Robert Breer

Jonas Mekas assembles 160 portraits, appearances, and fleeting sketches of underground and independent filmmakers captured between 1955 and 1996. Fast-paced and archival in spirit, the film celebrates the avant-garde as its own “nation of cinema,” a vital community existing outside the dominance of commercial film.

A compilation of over 30 years of private home movie footage shot by Lithuanian-American avant-garde director Jonas Mekas, assembled by Mekas "purely by chance", without concern for chronological order.

A film collage tracing the story of the lives, loves, and deaths within the artistic community surrounding Jonas Mekas.

No synopsis available yet.

No synopsis available yet.

Experimental filmmaker Pip Chodorov traces the course of experimental film in America, taking the very personal point of view of someone who grew up as part of the experimental film community.

Shot in 1974, Colliding was made as a portrait of sculptor/animator Robert Breer.

Burford met Breer in February 1992 and filmed his actions. Breer manipulates some of his mutoscopes: he leafs through some cards of his film in the making, Sparkill Ave! A dome-shaped sculpture slowly moves across the space.

Super 8 film. Observations of the Institute on Film, Video & Photography, Amherst, MA, summer 1975. Among the cast of characters, in order of appearance, are Robert Breer, John Terry, Steve Ascher, Richard Leacock, Jon Rubin, Frank Daniel, Ed Emshwiller, Ann McIntosh, Terry Lockhart, Standish Lawder, Jerome Liebling.

First shown on January 30, 1967, FOR LIFE AGAINST THE WAR was an open-call, collective statement from American independent filmmakers disparate in style and sensibility but united by their opposition to the Vietnam War. Part of the protest festival Week of the Angry Arts, the epic compilation film incorporated minute-long segments which were sent from many corners of the country, spliced together and projected. The original presentation of the works was more of an open forum with no curation or selection, and in 2000 Anthology Film Archives preserved a print featuring around 40 films from over 60 submissions.

A collage film in which Pope Pious XII does a juggling act.

Documentation of an exhibition entitled Le Mouvement held in Paris in 1955, co-curated by Breer and Pontus Hulten. Features works and appearances by Breer, Tinguely, Agam, Soto, and others. — Anthology Film Archives

No synopsis available yet.

A live action footage of a smiling, bespectacled (presumably) Western tourist set against the familiar cadence of an accelerating train revving up as it leaves the station sets the mesmerizing tone for the film's abstract panoramic survey of an Ozu-esque Japanese landscape of electrical power lines, passing trains, railroad tracks, and the gentle slope of obliquely peaked, uniform rooflines as Breer distills the essential geometry of Mount Fuji into a collage of acute angles and converging (and bifurcating) lines .

No synopsis available yet.

Animated short

Conceivably the best of all of Breer’s films to date – has more to do with figuration, according to Breer’s formulation regarding titles with letters or numbers. This becomes clear right away as the title letters are intercut with a flurry of fish swimming past the frame lines, which are made all the more literal through the associative chain established by a snippet of Schubert’s Trout Quintet heard on the soundtrack, along with footsteps – which continue over a profusion of other shapes, colors, and objects, including the title letters again. -- Jonathan Rosenbaum

"A concise, one-minute cartoon history of the black American, commissioned by the Public Broadcast Laboratory and shown on NET network." - Canyon Cinema

Personal photos are interspersed with fragmentary drawings and flashes of colour, observed and/or remembered everyday events - all of which add to a general sense of reminiscence. Sometimes a hand appears (Breer’s own) on top of a photo, reminding us that the photo is but an object in the film, not the film itself.

Breer’s animation explores the theme and variation of the drawn line: a line in constant movement and transformation. With a very sketchy style, he demonstrates how a simple, abstract image can fill and satisfy the imagination of the film viewer. - MoMA

A short film by Robert Breer

A number of simple mechanical objects spiral out of a spray-paint nebula then implode into pure pattern and line.

A free flow from photography to geometric abstraction hand-painted by Breer. - Harvard Film Archive

Featuring a commentary by Noël Burch (in nonsense French), Recreation's rapid-fire montage of single-frame images of incredible density and intensity has been compared to contemporary Beat poetry.

Cut-outs of war machines and the figure of Napoleon – contributors to an anti-war theme – encounter abstract shapes, line drawings, old-master landscapes, short bursts of ‘real-time’ landscapes and shakily photographed gestural watercolors. … ‘a synthesis of all previous techniques.’

An anarchic collage of invention, Rubber Cement uses rotoscoped family footage together with found objects to create an almost free-form animation bursting with color and movement.

Voted for in Sight & Sound's 2022 Greatest Films of All Time poll

Robert Breer’s What Goes Up... continues his “kitchen sink” approach of including as many different kinds of things as possible. Central to his art are a series of tensions. Rather than using animation to produce seamless illusions, his films reveal cinema’s dual nature as both an illusion of movement and a succession of stills. The ultimate effect of his work is ecstatic: by combining various rhythmic patterns, abstract and photographed shapes, and flatness mixed with depth illusions, Breer energizes ordinary eyesight. The whole world can seem more alive, alive with rhythms and colors and shapes and textures as well, after seeing one of his films. But Breer’s films also often have a theme of failure, of failed movements and failed aspirations, and the title What Goes Up..., in referencing the idiom “What goes up must come down”, refers to his childhood dreams of flying (illustrated here as in many of his films with airplanes) as well as to the limpness that follows orgasm for males.

A short film by Robert Breer

Breer's extraordinary autobiographical film combines personal and family photos with intense colors, textures and geometric abstractions. Originally presented as part of Karlheinz Sotckhausen's 1964 premiere of Originale. - Harvard Film Archive

An abstract view of a seacoast landscape, created by mixing original line drawings and rotoscoped imagery traced from live-action footage, presented against a sound track of seaside noises.

No synopsis available yet.

An experiment in associative spontaneity.