Robert Breer

What Goes Up.... (2003)

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 cinema ...

Atoz (2000)

An animated film dedicated to Breer's granddaughter Zoë. ...

Time Flies (1997)

Personal photos are interspersed with fragmentary drawings and flashes of colour, observed and/or remembered everyday events - all of which add to a general sense of reminiscence. Sometimes a hand appears (Breer's own) on top of a photo, reminding us that ...

Sparkill Ave! (1993)

Sparkill Ave! combines still photos of Breer's home and environs with hand-drawn images of ordinary objects and scenes. ...

A Frog on the Swing (1989)

An animated fable centered around a backyard pond shown intermittently in live-action scenes. ...

Bang! (1986)

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. ...

Trial Balloons (1982)

An experiment in associative spontaneity. ...

Swiss Army Knife with Rats and Pigeons (1980)

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 objects c ...

T.Z. (1979)

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. ...

Lmno (1978)

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 swimmi ...

77 (1977)

A number of simple mechanical objects spiral out of a spray-paint nebula then implode into pure pattern and line. ...

Rubber Cement (1976)

An anarchic collage of invention, Rubber Cement uses rotoscoped family footage together with found objects to create an almost free-form animation bursting with color and movement. ...

Fuji (1974)

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-esque J ...

Gulls and Buoys (1972)

An abstract view of a seacoast landscape, created by mixing original line drawings and rotoscoped imagery traced from live-action footage, presented against a sound track of seaside noises. ...

70 (1970)

"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. ...

69 (1969)

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

PBL #2 (1968)

"A concise, one-minute cartoon history of the black American, commissioned by the Public Broadcast Laboratory and shown on NET network. ...

For Life, Against the War (1967)

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 Week of ...

66 (1966)

Abstract, quasi-geometric study in interrupted continuity. ...

Fist Fight (1964)

Breer's extraordinary autobiographical film combines personal and family photos with intense colors, textures and geometric abstractions. Originally presented as part of Karlheinz Sotckhausen's 1964 premiere of Originale. ...

Breathing (1963)

Breer's animation explores the theme and variation of the drawn line: a line in constant movement and transformation. With a very sketchy style, he demonstrates how a simple, abstract image can fill and satisfy the imagination of the film viewer. ...

Pat's Birthday (1962)

Breer was influenced by the new performance art and "happenings" making waves in the avant-garde of Europe and New York. He worked briefly with Claes Oldenburg and his performance pieces resulting in a 13 minute film, Pat's Birthday (1962). ...

Horse Over Tea Kettle (1962)

A woman with an umbrella, a frog and other easily recognizable creatures and objects are moved and transformed within an intricate orchestration of expectations and surprises involving changes of scale, direction virtual depth, and above all, movement off ...

Blazes (1961)

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

Homage to Jean Tinguely's 'Homage to New York' (1960)

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 the s ...

Inner and Outer Space (1960)

Eyewash (1959)

A free flow from photography to geometric abstraction hand-painted by Breer. ...

Cassis Colank (1959)

A short film by Robert Breer ...

Par avion (1958)

A short film by Robert Breer ...

A Man and His Dog Out for Air (1957)

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. ...

Recreation II (1956)

Voted for in Sight & Sound's 2022 Greatest Films of All Time poll ...

Recreation (1956)

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. ...

Motion Pictures No. 1 (1956)

Experimental film, in which against a black field, constantly changing coloured strips of paper cross the screen, meet each other and deflect at angles. ...

Cats (1956)

Short hand drawn representation of a cat ...

Image by Images IV (1955)

An endless loop of film composed entirely of disparate images. Through repetition, certain images isolate themselves from the flow reforming the original pattern. ...

Image by Images II (1955)

Image by Images III (1955)

A Miracle (1954)

A collage film in which Pope Pious XII does a juggling act. ...

Form Phases IV (1953)

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

Form Phases II (1953)

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

Form Phases III (1953)

Different stages of paintings made with ink. The ink fuses, spreads. ...

Form Phases I (1952)

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

Free Radicals: A History of Experimental Film (2011)

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. ...

As I Was Moving Ahead, Occasionally I Saw Brief Glimpses of Beauty (2000)

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. ...

Birth of a Nation (1997)

Jonas Mekas assembles 160 portraits, appearances, and fleeting sketches of underground and independent filmmakers captured between 1955 and 1996. Fast-paced and archival in spirit, the film celebrates the avant-garde as its own "nation of cinema," a vital ...

Robert Breer At Home (1992)

Burford met Breer in February 1992 and filmed his actions. Breer manipulates some of his mutoscopes: he leafs through some cards of his film in the making, Sparkill Ave! A dome-shaped sculpture slowly moves across the space. ...

Colliding (1989)

Shot in 1974, Colliding was made as a portrait of sculptor/animator Robert Breer. ...

He Stands in a Desert Counting the Seconds of His Life (1986)

A film collage tracing the story of the lives, loves, and deaths within the artistic community surrounding Jonas Mekas. ...