Robert Carlton Breer (September 30, 1926 – August 11, 2011) was an American experimental filmmaker, painter, and sculptor.[1]
Life and career
Born in 1926, Breer began his artistic career as a painter after studying at Stanford University and Paris.[2] "A founding member of the American avant-garde,"[3] Breer was best known for his films, which combine abstract and representational painting, hand-drawn rotoscoping, original 16mm and 8mm film footage, photographs, and other materials.[4]
After experimenting with cartoon animation as a child, he started making his first abstract experimental films while living in Paris from 1949 to 1959, a period during which he also showed paintings and kinetic sculptures at galleries such as the renowned Galerie Denise René.[5][6][7]
Breer explained some of the reasons behind his move from painting to filmmaking in a 1976 interview:[5]
This was 1950 or '51... I was having trouble with a concept, a very rigid notion about painting that I was interested in, that I was involved with, and that was the school of Mondrian. [...] The notion that everything had to be reduced to the bare minimum, put in its place and kept there. It seemed to me overly rigid since I could, at least once a week, arrive at a new 'absolute.' I had a feeling there was something there that suggested change as being a kind of absolute. So that's how I got into film.
— Robert Breer, transcription of Screening Room with Robert Breer (1976)
Breer also taught at Cooper Union in New York from 1971 to 2001.[8] He received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1978.[9]
Breer died on August 11, 2011, at his home in Tucson.[10][11]
Scholarly publications on Breer's work and interviews with the artist can be found in Robert Breer, A Critical Cinema 2: Interviews with Independent Filmmakers by Scott MacDonald, An Introduction to the American Underground Film by Sheldon Renan, Animation in the Cinema by Ralph Stephenson, and Film Culture magazine.[12][13][14][15][16]
^Zorn, John, Martin Scorsese et al. Treasures IV: American Avant Garde Film, 1947-1986. San Francisco, Calif: National Film Preservation Foundation, 2009.
Uroskie, Andrew V. "Visual Music After Cage: Robert Breer, Expanded Cinema and Stockhausen's Originals (1964)". Organised Sound: An International Journal of Music Technology 17, no. 2 (August 2012): 163–69.
Burford, Jennifer Lou. "Robert Breer". Bilingual French-English. Preface by Christian Lebrat. Paris: éditions Paris Expérimental / RE:VOIR Vidéo éditions, 1999. 146 pages.
