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....

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 ,,,...

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

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....

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

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...

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

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

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...

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....

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 elegant home movie, its subject is Breer's apartment which faces the Tappan Zee (T.Z.) Bridge. It is permeated, as are all his films, with subtle humor, eroticism and a sense of imminent chaos and catastrophe....

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...

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 ...

First shown on January 30, 1967, FOR LIFE AGAINST THE WAR was an open-call, collective statement from American independent filmmakers disparate in style and sensibility but united by their opposition to the Vietnam War. Part of the protest festival W...

A record, of sorts, of the birth and death of Tinguely’s famous auto-destructive sculpture. Filmed on the spot at MoMA, this film also exploits a wide range of camera and editing techniques to give it a life of its own, independent of and parallel to...

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