Our partial retrospective of the career of Robert Breer includes two new films--Trial Balloons and Swiss Army Knife with Rats and Pigeons-- plus a number of other works from his prolific 30 years of filmmaking. Robert Breer will present and discuss his work as an artist and filmmaker.
Breer is a kinetic artist: in painting, in sculpture, and in film. He is considered to be the greatest animator working in avant-garde film today. Coming to film from abstract expressionist painting, Breer made a radical breakthrough in the Fifties by isolating the frame, in that virtually every frame presented a different image from the one preceding it. Later, Breer introduced the use of actual objects in animated film collages. Working with flip cards, he created his most famous film, A Man and His Dog Out for Air, in 1957. In the Sixties, Breer responded to both pop art and minimalism in continually innovative ways and in the Seventies, his work became more representational, using the rotoscope, an “old” device that allows frame-by-frame tracing of live-action footage.
Critic J. Hoberman describes Robert Breer's “infectious anarchy”: “In some ways Breer is an anti-animator: He's less concerned with fabricating a sense of continuous motion than with exploiting the rat-a-tat-tat of separate images that makes such an illusion possible.... What Breer shares with a studio animator like Tex Avery is a love of velocity and comic collapse. Nothing in his universe remains itself for very long.... Objects mutate and spatial ambiguities multiply.... Disney world offers a safely homogenous exoticism; 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....” --in American Film