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Hans Richter: Dreams That Money Can Buy (1947)

posted 14 years ago by Eumenides_0
7 replies | jump to latest

Hans Richter was an original member of Dada and one of the first avant-garde filmmakers. He started making experimental movies in the early '20s. One of my favourite movies by him is Dreams That Money Can Buy, about a man who sells dreams to people. This of course is just an excuse for Richter and his artist friends - Max Ernst, Doroteha Tanning, Alexander Calder, Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp - to compose a series of loosely connected vignettes displaying their artistic craft. It's funny, poetic, horrifying, baffling, playful, ambiguous, ambitious and daring.

I think anyone who likes unusual cinema will appreciate this film.

This world is a comedy to those that think, a tragedy to those that feel.

[–] lubin-freddy 14 years ago

ARTE-TV had an evening of Hans Richter films a while back. I enjoy watching them, as I do others of the so-called avant-garde cinema.

You know you should surrender
But you can't let it go...

[–] oOgiandujaOo_and_Eddy_Merckx 14 years ago

As far as I was aware Dorothea Tanning didn't have a segment in this movie, but I see on a page about her that she played a character in the movie (she doesn't get a credit for that on IMDb.

It is just an excuse I agree, the film doesn't hang very well together at all. I saw this in the cinema and was dumbstruck by the Duchamp rotoscopes. Quite a bit of the rest had no impact on me.

Richter's Rennsymphonie and Ghosts Before Breakfast are good stuff to see as well.

[–] Eumenides_0 14 years ago

I've read Dorothea Tanning's memoirs, Between Worlds, that's how I learned she was in the movie.

This world is a comedy to those that think, a tragedy to those that feel.

[–] oOgiandujaOo_and_Eddy_Merckx 14 years ago

Good read?

[–] Eumenides_0 14 years ago

If the history of surrealism interests you, I'd say so.

This world is a comedy to those that think, a tragedy to those that feel.

[–] hiddenagenda1 10 years ago

This is the first time that I heard of it.

Volker Flenske: (While torturing David) I don't know why you're doing this to yourself!

[–] dreaming (43) 8 years ago

Sweet-- I love me some old-school, weird, crazy-as-hell, whacked-out experimental Dadaist surrealist films. Will definitely be looking for this one.