Robert Breer: special programming

To celebrate the release of Patrick Barrès’ new book, Défier le film. Le cinema d’animation de Robert Breer (Les Éditions Somme toute), Tënk has prepared a layover built around the experimental work of this American filmmaker and artist, who, after his initial career as an abstract painter, went on to cofound the Film-Makers’ Cooperative alongside Jonas Mekas, Shirley Clarke, and Stan Brakhage.

Three other experimental works accompany and dialogue with this introduction to the works of Robert Breer (1926-2011), created by artists who were interested by his research or were in proximity with its strongest throughlines: Pierre Hébert, Jennifer L. Burford, and Robert Lapoujade.

Fracture

In his book, Patrick Barrès, professor at the Université Toulouse Jean-Jaurès and specialist in animated film, insists on the experimental aspect of Breer’s oeuvre, which is presented through subversive and engaged acts that necessarily contest norms, take risks, answer challenges and result in a distinct body of work.

Breer inserted a fracture into each of his works. Rejecting the systematic linear dimension of creative work, he disrupted visual and cinematographic rationality, framing bias, depth, formal logic, continuity, and fluidity. All of this served to uplift the creative process, an archaic materials approach, an experiment into film parameters, adoption of new creative conduits and the establishment of singular aesthetic motifs.

These lines of inquiry are built around powerful questions: the relationships between drawing,  movement, and drawn movement, the dialectic between movement and stasis in the field of the image and the visual rhythm, relationships between colour and perception, the connection made between narrative motifs and the poietic scenario, tensions between form and representation, all recognizable as issues in experimental animated film.

Experimental Bias

Our choice of pairings for this layover shines a light on experimental bias, injunctions, and the challenge issued to expressive forms by Breer: “Defy film. Defy sculpture.”

Pierre Hébert, with Mount Fuji Seen From A Moving Train, proposes a hybrid film that combines footage filmed during his stay in Japan and filmed performances with graphic sequences that interpret, analyze, or upend them through plastic modulations. Full-screen graphic animations at a juddering rhythm create a flash effect, interspersed with sequences filmed from the train, thereby evoking Robert Breer’s Fuji, to which Hébert pays homage. These two constitute our first pairing.

Jennifer L. Burford’s Robert Breer at Home delivers a journey of cinematographic exploration in the filmmaker’s workshop, with close shots of the artist’s manipulations at his worktable. A Man and His Dog Out for Air, a fine example of Breer’s experimental graphic research, completes this second pairing.

Robert Lapoujade completes our trio of “guest artists” with his Foules, a short contemporary animated film on Breer’s early experimental films, showing affinity for his research on multimedia, “unrelationships” and “anti-continuity”.

If you’re interested in learning more, you may enjoy the book, Toucher au cinéma, by Pierre Hébert, published by Les Éditions Somme toute, as well as this text from Nicolas Thys about the “Places and Monuments” series.