Gioco di cappelli

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

This film was apparently destroyed by the Nazis, with only some copies escaping without sound. And what a strange film it is. Maybe not the sensually decadent picture the Nazis thought it was, but weird. I can see Dali or Lynch finding a compatriot in Richter.

Is there a message here? I do not know. Looks more like just a man having fun with his actors and a camera, but what do I know? I do know one thing: I have to look more into the films of Hans Richter, because they are just my style.

Hans Richter and his crew must have had a lot of fun making this film. It's equal parts slapstick and Dada. I saw it in a theater as part of a program of 20s surrealist/Dadaist films, and this one was definitely the crowd favorite. It had everybody laughing. I wouldn't be surprised if this film were a big influence on a lot of modern music video directors. For some reason, the imagery put me somewhat in mind of a certain old Devo song. Would go well with the Talking Heads, too.

Surrealism/Dadaism in the service of irrationality but also against hierarchies, mostly malign ones as shown in the revolver-target deconstruction. Funny and bold in terms of the angles, the cuts and the (rudumentary) special effects this is film as a revolutionary and radical art; no surprise really that the Nazis denounced it as 'degenerate'. In this sense, the objects' revolt suggest wider networks with humans.

It took German filmmaker Hans Richter a number of years to begin to use film as its own medium - and not merely as a continuation of his expressionistic paintings. That's all his first films were, as evidenced by the Rhythmus series that used moving shapes instead of inanimate objects to create abstraction, making them more like cartoons and less like the abstract films later created by the likes of Stan Brakhage. By the time Richter made "Ghosts Before Breakfast", his most famous work, he had really hit his stride and learned all the interesting things he could do with film not applicable to painting. Looking at his later work, one would never guess he had been a painter - this is how much he had deviated from his previous work.

According to some sources, "Ghosts Before Breakfast" is not a complete film today, likely due to the efforts of the Nazis who considered it anti-German art and attempted to destroy every copy. It's hard to imagine exactly what they had in mind by labeling it as such - to everyone else, the film is a six-to-nine minute short (depending on which copy you view) that features inanimate objects rebelling against humans in a rather abstract manner. The title is suggestive of a greater narrative regarding ghosts, but the film has no indication of this as it uses multiple gimmicks including negative photography, stop motion and mirror images to make the abstract events all more chaotic. There is a playful but frantic tone to the imagery on display, with remarkable photography edited the right way to get the desired effect, illustrating the fact that Richter was brilliant both as a painter and a filmmaker.

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.