The Independent and Materialist Animation as Trauma, Studying the Works of Robert Breer

Memory and Cinema Studies have emphasized the importance of representing traumatic experiences by means of special structural and visual arrangements. Most screen studies have explored avant-garde films and the discovery of their capabilities, particular innovations and flashbacks. In fact, structuralist/materialist films in the 1960s, which inherited the legacy of 20s European avant-garde cinema, have innovative technical and aesthetic elements that potentially are capable of depicting experiences similar to trauma. According to Maureen Cheryn Turim’s writing about cinematic flashback, these films, which are fragmented and disjointed due to the unpleasant experiences after the war and the industrialization of societies and also the impact of modernism on the mind and body, are exactly similar and equivalent to the traumatic flashback (return of trauma to the mind). To better understand this issue, it would be helpful to look at the inherent characteristics of trauma in the studies of PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder) researchers and psychologists in this field. In this regard, familiarity with Chris Brewin’s situational accessible memory (SAM) in dealing with traumatic memory and Laub and Auerhahn’s eight spectrum of forms of knowing and not knowing trauma will be helpful for identifying trauma’s characteristics and reaching out a deeper understanding of the relationship between trauma psychology and trauma cinema. This research applies the statements of P. Adams Sitney, a historian of American avant-garde cinema, and two famous avant-garde cinema theoretician and filmmakers such as Malcolm Le Grice and Peter Gidal in order to provide a detailed description of structuralist/materialist film features. It is determined that some of the features of these types of films such as ambiguous images, attention to material, constant repetition of images, flickering effect in light, rejecting all content and narrative and so forth are very similar to the undecipherable and unknown memories resulting from the traumatic event. For this reason, Paul Taberham, according to the cognitive film theory, considers avant-garde filmmakers as practical psychologists, who use innovation in narrative and visual structures to impact on the viewer's memory and visual perception.
Therefore, an avant-garde and materialist filmmaker creates different and complex perceptual and receptive activities and brings specific and indescribable mentalities into reality. Robert Breer who was an American experimental filmmaker, which influenced by modernist arts, utilizes special innovation and initiative in his single-frame concrete animations to perform the flashback’s shock, disorientation and perceptual fatigue. Therefore, Breer is known as a practical psychologist which on the verge of representation and abstraction, stability and instability of shapes and creating Instability between motion and stillness, creates tensions between deep space and the flat picture of the screen. In conclusion, we will address how it is possible to create perceptual stimuli and create an experimental animation similar to the traumatic mind of today's human being.