morrison-dylan-fan With having enjoyed director Hans Richter's Filmstudie,I started searching round for other work by Richter,and found a movie which had almost been lost.The plot:Four bowler hats fly in the sky as a man puts on a tie,and a gunshot causes a man's head to fly in the air.View on the film:Barely surviving an attempt by the Nazis to completely destroy the film, (who destroyed the original soundtrack) director Hans Richter gives the title a surprisingly light comedic touch,thanks to Ritcher showing a real joy in making everything from hats to human heads act in the opposite manner they are supposed to.Putting everything up in the air,Ritcher casts a delightfully off-beat atmosphere,thanks to stylishly overlapping photos with snappy stop-motion images to reveal all the ghosts before breakfast.

MartinHafer If I had to pick one art film to watch, it would be Hans Richter's "Ghost Before Breakfast". This is unusual because it's not his entire film-- just a six minute portion that somehow avoided being destroyed by the Nazis--who felt that the film was decadent and anti-German! Huh?! What pin-heads! Additionally, the original sound is missing, though the music accompanying it now seems very fitting and works very well.The film has no traditional narrative whatsoever--which is true of almost all art films!! Instead, tons of tiny film clips are edited together in a manner that might look random--but as a whole they work together very well. The overall effect is actually quite whimsical and charming-- something you rarely would say about an art film. I loved watching the flying derbies, the spinning clock hands and the like! Weird and kind of fun.

MARIO GAUCI This is a nonsense short but, at least, has a welcome surreal touch to it (though the official label would be "Dadaist") – unlike the other "avant-garde" films I watched at the same time…which were mostly highbrow and, frankly, anti-entertainment!Reportedly, this was originally accompanied by a soundtrack which was destroyed by the Third Reich when it rose to power as an example of "degenerate art"; since here we get to see usually inanimate, albeit extremely innocent-looking, objects (such as hats and shirt collars) springing to life and refusing to blindly 'acquiesce' to their masters' whims, the oppressive socio-political connotations were immediately apparent to the Nazi regime!Other memorable images that were later imitated by artists of even greater renown than its maker are those involving a number of persons disappearing behind a lamp-post (a trademark of Tex Avery cartoons) and the one where a male group unaccountably loses its set of full-grown beards to the womenfolk (which Luis Buñuel would 'borrow' for disparate effect in his first two own "avant-garde" but infinitely superior efforts)!

ackstasis Well, I'm pretty much speechless. Avant-garde cinema often does that to me. What can I say? What can I possibly say about a film that features eerie floating bowler hats terrorising a group of young businessmen? Director Hans Richter developed a reputation for bizarre, abstract film-making, and I can certainly say that 'Ghosts Before Breakfast (1928)' fits the bill nicely. There's a certain charm to it – a rhythmic editing tempo that retains its momentum throughout the running time, even if there appears to be little apparent connection between the wacky visual sequences with which Richter presents us. The best way to describe the film is that it presents ordinary-looking household objects behaving in peculiar ways, whether that be the levitating hats, the disappearing beards, the self-spooling fire hose or the rickety ladder that doesn't lead to anywhere. Whether the director is trying to make some sort of obscure philosophical point, or simply having fun with all manner of optical trickery, fans of the surreal will surely relish this brief snippet of domestic insanity.Richter uses stop-motion animation extensively, it being one of the simplest ways to simulate motion. The result of this technique is movement that is oddly fractured and dream-like, a warped reality that doesn't quite make rational sense {director Norman McLaren also recognised how disorientatingly-unreal this pixilation technique feels, and later used it to interesting effect in his own short film, 'Neighbours (1952)'}. The flying hats are probably dangling on wires, though I couldn't spot any, and it must have taken a lot of practice to perform the aerial motion without tangling the support lines. Also present in the director's bag of tricks are numerous double-exposures, cross-fades and blurred photography. Richter delights in toying with the concept of time, frequently repeating the same shots over and over – sometimes reversed, sometimes sped up, sometimes slowed down – such that the characters' movements lead nowhere. Is he implying something about our everyday dependence upon trivial household possessions, and that we can't get anywhere without them? Well, I don't know; I just thought it was zany.