A Critical Cinema 2: Interviews with Independent Filmmakers

Fist Fight

seems to have emptied out a whole collage part of you.

Breer:

Exactly. First effulgence, then something dry and astringent. I think that, to survive, an artwork has to have excessive input. You've got to put everything into it each time. You can't ride on past laurels. You've got to start from scratch again and on a tack that'll identify the new thing as clearly different from the old thing, and quite often it is almost the opposite. For

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I had practically a gimmick: long static shots of slick, crisp imagery, with very short gunbursts of interruption.

I guess you go through stages. First of all, you're worried about your identity as an artist. In a sense you don't know who you are and what you're going to do. After a while you're happy that you've discovered what you can do best and are milking this vein, and then a while after that, you realize you're trapped, and you can't get out no matter how fucking hard you try. I'm in that last stage. But I still try. That's the only thing worth doing. There's no point in repeating myself, so I still try to change. I might use a gimmick to get into another vein, as I did with those three abstract films following

Fist Fight, 66, 69, 70,

and later

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. In the last few years I've combined things more and more. I no longer do a collage film, then an abstract film, then a collage. These days I might take the middle of an abstract film and turn it into a lyrical landscape film. Who's to say I can't? I'm the boss of my films.

MacDonald:

Individual films also reflect this need for change. For a while,

69

is a consistently hard-edged film; then it shifts into something else.

Breer:

Do you know the joke about the two explorers who get captured by the natives and tied to trees? The chief tells the first one, "You have two choices: death or ru-ru." The explorer thinks a bit and says, "Well, ru-ru." "Wise decision,'' says the chief, who unties him. Then the

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Successive frames from Breer's 69 (1968).

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whole tribe beats him up and abuses him sexually and completely destroys him and throws him down dead in front of the other explorer. The chief asks the second explorer which

he

prefers, death or ru-ru? The second explorer is very shaken up by what he's seen and finally says, "Death." And the chief says, "Very wise decisiondeath it isbut

first,

a little ru-ru." I love that joke. In my work there's always a little ru-ru.

69

undoes itself. It starts out like a system, then the system breaks down and goes to hell. During the editing I came up with the idea that it should break down, so I shuffled the cards. I thought it served me right to undo my own pretense at formal purity.

MacDonald:

When exactly did you shuffle the cards?

Breer:

First I shot each sequence several times. I was thinking of serial repetitions and building a texture. But I got bored with that, so I said "What if." I started shuffling the cards and shooting them in random sequences and shuffling more and more.

Also, there were some accidents. This was before dimmers were available and I had a parallel circuit for the lights and a double-throw switch, so I could put them on half-light (Stan Vanderbeek had shown me how to do that). I shot a sequence on the low light by accident, and it was brown and dismal looking, but somewhere during that scene I had turned the lights on for a second and there was a flash of proper lighting embedded within this dark stuff. Instead of dismissing all that material, I took advantage of it in the best tradition of experimental filmmaking. I went back and deliberately shot a lot of stuff at half-light, with a few sprinklings of properly lit imagery.

MacDonald:

You're very early in experimenting with flicker effects. They're an element in some of the earliest films, and you come back to flicker often.

Breer:

If you question everything, you'll question why you have to eliminate flicker. Flicker is disturbing, but it has an impact, and it doesn't make you have flat feet, or burn your retina. It's just another tool we've overlooked. I question all the time. It started out with my questioning the existence of God when I was a little kid. I read something by Sinclair Lewis when I was twelve or thirteen years old and challenged God to strike me dead. I gave him about fifteen minutes, thinking if he was all that powerful, that'd be plenty of time. And nothing happened, and I went down and told my parents I wasn't going to church anymore. I never had believed in God, but I'd been too scared to announce it. Of course, I had some awful experiences as a little kid at Catholic school, so I already had bad vibes about religion. But I questioned and got away with it.

In film a lot of things have been repressed for so long that they're fresh. I explore the medium for that kind of thing. There's an awful lot

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