A Critical Cinema 2: Interviews with Independent Filmmakers

Hell no! I don't know what I've got until I start cutting. I don't know how things are going to play off each other. When I'm shooting, I can flip a handful of cards and see five seconds of continuity. But until I get it all shot, I don't know how it's going to work. When I was a painter, the process was very different. I used to lie in bed in the morning (which I do still) and daydream, fantasize a creation of some kind. But as soon as I put my foot on the cold floor and took one step toward the easel, that feeling, that image, whatever, would start to evaporate. Every step toward the easel would kill off part of the dream. At the same time, I learned to discipline myself to replace it with equivalents. Every one of those evaporations would be replaced by some more solid idea that would allow me to unscrew the cap of the paint, squeeze it out onto the pallet, put the brush in it, and hit the canvas. It was a matter of using the original inspiration as a motor, but forgetting about the particulars I'd started out with. It's the same thing with filmmaking, but even more so. There are so many mechanical tasks to perform that the concrete replaces the ephemeral. The inspiration gets you moving, but the concrete is what you get at the end. To pretend that I can write down my dream fantasy in words and then transfer it to film later is unrealistic as far as I'm concerned and would be an unfair imposition on the editing process, which really should be as creative as the other stages.

MacDonald:

So how do you shoot? Do you get a general idea and explore it for a while, knowing that later onmuch lateryou'll make a film with it?

Breer:

That's right. Sometimes I've got a strong enough idea to carry me a year. The idea has to be able to accept a lot of definitions, even contradictory definitions, and at the same time survive the attacks I make on it. It might be something as stupid as a particular image or a feeling that the next film will be all crisp and clear. But that's how I work. I'll get a theme for the year and start drawing around it (or I'll start drawing and in the drawing I'll see how I feel that year and what it's going to be like).

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MacDonald: Breathing

is a tour de force of drawing. It reminds me of Lye's scratched imagery in

Free Radicals

[1958] and of the directly scratched jazz passage in the middle of [Norman] McLaren's

Hen Hop

[1942].

Breer:

I was sent a copy of

Hen Hop

in 35mm, and I turned it into a mutoscope as a gift to McLaren for this big tribute they had for him in Canada. I cut up his hen so it hipped more than it hopped.

Breathing

is 35mm. I drew the whole thing, and then shot it in 16mm several times, until I got all of the images lined up in their proper order. I didn't want to waste the 35mm time.

MacDonald:

Why did you make this particular film in 35mm?

Breer:

Because I wanted absolutely the sharpest, best image I could get. I wanted to do

A Man and His Dog Out for Air

better.

Breathing

is kind of a throwback in that sense. I wanted to use high contrast film and the sharpest lens possible and the most stable camera. The drawback with my Bolex windup camera is that the shutter exposures are not consistent; there are slight variations, flicker. Shooting in 35mm gives you just that much more resolution. I wanted a super slick film for very simple drawing. I used soundtrack film, which is absolute black or white, and I rented a 35mm Oxbury for a day, at ten dollars an hour, which seemed like a hundred dollars an hour at the time, from Al Stahl, who had about six of them in a row down at 1600 Broadway. I went in there one morning with boxes of cards and by nighttime I'd shot eight thousand of them. I couldn't stand. I couldn't walk. But when I got the film back, I had to make only one cut. The result was so good that the film was used to focus the projectors at Lincoln Center.

When I started making that film, we were in this little summer house in Rhode Island. I'd rented a barn space. I put a sign on the wall, saying "This film is what it is what it is." In fact I had several of those signs on the walls to keep me on target and not allow me to digress from line drawing into craziness.

MacDonald:

At times, it's hard to believe that the imagery isn't rotoscoped.

Breer:

I didn't know from rotoscoping. I do remember the exquisite pleasure in taking a flat line and making it come at you. Rudy Burckhardt mentioned to me one time that that was his favorite film of mine, and especially when that elbow shape suddenly comes into 3-D and swings around.

MacDonald:

That's the movement that reminded me of

Free Radicals

.

Breer:

Lye made

Free Radicals

by laying the strips out on a table and scratching and listening to the music. He didn't have the advantage I had of being able to see consecutive images, so his film really is a tour de

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