Hans Richter's breakthrough studies of movement made the artistic leap between abstract painting and abstract film. A major figure in the development of Expressionism, Dada, De Stijl, Constructivism, and Surrealism, Richter was the creator (along with Viking Eggeling) of the Abstract...
[more]Hans Richter's breakthrough studies of movement made the artistic leap between abstract painting and abstract film. A major figure in the development of Expressionism, Dada, De Stijl, Constructivism, and Surrealism, Richter was the creator (along with Viking Eggeling) of the Abstract Cinema -- the spiritual forebear of today's indie films.
Richter's witty, reductionist squares, trapezoids, and lines alter size and shade, becoming meditations on pure form, movement, and music. "Rhythm 23" (1923) explores various modes of movement, including criss-cross patterns, negative reversals, and changes in size and shape. His later studies juxtapose abstract forms (circles suspended in space) with their recognizable correlates (a human face, artificial eyeballs).
Rhythm was key to Richter's works. It created a kind of hidden structure, or grid, that helped unify disparate images into a whole. His abstract motion studies melted into a Surrealistic approach, and were explicitly intended to confound the rational mind with irrational happenings. In the obscurist fantasy "Ghosts before Breakfast" (1927), Richter's Dadaist influences take center stage. Everyday objects and people undergo bizarre metamorphoses: hats fly through the air; beards appear, grow, and just as magically disappear on hapless men; tea cups fill of their own accord. Creating a "fantasy trance" of curiosity, Richter's inspired choreography of objects held audiences spellbound at a time when film and special effects were new.
His playful experiments (slowing down and speeding up time, reversing images) and eccentric editing opened up a Pandora's Box that prompted the evolution of a new cinematic fantasy realm. Understanding Richter -- along with artists such as Theo van Doesburg, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, and El Lissitzky -- is crucial to understanding the role of the arts in the period of reconstruction following World War I.
After his emigration in 1941, Richter contributed enormously to the evolution of Modernism in the United States as well as in Europe, working as an integral conduit between the two art communities. "Dadascope I, II" (1956-57), part of a series of collaborative films Richter made with his old Dada cohorts Marcel Duchamp, Jean Arp, Man Ray, and Tristan Tzara, paints a comprehensive portrait of the Dada movement.
Using an ebullient mix of episodes with discordant clashings of sound and image, word puns, games of chance, and other nonsensical elements, the filmmakers achieved an "anti-film." "There is no story, no psychological implication except such as the onlooker puts into the imagery," said Richter. "But it is not accidental either, more a poetry of images built with and upon associations. In other words the film allows itself the freedom to play upon the scale of film possibilities, freedom for which Dada always stood -- and still stands."
[show less]
