A Critical Cinema 2: Interviews with Independent Filmmakers

The soundtrack is called "Earwash," by the way; it's exactly the same length as the film. This was a case where I thought I'd use a collaborator, get in touch with musique concrètejust a vague idea. I found out about a guy who ran a series of new music events at the YMCA on Ninety-second Street, New Music for Our Time, something like that. It might still be going. Max Polakoff his name was. He was a violinist. I called him explaining that I had a little film and was looking for somebody to do the sound track. He met with me and saw the film and wanted to do it. I don't know, violin didn't seem appropriate to me, but I figured I could edit what he did. We went to [D. A.] Pennebaker's studio and Polakoff improvised on a violin while he looked at the film. I thought, "Oh shit." But he was a good musician and respected in New York, and there was no way I could politely disengage myself. Later, he wanted to show the film at the music series. I hadn't yet heard the mix; we'd just gotten it back from the studio. As things turned out, it'd been overmodulated. It was too loud and sounded like a cat being pulled through a knothole. We didn't hear it until we played it that night for the audience, a full house. Before the presentation Polakoff dragged me onto the stage. I muttered something about keeping the sound separate from the picture because I didn't want the sound to interfere with the movie. Everybody giggled when they heard that, except Max. What I was saying must have seemed aggressive to him. Anyhow, we played the track and it sounded awful; then watched my film, and went on with the rest of the program. The next day newspapers wrote up the event. The music critics didn't give a shit about the film, but really roasted Max. I called to apologize for the lousy reproduction of the sound, but he didn't want to speak to me, and I haven't seen him since. And I haven't used the sound since.

MacDonald:

How did you come to do mutoscopes?

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One of Breer's mutoscopes.

Breer:

When I was back here in America in 1957, I was thinking about buying a mutoscope. Somebody told me to look up this guy on Tenth Avenue who had a big collection of them, along with pinball machines and other penny arcade stuff. I went to see him and got a price on a mutoscope. I think it was twenty-five dollars, which was a lot of money in those days. I had to go home and think about it. When I called him up, he told me that while I'd hesitated, Disney people had bought almost all of them for Disneyland. The price of the few he had left had gone up to seventy-five dollars. I said the hell with it, and decided to make my own.

Shortly after I went back to France, I started making mutoscopes. The first was made out of a cigar box: paper was glued in a cross section of a broomstick with slots in itprobably a hundred images in all. It was restored by Pontus Hulten a while ago: it's become a museum relic. Anyhow, I made a bunch. They were big contraptions, sculpted on the edges so that just sitting there they were interesting as shapes. When you cranked them, the shapes would make for a kind of flowing change. I still have one. The rest fell apart.

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When I got back to America, I was interested in having a show of films and objects. I found a vinyl that looked and felt just like paper, but was a lot tougher, so the subsequent mutoscopes were made with vinyl leaves, and I improved the mechanism too. I mass-produced a bunch of boxes and cranks for them, and I showed them [in 1965] at the Bonino Gallery, along with a lot of other kinetic sculpture (an earlier show of the paper mutoscopes had been scheduled in a Paris gallery in the spring of 1958 but never happened). I never made any more mutoscopes after that.

One guy wanted to exploit the mutoscopes as toys. He thought he could peddle them as a do-it-yourself kit for children. He did a patent search on his own and found out that I had come up with a couple of patentable items. I'd made some improvements on the 1898 model. Of course, I didn't have any delusion that I was inventing anything entirely new. I just thought I could explore my ideas about continuity and discontinuity. One of the advantages of the mutoscope was that you could sit there cranking the same cycle over and over and, through subjective changes, you would discover new images, so the piece would seem to be constantly renewing itself. I never thought of the mutoscopes as replacements for cinema. They were a way to get the magic of flip cards out of the flip-book into a contraption that was easier to work with, could be nailed down in an art gallery, and could work in daylight. I also liked that you could stop on a frame and study it. Mutoscopes had certain advantages over just plain film. I also did a few wall pieces that you riffle your hand along, a variation.

MacDonald:

How was it, coming back here?

Breer: