In Memory of Robert Breer
— When Robert Breer died in 2011, Artforum asked me to write this appreciation—
No artist can follow in Robert Breer’s footsteps, and it would be foolish to try. The path he blazed through film was so utterly his own that no one will ever take it to quite the same heights he did. The films we remember him for could only have come to, or rather through, this great artist in all his particularity: through his eye and hand, and through daydreaming, tinkering, and wily sense of structure.
Which is not to say that a deep seeing of his work can’t utterly transform the horizon of your own possibilities. Certainly his films have rewarded the close and repeated viewings I’ve given them since my first, teenage encounter thirty-some years ago. I remember his 1968 film 69 throwing me for a complete loop at the time. I realize now that it has been lurking in my mind ever since, a touchstone for my ponderings of off-screen space and reference, of 3D illusion springing forth from and collapsing back into the 2D plane, of structures that have as much to do with falling apart as they do with building up.
Only recently did it occur to me that Breer’s handling of structure is like that of his great contemporary Morton Feldman, unlikely though this pairing of artists may seem. Though one was the master of speed in film and the other of slowness in music, both keep upending your expectations as you experience their work, pushing you back to the present instant of perception. Too rarely do we realize that firm structure has a way of deadening perception: What you know to expect you stop attending to. In Breer as in Feldman, structures threaten to shift or give way on you at any moment, and since this means that future moments are unforeseeable, you have no choice but to concentrate on what’s happening now, before it vanishes.
Speaking of vanishing, I should point out that the vast possibilities of cinema were once on the point of doing just that when the masters of American experimental film (Breer along with Brakhage, Jacobs, and Warhol, among others) turned time backward, rebooting film from the point where Lumière and Méliès had left off and then striking out on the paths that Griffith had closed off. I’m sure that what struck Bob Breer when, as a young mid-century painter, he first took up filmmaking was how out of step modern cinema was with modern art. The allover composition of Méliès, where anything could happen at any time in any zone of the screen, was after all much closer to Pollock or Rauschenberg or Cunningham or Cage than were the predigested frames of narrative film. It’s has been too easy to overlook Méliès’s importance as a truly great artist, valuing his work for its technical innovations but dismissing it as merely clever tricks for comic effect, and I suppose it’s has been a little bit the same with Breer and his whimsicality, not to mention the aw-shucks demeanor he always maintained. How much simpler it has been for the lazy to bestow importance on the self-important—not to name names here.
Bob was the son of an inventor, and in certain circles (automotive rather than artistic) the father’s fame outshone the son’s, primarily as I recall for his breakthroughs in the aerodynamic streamlining of car bodies. When I first mentioned our OpenEndedGroup forays into 3D projection, Bob recalled his dad having invented his own 3D movie camera for anaglyph viewing: Breer family movies of the ’30s were as likely to be in 3D as not. Bob inherited this Breer knack for tinkering, and when my daughters used to explore his studio with him (so much more interesting than my own, with its bland stacks of hard drives), they marveled over all his gadgets: the mutoscope viewers, the slow sculpture Floats, the useful little mechanical device he’d made to speed up the slow process of animation: a card-flipper that would plunk down a hand-drawn card for quick single-frame capture by the lens before grabbing the next.
This tinkering brought Breer close to the materiality of the medium, which in turn allowed him to see it anew. In films like Gulls and Buoys (1972), Fuji (1974), and TZ (1978), he made incomparable new use of the tired-out and nearly forgotten animation technique of rotoscoping, using felt-tip markers to trace the successive contours of movements caught in film footage. But rather than the enhancement of realism that this technique allows, what intrigued Breer was its collapse. In Gulls and Buoys, as the flickering hand-drawn contour of a swan’s neck, simplified down to a single elegant curve, merges with its watery reflection, it drowns its own likeness. An ineffable moment that lingers even through the rapid tumult of the frames that follow.
Indeed, Breer is best known for is the extreme speed he brought to film (the opposite of his treatment of kinetic sculpture). He must have been, if not the first then among the first, to cut on every frame, and his films just blaze by you (Blazes is actually the name of one such film, from 1961, Eyewash, from 1959, another). Not only that, but the speed of Breer’s subjects—by which I mean the chain of his split-second visual associations and digressions—keeps you forever on your toes as you try to keep pace with an eye and hand combining to move at (even beyond) the astonishing speed of thought.
All this bears superficial resemblance to much of what we now find around us: our world of distractions, of quick switches and multi-tasking, of sensory overload. It might seem that MTV and its many offshoots have long since absorbed and subsumed Breer’s lessons (though without acknowledgment or, very likely, knowledge: The one time Bob ventured into that realm, for money, was in a comically misshapen music video for the rock band New Order, whose metronomic drum-machine beat canceled out Breer’s rhythmic complexity, which was in any case compromised by the director’s weird decision to intercut Breer’s contribution with segments of William Wegman’s cute dog videos).
No, what Breer offers you is far different from the barrage of blandishments and interruptions that our media world subjects us to. For, rather than providing distraction, Breer opens you up to a new kind of attentiveness and concentration: the calm observation of the mind’s pell-mell flow, of consciousness that never reduces itself to predictable pattern or structure. It is this that keeps his films so deeply true.