Vormittagsspuk

Ghosts Before Breakfast is a light-hearted and playful Dada film. Its imaginative images come at you in a nice steady rhythm. Those visuals incorporate a fair amount of trick photography and effects, and they are all done really well. The most indelible image in the film is the flying hats but there are many other repeat motives, such as revolvers and beard stroking intellectuals. Like Dada in general, there is a definite sense of humour. At times it's almost in slapstick territory. I suppose if Charlie Chaplin was to have made a Dada film then it might have looked something like this. Overall, this is a good example of a 1920's art-film with a comic touch. And like so many of its peers it easy to see its influence on modern Pop Art. Interesting to also note that the Nazi Party tried to destroy all copies of this film when the got into power in Germany not long after this was made. They considered it decadent - this should be taken as a recommendation.

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.

I was fortunate enough to see this short film in my Cinematic Expression class. It's a wonderfully creative, dadaist film and if given the chance, you should definitely see it. Through four-way symmetry and insane flying bowler hats, Han Ritter creates a highly creative dream world that I quite enjoyed.

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.

Hans Richter's "Vormittagspuk" ("Ghosts Before Breakfast" in English) is basically an excuse to be zany. A series of free-associative images, its message is that not even inanimate objects will succumb to regimentation. Sure enough, the Nazis tried to censor the movie, labeling it degenerate art. Seriously, those twerps considered EVERYTHING anti-German!

Fortunately, the goose-steppers' attempts to destroy the movie failed, and it's available on Vimeo. I recommend it.