Robert Breer

Organized confusion of live footage and animation.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 »

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.Read More »

A volley of rapid visual associations from the mind of Robert Breer, animating collage, drawings and snapshots in a playful, but rigorous manner. What goes up must come down.Read More »

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. – Harvard Film ArchiveRead More »