Program 2: New Lines: Avant-Garde Animation

Shoot the Moon
Rudy Burckhardt and Red Grooms, 1962, 16mm, 24m

Pat’s Birthday
Robert Breer, 1962, 16mm, 13m

Breathing
Robert Breer, 1963, 35mm, 5m

Fist Fight
Robert Breer, 1964, 16mm, 11m

Late Superimpositions
Harry Smith, 1964, 16mm, 31m

This program begins with Rudy Burckhardt and Red Grooms’s delightful Méliès homage Shoot the Moon, and proceeds to the work of Robert Breer, one of the most adventurous figures in the history of animation. Breer advanced the graphic possibilities of cinema in works like Breathing, with its dramatically metamorphosing lines, and the autobiographical Fist Fight, a rapid-fire progression of single-frame images, first shown as part of a production of Stockhausen’s Originale, that combines drawn elements alongside rephotographed stills. Late Superimpositions, meanwhile, overlays New York scenes with those of an ethnographic trip to Oklahoma, marking a departure for the polymath artist Harry Smith; it was his first foray away from the animation table, previously the primary site of his cinematic activity. “I honor it the most of my films,” noted Smith.