Experimental Memoria II: Robert Breer
April 18, 2012
Northwest Film ForumSeattle, WA
Visions in Motion: A Memorial Retrospective, 1954-2003
A selection of 16 short films spanning the artist’s career. All films were screened on 16mm.
The son of an inventor, Robert Breer (Sept. 30, 1926–Aug. 13, 2011) studied engineering at Stanford but soon devoted his life to the visual arts. As a painter, sculptor and pioneering experimental filmmaker, he achieved international acclaim as one of the finest of his generation. His film techniques combined line animation, stop-motion, rotoscoping, home movies and single-frame editing, often with audio collage.
This special program spanned Breer’s entire career and included award-winning and rarely-shown gems like A Miracle (1954), Jamestown Baloos (1957), Fuji (1973), Rubber Cement (1975), Bang! (1986) and ATOZ (2000).
Presented as part of the three part series Experimental Memoria (co-curated with Adam Sekuler), commemorating the work of three notable experimental and underground filmmakers who left this plane in 2011.
There were three screenings in this series:
- George Kuchar
- Robert Breer
- Adolfas Mekas
The son of an inventor and designer of cars for Chrysler, Robert Breer (Sept. 30, 1926 – Aug. 13, 2011) studied engineering at Stanford but soon devoted his life to the visual arts. As a painter, sculptor and pioneering experimental filmmaker, he achieved international acclaim as one of the finest of his generation. His film techniques were incredibly diverse: line animation, stop-motion, rotoscoping, cut-outs, home movies and single-frame editing, often with audio collage — sometimes all in one film.
A founding member of the Film-maker's Cooperative in New York, Breer worked in Europe, America and Japan; exhibited at the legendary Expo 70 in Osaka, Japan; made short animated films for the PBS children's program, The Electric Company; and taught film for 30 years at the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art. His many honors included the American Film Institute's coveted Maya Deren Award and the induction of his film Fuji in the National Film Registry in 2002. Upon his death last year, obituaries appeared in the New York Times, the Village Voice, The Guardian, the London Telegraph, and BBC News.
This special program features 16 of Breer's amazing and diverse short films, most of them unavailable on home video. Spanning his entire career, they include award-winning and rarely-shown gems like A Miracle (1954, in collaboration with Pontus Hultén, future director of the Pompidou Center), Jamestown Baloos (1957), Pat's Birthday (1962, in collaboration with Claes Oldenburg), Fist Fight (1964, with music by Karlheinz Stockhausen), Fuji (1973), Rubber Cement (1975), Bang! (1986), ATOZ (2000), and the very-rarely shown PBL No. 2 (1968) produced for public television.
“A key member of the great generation of American avant-garde filmmakers, and one of the most influential animators in cinema history.”
- J. Hoberman, Village Voice“Combining a meticulous attention to form and rhythm with an acerbic wit and talent for satire, Breer provides an important link between the abstract films of Richter, Eggeling and Leger and the lyric and radical traditions of the avant-garde, from Brakhage and Baillie to Kubelka and Sharits.”
- Harvard Film Archive, 2008“His cinema...argues for an active reenvisioning of the seen world, with all its parts equally capable of inspiring wonder. Breer makes a cinema in which everything seems alive.”
- Fred Camper
