Passionate Pastime

1967 film directed by Greta Deseson about the Dada art movement. Featuring Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray, Max Ernst, Hans Richter and Gabrièle Buffet-Picabia

Free-associative images are juxtaposed with disorienting poetry in Richter's late work. The film is visual dynamite: Upside-down and reversed footage, play with shadows and light, billiards and dice and balloons-- suggestive and surreal images. Tenets of Dada writing, such as games of chance, punnery, wordplay and loud nonsense noise are foist upon the viewer as Dada poems are read / performed by their orignal authors.

A commissioned film for Schweizerischer Werkbund (SWB), Die neue Wohnung was produced for the Basel architectural and interior design exhibition, WOBA, to demonstrate innovative aspects of modern architecture and highlight their differences from the event’s highly conservative approach. Despite its ad campaign roots, Richter's touch is not absent; The surviving version, aimed at a "bourgeois" Swiss public, presents decluttered, functional architecture and decor as superior to the traditional and luxurious "ancient" ways of living.

Die neue Wohnung, Version Atelier Richter, was made a year after the SWB version, for screenings in Germany that began in January 1932. This version, of similar length, is a complete re-edit, in which there is no mention of SWB, but there are new intertitles.

Hans Richter, noted for his abstract shorts, has everyday objects rebelling against their daily routine.

Experimental documentary focusing on a day in the life of city workers, featuring montage sequences and repetition to emphasise the monotony of routine office work.

In Race Symphony (1928), Richter documents and celebrates a typical day at the German races, where a sophisticated people turn up in droves to gape, gasp, place a bet, and celebrate a well-deserved win.

8 x 8: A Chess-Sonata in 8 Movements is an American experimental film directed by Hans Richter, Marcel Duchamp, and Jean Cocteau. Described by Richter as "part Freud, part Lewis Carroll" and filmed partially on the lawn of Duchamp's summer house in Southbury, Connecticut.

An attempt to bring the work of surrealist artists to a wider public. The plot is that of an average Joe who can conjure up dreams that will improve his customer's lives. This frame story serves as a link between several avant-garde sequences created by leading visual artists of their day, most of whom were emigres to the US during WWII.

A day at the carnival — sensational tent shows where miracles can be seen for the price of admission, boisterous noise of crowds and barkers, shrill and gaudy circus music, the violence of the street ten-fold. This is the substance of Everything Turns, Richter’s first sound film. At its premier at Baden-Baden Richter got into a fight with two Nazi officials who disliked the film's ‘modernism.’ Yet in 1936 it was awarded first prize for artistic merit by the Nazis, with Richter’s name suppressed from the credits. He had long since left Germany.

Entertaining Dadaist experimental short, similar to Man Ray's work, full of shifting geometric shapes, stock footage of seagulls, flying eyeballs, and glaring floating heads.

Two Penny Magic (Zweigroschenzauber) starting off with a little magic trick. It then presents an array of images from swimmers, bicyclers, murderers, airplanes in flight, boxers, lovers, runners, becoming in the end a collection of images in a magazine.

We watch white shapes dancing on black background, which changes when the white shape fills up the screen completely, and black lines and figures bounce around on the now white background.

Abstract animated short film. Grey and white squares change size and shape on a black background.

American sculptor, Alexander Calder, creates around the workshop. The film features several of his kinetic sculptures-- Wild moving figurines that spin, undulate and perform circus acts. The film ends on a hanging moon mobile, completing our wacky trip.

SYNOPSIS: 8 films by Hans Richter. Richter's position in the art world was unique. As one of the earliest exponents of Dada, he was also one of the first to recognize the new possibilities cinematography offered the artist. He participated in the first avant-garde film movement alongside Léger, Duchamp, Man Ray, Picabia, Cocteau and Dali, and later in New York his teachings would influence many of the 'New American Cinema' filmmakers.