Bibliography
Vincent Deville, Les formes de montage dans le cinéma d’avant-garde, Rennes, Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2014: 200-202.
Scott MacDonald, ‘Robert Breer,’ A Critical Cinema 2. Interviews with Independent Filmmakers, Berkeley/Los Angeles/Oxford, University of California Press, 1992: 17-21.
Guy L. Coté, ‘Interview with Robert Breer,’ Film Culture, n. 27, 1962/1963: 17-20, available online: http://www.ubu.com/papers/cote_guy-breer_interview.html.
Robert Breer was a recent Stanford graduate when he moved to Paris in 1949 to build his career as a painter. His budding style was influenced by concrete art: he regularly exhibited at the Galerie Denise René, which hosted a number of artists in the geometric abstraction movement, some of them later to become pioneers of kinetic art.
Breer came to moving images via flipbooks, drawing one or more images on successive pages of a notepad with tiny incremental changes to create the illusion of movement as the pages were flipped. The same principle underlies animated film. In 1952, Breer borrowed a film camera from his father, an amateur film-maker. He experimented with drawing on slides, then filming them one by one. The result was the work Form Phases, the first in a series of the same name, including four films in total between 1952 and 1954.
Form Phases IV perfectly encapsulates Breer’s shift from painting to film. Colourful shapes and black lines dance, follow each other, change, jostle, and loom large in the image, then immediately vanish, all against a backdrop of colourful, dynamic geometric shapes. Movement and the relationship between form and substance become elements of the composition in its own right. Form Phases IV also pays homage to Hans Richter’s pioneering Rythmus 21 (1921).
Form Phases IV was exhibited at the Galerie Denise René in 1955, alongside Breer’s paintings. Experimenting with images led him to drop painting for the new medium, not only because it was where his interest lay but also because his film work met with a warmer reception than his paintings. From the early 1960s on, he began to work on kinetic sculptures.