth by having lower and higher forms in the same film: I could combine all levels of experience and all levels of ambition, from low vaudeville to high art, to make an analogy for real life. It was a great rationale for combining all my urges: to cartoon, to allude to my experiences in various degrees of depth and penetration, and to integrate all that stuff into a unit of experience by means of pacing, rhythm, and texture.

MacDonald:

I guess I assumed that the more obvious politicalness of it had something to do with your coming back to this country and becoming reimmersed in American political life.

Breer:

Well my politics were extremely simplistic. For all of my Marxist artist friends, Marxism didn't really take seriously on me. I had conventional liberal viewsI still have them, I guesswhich

are

pretty cool on capitalism. I'm very antiauthoritarian, but I've never sorted out my politics, and I'm always embarrassed to put politics up front in a film.

At one time I was hired to do twenty political cartoons for PBL [Public Broadcast Laboratory], when they had their Sunday night prime time series on big issues: birth, death, and so forth. David Brenner was the producer. Two of the cartoons got done:

PBL 2

[1968], the one about racism; and

PBL 3

[1968], about television. I have only a magnetic striped copy of

PBL 3

. The series was promising, but it got axed. The fourth show was going to deal with the Pentagon, and it was going to be a fairly critical, liberal view of the Pentagon. Word came from Washington that all the footage had to be prescreened, and everybody was embarrassed. That, along with the roasting the series got in the public press, ended the project.

I found that those little cartoons came easily, but I also suspected myself. I suspect pieties; I suspect the motivation behind the pieties. So I'm always a little embarrassed and suspicious of myself when I do polemical projects. I've gone South without

PBL 2

just so I wouldn't trade on easy political emotion. A really political person gets off on relationships to large social movements. That's not my thing, and yet I feel that at times the elitism of Pure Art needs to be questioned too, and put in its place.

Page 28

MacDonald: Jamestown

and

Recreation

use a lot of junk art, trash art, assemblage in a way that moves the films in a diaristic direction. We get a sense of your environment.

Eyewash,

which was made right after those films, uses a highly edited, gestural style, with obviously personal imagery, a method exploited so effectively by Stan Brakhage and Jonas Mekas.

Fist Fight

has some of that feeling too, but in

Eyewash

the feeling of you moving

through

an environment seems more powerful.

Breer: Eyewash

was the last film I did in Paris. I was back here when I made the soundtrack. I wanted to send it to a festival in Germany that wouldn't accept films without soundtracks. That annoyed me, just as an idea. So I did a soundtrack but kept it separate from the film. I planned to send the two things to them separately, and say, ''Here's my fucking soundtrack; play that,

then

show the film," but I never sent it.