Swiss Army Knife with Rats and Pigeons (1981)
By Robert Breer
In the final, melancholic passage of Maurice Pialat's L'amour existe, a narrator contemplates the double entendre image of a victory commemorative sculpture that appears to equally articulate strength and human frailty, noting that "the hand of glory, ordering and directing, can also beg - a simple change in angle is sufficient." This intrinsic contextual duality of images based on the observer's perspective similarly provides the inspired methodology to Robert Breer's visually dense, yet integrally cohesive film, Swiss Army Knife with Rats and Pigeons. The introductory sequence of a rough sketch illustrating a closed Swiss army knife that is interlaced with images of a hand drawn rat presents the eccentric association of seemingly mutually exclusive objects presented in the film as the mundane pocket knife begins to associatively resemble the characteristic profile of a rodent waiting to pounce with its accipitral, nail inset eye, corkscrew tail, and jagged blade teeth. Breer uses spiral images - a tape dispenser, turning windmills, and rolling soda cans - in order to illustrate the recursive, abstract (and fanciful) transfiguration of mundane objects (a pigeon's eye into a tap…
Watch Swiss Army Knife with Rats and Pigeons on Fast Ubu