Robert Breer : Ambassador of Ambiguity
by Ian Kennedy
Robert Breer began experimenting with animation in the early 1950s. His style was immediately recognizable by his use of the “single-frame aesthetic” and ambiguity as an expressive device. Although his films rely heavily on deliberate randomness they are important conceptually. Breer is a central figure in the tradition of experimental animation, which has functioned as an alternative to commercial cartoons. Ambiguity, or more accurately equivocality, plays a pivotal role in the process and style of Breer’s work.
Robert Breer came to filmmaking as an abstract painter and his films reflect that. His interest in ambiguity as an element of art can be traced to his exposure to American Abstract Expressionist paintings during the 1950s. The Jackson Pollack exhibition at the Galerie Fachetti in 1952 made an enormous impression on him, forcing Breer to rethink his aesthetic positions.[1] This helped him expand his approach to the construction of radically new cinematic forms and question the role of composition and the frame. Breer saw similarities between the Pollack paintings and what he wanted to do cinematically:
I liked the open-endedness of American Abstract expressionist paintings. I liked the fact that compositions were getting opened-the idea of the surface extending beyond the frame. I saw the frame as getting arbitrary and of course that helped very much support the idea about filmic form. When you begin to consider ...anything moving around that’s going to bounce off the edge of the canvas, it also has the option of passing behind it, or passing beyond it. That cinematic space, that screen we’d been building everything into that rectangle. Of course Richter did in his first movies. That was just more of the art concrete orthodoxy, that the canvas limits were determined by the interior dynamics of the painting with film, I suspected the idea of an infinity, of a continuum, and American Abstract Expressionist paintings have that...It was no longer necessarily a kind of enclosed composition in which the eye wandered through a maze of tension and so forth.[2]
With this statement we can better understand Breer’s philosophy of the film space and the limits inherent in the medium. He did not want to be limited by the “interior dynamics” of film, just like the Abstract Expressionists were not limited by the “interior dynamics of the painting.” Unlike painting, film is not immediately thought of as a highly expressionistic medium, meaning that it is not an entirely subjective form of expression. In other words, to distort reality on film is more challenging than it is on canvas. What interested Breer, as well as most avant-garde filmmakers in general, was the expressionistic potential film has. American Abstract Expressionism, as well as the Pop art and color abstraction later on, inspired Breer to explore ambiguity in his work. Breer explains: “ I think that even in painting the clue to what I do has something to do with ambiguity and controlling ambiguity and making it dramatic...to get ambiguity as an expressive feature of the thing.”[3]
The ambiguity in Breer’s work has as much to do with the freedom which animation allows than any highly individualized style or idea. Animation is the most expressionistic form of filmic representation because the filmmaker has the most control over what is being filmed. Every element is in the filmmaker’s hands. What allows Breer the freedom to be so expressive is his choice of using animation to form his ideas. In fact Breer has more in common with early animators Emile Cohl, Winsor McCay, and Hans Richter than any of his more poetic contemporaries like Stan Brakhage and Kenneth Anger. “Breer’s films combine extreme wit with technical dexterity that makes his films more accessible to a larger audience than most experimental/avant-garde filmmakers can attract.”[4] The similarities between Cohl and Breer lie in, as Scott MacDonald says; “the idea of animation being primarily about metamorphosis, rather than storytelling."[5] However, it is important to note that Breer had not seen any of Cohl’s films until he did A Man and His Dog Out for Air in 1957.
Breer's first films- Form Phases I (1952), Form Phases II, III (1953) and Form Phases IV (1954) were basically his paintings put into motion . In a 1985 interview, Breer explains: "Form Phases I was a painting before it was a film. I used its composition for the film. I moved the shapes around and had them grow and replace each other. I went from making paintings to animating paintings. For me, that was the whole point of making a film."[6] These films, like Rhythm 21 by Hans Richter (1921) are abstract, geometric experiments with figure/ground reversals, overlapping, and intersections which examine the way the eye identifies and understands what it sees.
If Breer's early films were an attempt to add motion to his paintings then his later work seems to show film's potential in the area of collage. As Breer evolved cinematically he chose to keep a pictorial aesthetic in his work, using the single-frame picture rather than the traditional shot as the building unit of the film. His films retain delicate balance between the still image and the moving film. Breer explains it this way: "...think of each frame as a still picture, which they are, of course. And as soon as I did that i gave me the freedom to experiment because I was safe. I was on home ground."[7] This duality between the pictorial and cinematic language is what makes Breer's work so interesting and unique. After experimenting with a film loop consisting of single frames of different images Breer made Recreation (1956-1957), which applied the collage concept to the problem of creating a unique cinematic form.
I thought of film as just naturally the material of collage itself because it has a kind of consistency of form, you know, sprocket holes and little squares and you cut it and move it around in a way that you would any kind of material. The editing is like gluing together, It is actually using glue.[8]
Each frame serves as a collage fragment and when these different fragments are put together by projection they become interdependent on each other to create one ongoing multilayered image. "Thus the collision of contrasting elements which is central to the principle of collage construction takes the form of simultaneous presentation which extends in time."[9] The fragments do not mean anything by themselves; it is the contrasting relationship between them which creates meaning. There is a sense of unfinishednesss and ambiguity in the elements of any collage because fragments and meanings can be infinitely added.
The extended surface of Abstract Expressionist paintings is something Breer deliberately tries to attain in his films. Just like a Jackson Pollack painting seems unrestricted by the frame -the paint seems to be flying off the canvas -Breer's films make it obvious to the viewer that space exists outside of the frame by having objects leave on one side of the frame and then enter another. Unlike a live-action film, there is no reference point for the use of off screen space in animation. One can make sense spatially and temporally of off screen space in a live-action sequence, but in animation the viewer does not expect a "realistic" relationship between what is seen and what is hidden. For example in Jamestown Baloos (1957) the action continues, yet it is unseen. Many figures in Parts 1 and 3 of Jamestown Baloos fly in and out of the frame, expanding the field of cinematic action beyond the frame. Some of his images straddle the frame and thus simultaneously exist in the space of the screen and the space beyond. In Part 2 of Jamestown Baloos a solid red cutout of a reclining woman lies horizontally across the top of the frame with only the bottom strip of her body visible along the screen's edge. Sometimes objects enter and exit the frame quickly, suggesting they are traveling a long distance to reach the screen. "This is quite different from the use of off-screen space in Recreation (1956-1957) where shapes extend beyond the boundaries of the screen through rhythmic expansion and contraction of form clusters, but they do not appear to travel far beyond those boundaries or along directed trajectories."[10] Sometimes the use of off-screen space is more complex and ambiguous than a straight line extension beyond the frame. When a cutout head with sunglasses rolls off the screen right and then reenters a moment later from the screen left, its spatial area curves around the screen and yet its movement is completely invisible to the viewer.
Breer also experiments with off-screen space through exploring the reflexive nature of film. In these instances the viewer is more aware of the process of animation and the relationship of the filmmaker to the film. Many of the full screen watercolors and collages in Part 2 are shifted under the lens manually and then whisked away. Other times, photographs are moved under the lens to the point of blurring the image. At one moment we even see the cause of these of these movements- the hand itself. All these examples allude to the space of the filmmaker himself, the lens, the camera, and draws us into the filmmaking process, a space that existed at another moment and place from the theater of presentation. This imaginative creation of off screen space belongs to the tradition of reflexive cinema initiated by Dziga Vertov in Man with a Movie Camera (1929).
Breer's film, Fist Fight (1964) expands on his earlier collage strategies to invent more cinematic possibilities. Once again he uses the concepts of pictorial collage as the foundation for expanding cinematic form. However, what differentiates Fist Fight from his other collage films is how it came to be made.
Breer had been working on the film with the temporary title of Cookies when Karlheinz Stockhausen, a German musician friend of Breer's, asked him to be the filmmaker for his Originale project. It was 1964 and Originale was an avant-garde theater project scheduled to be performed on five subsequent days at the Judson Theater, opposite Carnegie Hall. The film was scheduled to appear at a certain moment in the middle of the piece and Breer would act the part of the filmmaker, using video equipment to record the theatrical events.
As the film went on for a certain amount of time, I walked up to the screen with a hoop of paper stretched on a metal frame, big enough to cover the whole screen, and I took that and I walked back to the projector with it. And as I remember I had someone following focus. So I took the image, I took the screen and moved it up to the projector and the image got smaller and smaller and went right back into the projector. It was very nice and I had to step over the actors to do it. That was about two-thirds of the way through Fist Fight. [11]
The version of Fist Fight which is viewed today, in its entirety in a conventional theater, is not the same film as the one which was part of a larger artistic context back in the sixties. However, it remains an amazing collage film-one that refers back to Recreation and Jamestown Baloos, but built around a different structure. Instead of a stream of bombarding images, the film is an arrangement of individual fragments, or mini collages separated by strips of black leader. The formation allows for the eye to rest briefly before following the next visual burst. The soundtrack is an edited version of a recording of all five performances of the Originale piece. It has no narrative function nor does it follow the flow of the visuals. Rather, it runs parallel to the images, but not synchronized with them. This relationship between the aural and visual elements creates an ambiguous structure, one that could extend indefinitely or be closed like a loop.
What also makes Fist Fight unique from Breer's other films is his use of photographic images. The first sequence of the film is a prologue consisting of snapshots of the participants in the theatrical event. The rest of the film uses photomontage in a cinematic form. Breer explains the use of photographs in his film:
I decided at some point that it would contain a lot of snapshots and stuff I have from family albums-just because there is so much of it. I was interested in a very dense collage and I wanted to use stuff at hand and thought it would be interesting to use very familiar stuff, family stuff. It's kind of a challenge to ignore the sentimental content and use it rather dispassionately.[12]
Breer wanted to use personal material in an unsentimental, cold and public way.[13] Throughout the film Breer incorporates photographs in different ways. He uses them as they are, he juxtaposes them with other materials and other photographs, alters them by hand, and tampers with their position in front of the lens to create a cinematic photomontage. " Like the Dada photomontagists who preceded him, Breer was clearly fascinated by that special dichotomy between the real or documentary quality of the photographic fragment and the unreal or synthetic result of welding them together."[14]
By expanding and radicalizing strategies of his artistic predecessors-painters as well as filmmakers-Robert Breer created a new cinematic form. Breer's success as a filmmaker lies in his fusing together of disparate fragments through single-frame construction, creating what Lois Mendelson describes as "complex spatial, temporal, chromatic and rhythmic structures." [15] His resistance of the boundaries of filmmaking makes the viewer question his/her spatial and temporal perception. Breer's attempt to push beyond cinematic limits led him to incorporate ambiguity in his work creating subtlety and complexity. This ambiguity is made possible through the art of animation and his use of collage. For Breer ambiguity is: "...not just an oscillation between one thing and another, but an ongoing ambiguity, one that would grow, one that is so complex, so difficult to decipher, that it could never be resolved."
Breer's roots lay in the tradition of Constructivism, the Bauhaus and Dada, as well as American Abstract Expressionists. Unlike many of his contemporaries, Breer is not linked to literary or poetic traditions or Romantic or Surrealist modes of expression. Rather, Breer pioneered a cinema of speed, of pure images, rhythm and structure: a style that, after 25 years of MTV, is largely taken for granted today.
[1] Lois Mendelson, Robert Breer: A Study of His Work in the Context of the Modernist Tradition ( Ann Arbor, Michigan:UMI Research Press, 1981), 8.
[2] Mendelson.,8
[3] Mendelson., 2
[5] MacDonald.,18
[6] MacDonald.,18
[7] Mendelson.,2
[8] Mendelson.,74
[9] Mendelson.,74
[10] Mendelson.,88
[11] Mendelson.,91
[12] Mendelson.,94
[13] MacDonald.,34
[14] Mendelson.,94
[15] Mendelson., 2
