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This experimental film is a study of an abstract painting as it grows out of the mind and soul of the artist and filmmaker. Painstakingly hand-painted in a Impressionist pixel-point style over a period of 9 months (!), and equally laboriously stop-animated, Fischinger captures not only the wonderful decision-making process of the artist at work, but the “life” that the work itself takes on as it changes and grows. Use of color, patterns, and pacing compliment and clash with one another before the viewer’s eyes and lead one into an impossible world that seems none-the-less real, and all the more engaging for seeming to just be made of pure MAGIC! Read More »

Light and shadow, sun and moon, dream and colour: a daring attempt, by one of the great experimenters of our day, to portray events, objects, the world as they might look to an infant as yet unable to organise his impressions. “Reality” is here broken into a flow of colours and shapes, rushing by in complex, mysterious orchestration. — Amos Vogel Read More »

Standing apart along the northeast shore of the Great Salt Lake is a huge earthworks project, boulders and potholes, clinging brine and mirrored sky, which the film documents, as it moves back geologically to dinosaur history. Read More »

An experimental short film from Robert Breer with animated and live-action scenes cut together. Read More »

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 the photo is but an object in the film, not the film itself. Read More »

Form Phases IV is the last film in Form Phases, the first series made by Robert Breer to lend movement to the abstract forms in his paintings. Breer was a self-taught practitioner of animated film, focusing particularly on the demystification of the screen space. This was a theme already touched on in the 1920s by Hans Richter, one of the references for avant-garde European cinema. Richter’s work, specifically his film Rhythmus 21 (also in the Museo Reina Sofía collection), the starting point of abstraction in film, was a decisive influence on Breer’s cinematographic output.
Here, Breer applied, in a particularly sophisticated way, the principle by which a static screen is animated by the appearance of a moving shape which then changes as another shape appears, and then disappears, leaving the screen blank, to return once more to its static state. Read More »

Rob Breer blazing the trail. Read More »