A Critical Cinema 2: Interviews with Independent Filmmakers

After I did that film, I seriously debated going into live-action filmmaking. But I didn't think I could deal with production, especially with getting the money. I had four kids. And I didn't want to quit working on film until I had the money. I guess the thing that bothered me most was having to get involved with other people on an artistic level. With Oldenburg there was no problem because we were on the same wavelength.

Actually, before

Pat's Birthday,

I shot a live-action film that became a segment on the first installment of

David Brinkley's Journal

. I had moved into a little house in Palisades that had been owned by this TV producer, Ted Yates. When Maya Deren's Creative Film Foundation awards were announced in the

New York Times,

and he saw my name, he decided to look me up [Breer won the Award of Distinction for

Inner and Outer Space

from the Creative Film Foundation in 1961; in 1957 he had won a Special Citation for

Recreation

]. He looked at some films and signed me up to edit some footage that was part of a gangster film he was doing with Ben Hecht. I forget how that project fizzled, but anyhow, he got himself hired to produce

David Brinkley's Journal,

a spin-off from

The Huntley/Brinkley Report

. I told him about the massive kinetic art show in Stockholm, which had been put together by Pontus Hulten, who at that time was director of the Moderna Museet in Stockholm. I was taking part in that show, and I guess he thought it would be an interesting subject. He hired me as a coproducer. It was a hurry-up job, and suddenly I found myself in Stockholm in the middle of the museum with a five-person crew who didn't speak Englishall these people waiting for me to say the fatal words: "Lights, camera, action!" I didn't know how to say them in English, much less in Swedish, but I shot the filmor rather my cameraman shot it on a new Arriflex which, we found out a month later, he couldn't focus. The stuff was developed in New York, and it wasn't until I got back here that I realized that most of this guy's footage couldn't be used. Fortunately, I'd taken my Bolex and shot a lot of footage. That became the backbone of a fifteen-minute

Brinkley Journal

segment. I hired Mimi Arshum, a friend of Sasha Hammid's, and a good editor, because I didn't know what the hell I was doing. She helped me put together a tentative assemblage, which we took to Washington. As soon as Brinkley started watching, he said, "Where's the

Page 33

establishing shot?" I knew I was in trouble. I'd syncopated everything. I even had a pixilated sequence of the king of Sweden arriving at the museum and jerking through the whole exhibit shaking hands rapid fire with all the other dignitaries. Brinkley looked at the whole thing, said some patronizing word to me, and we knew that was that. The assemblage was eventually given over to their editors, over my not quite dead body, and they cut the film. It appeared on television, with a conventional talking-heads interview with Hulten which they'd gone back to Stockholm to shoot. It was my footage, cut along the lines of my assemblage, but without the rhythms. I sat there watching it, cringing, with my parents in Michigan. They were proud: my name was in the credits. I did get paid, but I felt like I'd been raped. When I tried to get the footage later, they wouldn't cough it up. I

was

able to buy that new Bolex, the Rex model. Up until then I'd been using an old non-reflex model that belonged to my father. I shot

Pat's Birthday

with that new camera, and I still have it. At the rate of ten minutes of film a year, I haven't worn it out yet.

After I got my new Bolex, I took to loaning out the old one. One of the first borrowers was Carolee Schneemann. She went away with Jim Tenney for the summer and came back with the footage later used for

Fuses

[1967]. I remember her showing me this film of her and Tenney endlessly fucking, and wanting to know how I felt about it. Finally I realized that they'd had to stop and wash clothes and cook food and do other things in between the fucking, just like the rest of us, and I got over my depression.

Anyway, to get back to

Pat's Birthday:

when I'd gotten to New York, I'd met Oldenburg and other pop artists. We used to go to parties and hang out. I was on the fringe. Then they came to some of my films. I'd been introduced to Oldenburg as a guy who owned a movie camera, and he wanted to employ me (for no pay) to shoot his happenings. This is 1961, 1962. I said nix. I'd just done that film with Tinguely [

Homage to Jean Tinguely's Homage to New York