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.

A record, of sorts, of the birth and death of Tinguely’s famous auto-destructive sculpture. Filmed on the spot at MoMA, this film also exploits a wide range of camera and editing techniques to give it a life of its own, independent of and parallel to the subject. — Anthology Film Archives

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 .

100 basic images switching positions for 4000 frames.

While birds can be heard singing a shrill song, lines crisscross wildly as if they aimed to form shapes. Their efforts seem hopeless until the very end.

Cut-outs of war machines and the figure of Napoleon – contributors to an anti-war theme – encounter abstract shapes, line drawings, old-master landscapes, short bursts of ‘real-time’ landscapes and shakily photographed gestural watercolors. … ‘a synthesis of all previous techniques.’

Breer's earliest experiments in animation are wonderfully dense yet lyrical abstractions based on Breer's own geometric paintings. - Harvard Film Archive

Breer's earliest experiments in animation are wonderfully dense yet lyrical abstractions based on Breer's own geometric paintings. - Harvard Film Archive

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.