Robert Breer

For more than 40 years, Robert Breer has been making films that push the aesthetic and technical boundaries of conventional animation. Incorporating variation, repetition, rhythm, and motion, his animations are moving collages, a playful mix of drawings, cartoons, photographs, and ephemera from everyday life. Expressive and downright delightful, Breer's work varies in tone from kinetic explorations of abstraction to poetic mediations on life and death. He extracts the element of parable from the simplest of human activities and natural occurrences. His most recent film, What Goes Up, cycles through several intervals framed by the drawn animations of an ascending plane and a variety of images that offer a succinct summary of the joys of being alive—photographs of the artist's family, home and studio, food, drink, the changing leaves, and a drawing of a voluptuous woman. Breer gives us his personal take on the everyday in images that zoom past us like a flashback of a thousand perfectly lived moments rolled into one four-minute epic. The final scene of a derailed train provides a metaphor for the absurdity of the notion that a big, beautiful, well-lived life simply runs out.

Selected Bibliography:

Burford, Jennifer L. Robert Breer. Paris: Paris Expérimental/Re:Voir Vidéo, 1999. Includes videotape.

Film Culture, nos. 56–57 (Spring 1973): 39–70. Special section, including interviews by Jonas Mekas and P. Adams Sitney, and Charles Levine.

Hoberman, J. "Robert Breer's Animated World." American Film 5 (September 1980): 46.

Maldonado, Guitemie. "Robert Breer: &: gb agency." Artforum 40, no. 5 (January 2002): 149–50.

Smith, Roberta. "Art in Review; Robert Breer." New York Times, January 7, 2000.

Links:

Animation World Network

Chicago Reader