A collage film in which Pope Pious XII does a juggling act.
1954, 16mm, color/si, .5m, $20
A frame by frame collision of totally disparate images.
"I haven't felt as good in a long time as when I stood in the Bonino Gallery looking at Breer's constructions and movies. The amazing thing is that all this goodness and happiness is caught so simply and so effortlessly. It's done through abstract lines, through the play of plastic elements, through movements and rhythms. The happiness has its own rhythm, and Breer seems to have caught and recreated it in his work. We look at Breer's work and we begin to smile - lightly, inside, a happy sort of smile, a happy feeling like when you see anything beautiful and perfect. It's through an amazing control and economy of his materials that he achieves this; through the elimination of all the usual emotional, personal, biographical material; not by giving in to temptations." - Jonas Mekas, The Village Voice
Award: Creative Film Foundation
1956, 16mm, color/so, 1.5m, $20
"Mixing photographs, newspaper clippings, and quickie paintings of an insolent taschisme, he ran them together as fast as racing cars. The eye absorbs them imperturbably, as if they constituted a coherent sequence. It is the succession of different images itself which comes to constitute an illusory form, comparable to that of solids in movement, and which reduces every attempt at analysis to a simple 'impression.'" - Benayoun, Positif
Award: Bergamo Award
1957, 16mm, color/so, 6m, $20
"[A] brilliant and astonishing ballet animated with unprecedented virtuosity!" - Burch, Film Quarterly
Selected for eight months' run with Last Year at Marienbad premiere in NY.
1957, 16mm, b&w/so, 3m, $20
100 basic images switching positions for four thousand frames. A continuous explosion.
1961, 16mm, color/so, 3m, $20
A day in the country with Claes Oldenburg and the Ray Gun Theatre Players ... includes such classic items as the haunted house, a gas station, ice cream stand, miniature golf, airplane noises, balloons. Things happen after each other in this film only because there isn't room for everything at once. After all, time's not supposed to move in one direction any more than it does in another.
1962, 16mm, b&w/so, 13m, $40
"Breer's unpredictable lines flow forth naturally with an assurance and a serenity which are the signs of an astonishing felicity of expression." - A. Labarthe, Cahiers du Cinema
Awards: NY Film Festival; London Film Festival; Tours Film Festival.
1963, 16mm, b&w/so, 5m, $20
Frame by frame collage of everything imaginable. First shown in New York production of K.H. Stockhausen's "Originale." Track from these performances.
Awards: NY and London film festivals; Special Mention, Ann Arbor Film Festival, 1965.
1964, 16mm, color/so, 11m, $30
A record, of sorts, of the birth and death of Tinguely's famous auto-destructive sculpture. Filmed on the spot at the New York Modern Art Museum, this film also exploits a wide range of camera and editing techniques to give it a life of its own, independent of and parallel to the subject.
1968, 16mm, b&w/so, 9.5m, $30
"It's so absolutely beautiful, so perfect, so like nothing else. Forms, geometry, lines, movements, light, very basic, very pure, very surprising, very subtle." - Jonas Mekas, The Village Voice
"A dream of Euclid." - Donald Richie
Awards: NY Film Festival; London Film Festival; Tours Film Festival; Oberhausen Film Festival.
1968, 16mm, color/so, 5m, $20
A concise, one-minute cartoon history of the black American, commissioned by the Public Broadcast Laboratory and shown on NET network.
1968, 16mm, color/so, 1m, $20
1970, 16mm, color/si, 4m, $20
"In GULLS & BUOYS a large number of Breer's ideas are compressed and crystallized into a short statement of great richness. It could function excellently as an introduction to the remarkable range of pleasures available from the films of Robert Breer." - Scott Hammen, Afterimage
1972, 16mm, color/so, 7.5m, $20
"A poetic, rhythmic, riveting achievement (in rotoscope and abstract animation), in which fragments of landscapes, passengers, and train interiors blend into a magical color dream of a voyage. One of the most important works by a master who - like Conner, Brakhage, Broughton - spans several avant-gardes in his ever more perfect explorations." - Amos Vogel, Film Comment
Awards: Oberhausen Film Festival, 1975; Film as Art, American Film/Video Festival.
1974, 16mm, color/so, 8.5m, $25
"RUBBER CEMENT employs a variety of formal techniques and modes - including live-action footage, line drawings, animated geometric figures, color washes and found material in the form of newspaper clippings and sales receipts. The soundtrack follows a similar collagist tendency, offering snatches of dialogue, music and natural sound. The film is divided loosely into sections - some involving representational figures and others presenting purely abstract imagery.
"It seems fitting that one of the central 'characters' in RUBBER CEMENT is a bottle of film editing glue which collects and trails behind it a chain of colorful fragments. For through the collagist potential of frame-by-frame construction and the adhesive possibilities of the editing process, Breer has created a highly eclectic and brilliant cinematic work." - Lucy Fischer, UFSC Newsletter
1976, 16mm, color/so, 10m, $30
"Breer is a consummate master of cinematic space. Like Hans Richter, he constantly provokes a sense of depth through changing the scale of his shapes. We see the space as constantly shrinking and expanding ... the metamorphosis of things and space is located in the spectator who actively participates in creating the meaning of the image. Breer celebrates the freedom endemic in animation by giving the spectator a creative role in the process of metamorphosis." - Noel Carroll, The Soho Weekly News
"[77 is] a film notable for its sparely effective use of color and sound." - J. Hoberman, The Village Voice
Exhibition: Biennial Exhibition, Whitney Museum of American Art, 1979
1977, 16mm, color/so, 7m, $20
"[A] French gendarme weaves a hapless path through the film's strobe
attacks, disparate drawing styles, and variable scale .... Framed by
underwater and travel imagery, the central section's faucets and
aerosols, collapsing tents and outsized croquet games, breakfast
foods and sexual violence, all suggest domestic frustration." - J.
Hoberman,The Village Voice
Exhibition: NY Film Festival, 1979; Biennial Exhibition, Whitney
Museum of American Art, 1979.
1978, 16mm, color/so, 9.5m, $30
"� Breerworld is homey but tumultuous, filled with sudden shifts in scale or color, flash frame jolts, and a steady back beat of good-natured apocalypse. ... [H]e towers over a field where gimmicks are common currency and cuteness is as virulent as malaria in the tropics .... T.Z. offers a typically witty barrage of domestic imagery and eclectic technique." - J. Hoberman, American Film
"Within the film's brief length, numerous dramas take place, puzzling and enthralling us with their restless, enigmatic denouements." - B. Ruby Rich, Chicago Reader "An elegant home movie, its subject is Breer's new apartment which faces the Tappan Zee (T.Z.) bridge. It is permeated, as are all his films, with subtle humor, eroticism and a sense of imminent chaos and catastrophe." - Amy Taubin, Artforum Exhibition: NY Film Festival, 1981; Biennial Exhibition, Whitney Museum of American Art, 1981.
1979, 16mm, color/so, 8.5m, $25
"... displays sinuous cutting between live action and animated images, rapid-fire associations and transformations, freedom in collaging the everyday with the imaginary in sound and image, and a diabolical moment of synthesis at the climax when the rat trap is sprung. ... Breer is easily the greatest animator currently practicing." - Amy Taubin, The Soho Weekly News
"... a typically bravura and delightful display of simple objective forms flashing, rotating, and dissolving into abstraction ...." - J. Hoberman, The Village Voice
Exhibition: NY Film Festival, 1982; Biennial Exhibition, Whitney Museum of American Art, 1983.
1981, 16mm, color/so, 6m, $20
A mix of rephotographed live action and animation using hand-cut traveling mattes.
"The strongest film by Robert Breer in several seasons." - J. Hoberman,The Village Voice
1982, 16mm, color/so, 5.5m, $20
"BANG reveals Breer at his most accomplished and most playful. It is also his most autobiographical film - the youngster paddling a boat is Breer as a boy and the pencil cartoon sequences were drawn by Breer when he was around ten years old.
"Robert Breer is the godfather of animation art. In BANG he sustains ten dense minutes of collagistic mayhem that's as potent as anything he's ever done. Television images of a boy paddling a boat and an arena crowd cheering, plus film shots of bright pink and red flowers and a toy phone, are intercut with frenetic drawings in Breer's trademark heavy crayon, principally of baseball games. Breer inserts a photo of himself with a question mark scrawled over his head, accompanied by the words 'Don't be smart.' But he can't help it - he is." - Katherine Dieckmann, The Village Voice
"Robert Breer's style is akin to musical composition. His films begin by presenting various elements - a dog, a house, a telephone - upon which he will later expand. The films seem to be variations on the themes of certain objects or words or gestures, variations that grow and build, becoming ever more complex." - Janet Maslin, The New York Times
1986, 16mm, color/so, 10m, $40
This animated fable is centered around a backyard pond shown intermittently in live-action scenes. A small child appears and disappears in a ballet of crows, rabbits, monkey wrenches, and goldfish. When the police arrive there are pot-shots at backyard varmits, but the frog on the swing seems to survive it all.
As usual in Breer films, the soundtrack is often conspicuously out of sync with the picture. Or is it vice versa when a crow goes "moo?"
1989, 16mm, color/so, 5m, $20
VHS Sale: $300
1997, 16mm, color/so, 8m, $30
16mm, color/so, 5m, $20
2000, 16mm, color/so, 5m, $20