Movies: Robert Breer

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....

100 basic images switching positions for 4000 frames....

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....

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-e...

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....

While birds can be heard singing a shrill song, lines crisscross wildly as if they aimed to form shapes. Their efforts seem hopeless until the very end ,,,...

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

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

"Made with spray paint and hand-cut stencils, this film was an attempt at maximum plastic intensity… Places Breer for the first time among the major colorists of the avant-garde." – P. Adams Sitney...

Robert Breer animation from 1969. 16mm, color, silent, using spray paint & stencils....

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 ...

Filmmaker Jonas Mekas films 160 underground film people over four decades....

Utilising an apparently new-found obsession with the colour red and reinvigorating some of the circular imagery of A Man and His Dog Out for Air and 69, Breer delves into the very basis of animation to explore how a variety of easily recognisable obj...

An experimental film in which a photograph of an airplane turns into a wire diagram, then into an animated plane in flight, and then it explodes into words....

Breer's earliest experiments in animation are wonderfully dense yet lyrical abstractions based on Breer's own geometric paintings. - Harvard Film Archive...

An experiment in associative spontaneity....

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 sw...

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 synt...

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....

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. - M...