Breer / Dewdney

There was a year in my life where I tried to write something really substantial on Robert Breer, but ended up not being able to get anywhere with it; I read what I could, but as is often the case with work like this, couldn’t see all I wanted. Our department had some of his films: 69, 70, 77, Gulls and Buoys and Pat’s Birthday. 69 especially blew me away. It really made me giggle, like some kind of wonderful machine, learning how to live, setting up rules here and there, changing them just a bit, the weight, the heaviness, the (illusion of) movement of objects, things “moving” because of sounds in the background, depth coming in and out, and all of this hilariously breaking down into blues, greys, everything we saw before in single frames, and a gasping flashing and focusing of little chotchkeys right before. If we ever get robots, this is how they should break  - or be born (they probably already do.)

I know there’s a bunch of versions online, but seriously, none of them are worthwhile unless you’ve seen 69 on film.

I figure it might be of interest to someone to offer some of the quotes I gathered, along with a bibliography here (.doc), both by Breer and about him. To be frank, blogging again about films really came via the back to back posts on Breer by Jacob W. (who posted the interview with Breer by Mekas/Sitney quoted below) and Yoel Meranda, and I had this little post in mind ever since. The quotes mostly focus on 69, but I was also interested in trying to connect him to Jean Vigo (whom he mentions as an influence) and also talk politics briefly. I’ve generally felt that the most interesting writing on Breer was done by Scott MacDonald, Fred Camper and Lois Mendelson in her difficult-to-find book Robert Breer: A Study of His Work in the Context of the Modernist Tradition. I never gathered all the quotes I wanted from that book – there were too many. Anyhow, here’s some samples from the file:

From Film Culure Interview (Mekas/Sitney) p.46-47 (on 69, analyses of synthesis):

Mekas: I projected, yesterday, to a group of people, here at Anthology, your film 69. And I could talk about any other film, any film – but I practically couldn’t say a work about 69. I don’t know how to approach it, or how to talk about it, although it may be my favorite film of yours. I don’t know how to begin to talk about it.

Breer: … I think 69 goes from a kind of very deliberate, repetitive opening sequence that seems to be very locked in on itself, and gradually disintegrates, right? And it goes dark, and it ends dark. Things break up completely. Somebody asked me at the Flaherty Seminar or some place, what was the meaning of the last part of 69 when the flow that was previously there, on the screen, began to break into pieces? And I said that that was the analysis of the synthesis. They are all synthetic films, very much so. I mean frame by frame synthesis. I broke up those motions and actually shuffled the cards to get that effect, you know – I shuffle and shoot them, and I shuffle them again and I shoot them again… So then, I was analyzing the construction of the film. That’s part of my idea about concreteness and exposing the materials of film itself and that was the way of doing it.

From Letter sent to Jonas Mekas by Breer (Film Culture, p.70)

“It has to do with revealing the artifices instead of concealing them. The fact of that rabbit sitting inside the magician’s hat is the real mystery, not how it’s dissimulated. The hat should be transparent and show the rabbit.

So it’s again the threshold area that defines the form. Thresholds for my own exploration have been:

1. The fusion of stills into flowing motion and back again (flip cards, collage film, sculpture).
2. Transition from literary convention to other – i.e. abstraction and back again (collage films – Pat’s B’day).
3. Transition from subconscious to conscious awareness-i.e. slow motion sculpture, fast paced film.
4. Transition from 2d to 3D and from 3D to 2D-transparent mutascopes and cut out sculpted mutascopes – rotating bent wires.

Interview with Hans Ulrich Olbrist (On the floating room):

RB: There was a project that Billy Kluver came up with from Sweden that didn’t ever get done, but solicited some suggestions. Somebody here reminded me of the project that I’d suggested and which was for a room that would be made for meetings, political, artistic and that room would be on wheels but very quietly. People would come in and spend all day talking and deciding things, but when they go out of the same door it would be in a different place.

HUO: It would move slowly?

RB: Yes it would move slowly and the idea was again to undermine certitude so that even these big decisions would have to be… It’s kind of obvious I guess. But that was one of the projects that never got realised and that will probably never get realised because it’s anti-organisation, it’s anti-orthodoxy, so that maybe is a little problematic too.

***

On my last trip to Toronto, we visited the CFMDC. I assume like other film coops, they let you preview films, which basically means $10 to watch what ever sweet Canadian flicks you want (or perhaps whoever was working that day let it mean that.) Made me really jealous of Torontonians… So along with Frampton/Wieland’s A to B in Ontario, Elie Epp’s Trapline, we watched Keewatin Dewdney‘s Maltese Cross Movement. For those wondering what a Maltese Cross (also known as a Geneva Drive) is, here’s a Wikipedia article. Dewdney didn’t make that many films, but this is a real, joyful hoot. It was the second time I saw it; the first time, Michael Zryd had introduced it to us at our Canadian Curiosities screening with the words, and I paraphrase, “A film about a projector learning how to speak.” Ever since I watched it, I kept trying to remember the music, the progression and the general giddy feeling of watching it, and it all happened again the second time. Here’s some program notes from the Courtisane Festival in the Netherlands:

The “Maltese Cross” system was at the heart of the cinema machine in its infancy. This was the mechanism that originally dissected the continuity of vision in the camera and also re-assembled it in the projector. Keewatin Dewdney uses it as the central motif in this fascinating film, which not only addresses the nature of cinematographic illusion, but also plays in a witty way with the cognitive relationship between word and image. The Maltese Cross Movement reads like a rebus. In the process of its decoding, the deep-rooted process of attributing meaning is reversed, and in doing so generates a turbulent counter current which carries us along to the edge of the logics of meaning.

And another one by Konrad Steiner:

The Maltese Cross Movement is a fascinating rebus of a film. The star and crescent motif shot through the film can represent so many things. At first it is the mechanical movement in the camera/projector that slices flow in just the right frequency and regularity for us to see motion where there is none. Then this pair goes on to be the sun and moon, as the astronomical basis for our diurnal and calendric rhythms, they represent another kind of intermittance and alternation. Then further to be the symbols of complementarity, one in continuous motion and one intermittent (with the sound of the ratcheting cogs of the projector). Many images flash past as the film teaches you various ways to read it. And as the montage gets ever more ecstatic — and interrupted — the text of image, sound and their synchronization working like a rickety reality, almost ready to collapse, multivalent and almost intelligible, like the fine structure of our own experience, the final words, “If i die tonight, tomorrow “I” ‘ll be gone” representing a joke.

You can rent the film from the CFMDC, which I really recommend you do.

What would happen if you showed 69 and Maltese Cross Movement back to back? Would they cancel each other out? Would it work out perfectly? Are you ready?

…

…

no

(♫)

 

Update (1/18/2011): I found a small essay by Dewdney entitled Discontinous Films (.pdf). Check it out!