April 24: View a film begun by theater icon Lee Breuer in 1968 Paris—now finished by his son

Lee Breuer (1937-2021) was a celebrated playwright and director and co-founder in 1970 of the experimental theater company Mabou Mines, still a major force in New York avant-garde theater.

Two years before that, though, he and other co-founders were working as film dubbers in France. There they began shooting a short, New Wave-style film about a 13-year-old boy determined to make a film about himself amid the strikes and uprisings of 1968 Paris.

They shot about 16 hours of 16mm black-and-white film before returning to the U.S. and dropping the project for more than 50 years. Early in the COVID pandemic, filmmaker Mojo Lorwin, Breuer’s son, met with his father over Zoom to review the footage and learn what he could recall about the story. Lorwin completed the project after his father’s death in January 2021.

The original film has no soundtrack and the script was more sketched out than fully written; Lorwin had a notebook of Breuer’s with these notes. Otherwise, Lorwin had to reconstruct the script from his father’s memories and the footage and compose new dialogue. An early cut of the film was screened with live voice actors in June 2022 at a belated 50th anniversary celebration for Mabou Mines. 

Lorwin subsequently edited the final cut of the film with voice performances by the children of many of the original performers, including his sister Clove Galilee, Breuer’s daughter with Ruth Maleczech (a co-founder of Mabou Mines and collaborator on the film.) The film has had just a handful of prior screenings, including at the Middlebury New Filmmakers Festival in August 2024 and a sold-out New York premiere earlier this spring.

The Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library purchased Lee Breuer’s papers in 2020. Two years later, the Beinecke also purchased the original film footage, which Lorwin had retrieved from one of Breuer’s collaborators in France. Working with Andrea McCarty, head of media preservation in Preservation and Conservation Services, and Brian Meacham, managing archivist at the library’s Yale Film Archive, the Beinecke also acquired Lorwin’s high-definition digital transfer of the footage.

“The film footage will  complement and enhance our collection of Breuer’s papers,” said Melissa Barton, curator of drama and prose for the Yale Collection of American Literature. “While we weren’t able to directly  sponsor the film project,  we’re delighted that the funds from the Beinecke’s purchase could help Mojo produce his first complete cut of the film.” 

The Yale screening of “Moi-même” will be presented by the Yale Film Archive on April 24, 2025, at 7 p.m. in the Humanities Quadrangle, L01, 320 York Street.  Filmmaker Lorwin will be in conversation with Yale’s Marc Robinson, Dean of Humanities and Malcolm G. Chace ’56 Professor of Theater, Dance & Performance Studies and English. 

See the finding aid for the Lee Breuer Papers at Beinecke Library.

—Patricia M. Carey