Breathing

"A concise, one-minute cartoon history of the black American, commissioned by the Public Broadcast Laboratory and shown on NET network." - Canyon Cinema

Sparkill Ave! combines still photos of Breer's home and environs with hand-drawn images of ordinary objects and scenes.

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.

An animated film dedicated to Breer's granddaughter Zoë.

A number of simple mechanical objects spiral out of a spray-paint nebula then implode into pure pattern and line.

Short hand drawn representation of a cat

An elegant home movie, its subject is Breer's apartment which faces the Tappan Zee (T.Z.) Bridge. It is permeated, as are all his films, with subtle humor, eroticism and a sense of imminent chaos and catastrophe.

An anarchic collage of invention, Rubber Cement uses rotoscoped family footage together with found objects to create an almost free-form animation bursting with color and movement.

First shown on January 30, 1967, FOR LIFE AGAINST THE WAR was an open-call, collective statement from American independent filmmakers disparate in style and sensibility but united by their opposition to the Vietnam War. Part of the protest festival Week of the Angry Arts, the epic compilation film incorporated minute-long segments which were sent from many corners of the country, spliced together and projected. The original presentation of the works was more of an open forum with no curation or selection, and in 2000 Anthology Film Archives preserved a print featuring around 40 films from over 60 submissions.

Conceivably the best of all of Breer’s films to date – has more to do with figuration, according to Breer’s formulation regarding titles with letters or numbers. This becomes clear right away as the title letters are intercut with a flurry of fish swimming past the frame lines, which are made all the more literal through the associative chain established by a snippet of Schubert’s Trout Quintet heard on the soundtrack, along with footsteps – which continue over a profusion of other shapes, colors, and objects, including the title letters again. -- Jonathan Rosenbaum

A live action footage of a smiling, bespectacled (presumably) Western tourist set against the familiar cadence of an accelerating train revving up as it leaves the station sets the mesmerizing tone for the film's abstract panoramic survey of an Ozu-esque Japanese landscape of electrical power lines, passing trains, railroad tracks, and the gentle slope of obliquely peaked, uniform rooflines as Breer distills the essential geometry of Mount Fuji into a collage of acute angles and converging (and bifurcating) lines .

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.

An experiment in associative spontaneity.

Featuring a commentary by Noël Burch (in nonsense French), Recreation's rapid-fire montage of single-frame images of incredible density and intensity has been compared to contemporary Beat poetry.

A free flow from photography to geometric abstraction hand-painted by Breer. - Harvard Film Archive