Robert Breer, Avant-Garde Animator, at HFA

Robert Breer, Kinetic Poet of the Avant-Garde
Harvard Film Archive
Carpenter Center, 24 Quincy St., Cambridge
Today, 7:00pm, $10
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Robert Breer brought pop art to abstract animation. He’s an artist whose work could fit equally well alongside the European “cubist” film of the early twentieth century and American Saturday morning cartoons. (Breer worked as an animator on the PBS series Electric Company in the early 70s.)

Billed by HFA as a “founding member of the American avant-garde,” Breer has a career spanning five decades and twice as many stylistic shifts. His work ranges from hilarious (“Un Miracle” (1954) depicts the Pope juggling his own head) to the deeply abstract (“Blazes” (1961), described by Breer as “One hundred basic images switching positions for four thousand frames. A continuous explosion.”). He inspired Alan Ginsburg and collaborated with pop art sculptor Claes Oldenburg and oddball composer Karlheinz Stockhausen. A few of his films embody their artistic moment with perfect clarity. “Swiss Army Knife with Rats and Pigeons” (1981), with its dark pastels and abstract lines, simply looks like the 80s.

What unites his pieces is his interest in the mechanics of film and the history of animation. “Fuji” (1974) takes a familiar figurative subject – the titular mountain – and, through rotoscoping, transforms it into a flurry of lines, shapes and colors, moving around the frame like bacteria in a Petri dish. It’s a breathtaking masterpiece that will restore your faith in experimental animation, if it has lapsed.

Breer will be at HFA tonight answering questions about his long career. Many of his films are available on UbuWeb, but there is never a substitute for seeing work like this on film.

Still from "Un Miracle" (1954) courtesy Harvard Film Archive.