Chelsea Girls (1966)

Chelsea Girls is a 1966 experimental underground film directed by Andy Warhol and Paul Morrissey. The film was Warhol's first major commercial success after a long line of avant-garde art films (both feature length and short). It was shot at the Hotel Chelsea and other locations in New York City, and follows the lives of several of the young women who live there, and stars many of Warhol's superstars. It is presented in a split screen, accompanied by alternating soundtracks attached to each scene and an alternation between black-and-white and color photography. The original cut runs at just over three hours long.

The title, Chelsea Girls, is a reference to the location in which the film takes place. It was the inspiration for star Nico's 1967 debut album, Chelsea Girl. The album featured a ballad-like track titled "Chelsea Girls", written about the hotel and its inhabitants who appear in the film. According to script-writer Ronald Tavel, Warhol first brought up the idea for the film in the back room of Max's Kansas City, Warhol's favorite nightspot, during the summer of 1966. In Ric Burns' documentary film Andy Warhol, Tavel recollected that Warhol took a napkin and drew a line down the middle and wrote 'B' and 'W' on opposite sides of the line; he then showed it to Tavel, explaining, "I want to make a movie that is a long movie, that is all black on one side and all white on the other." Warhol was referring to both the visual concept of the film, as well as the content of the scenes presented.

The film was shot in the summer and early autumn of 1966 in various rooms and locations inside the Hotel Chelsea, although it is worth noting that of all those who starred in the film, only poet René Ricard actually lived there at the time. Filming also took place at Warhol's studio The Factory. Appearing in the film were many of Warhol's regulars, including Nico, Brigid Berlin, Gerard Malanga, Mary Woronov as Hanoi Hannah, Ingrid Superstar, International Velvet and Eric Emerson. According to Burns' documentary, Warhol and his companions completed an average of one 33-minute segment per week.
Once principal photography wrapped, Warhol and co-director Paul Morrissey selected the twelve most striking vignettes they had filmed and then projected them side-by-side to create a visual juxtaposition of both contrasting images and divergent content (the so-called "white" or light and innocent aspects of life against the "black" or darker, more disturbing aspects.) As a result, the 6½ hour running time was essentially cut in half, to 3 hours and 15 minutes. However, part of Warhol's concept for the film was that it would be unlike watching a regular movie, as the two projectors could never achieve exact synchronization from viewing to viewing; therefore, despite specific instructions of where individual sequences would be played during the running time, each viewing of the film would, in essence, be an entirely different experience.

Several of the sequences have gone on to attain a cult status, most notably the "Pope" sequence, featuring avant-garde actor and poet Robert Olivo, or Ondine as he called himself, as well as a segment featuring Mary Woronov entitled "Hanoi Hannah," one of two portions of the film scripted specifically by Tavel.

Notably missing is a sequence Warhol shot with his most popular superstar Edie Sedgwick which, according to Morrissey, Warhol excised from the final film at the insistence of Sedgwick herself, who claimed she was under contract to Bob Dylan's manager, Albert Grossman, at the time the film was made
From Wikipedia

CHELSEA GIRLS
ANDY WARHOL   (1966)
194 MIN
USA

Kiss - Andy Warhol (1963)

This was Andy Warhol's first film, it was shot in late 1963. Some Warhol scholars date the Kiss films from November/December 1963. However, Warhol probably started shooting them much earlier - around August 1963 and continued to shoot them through the end of 1964, if not beyond. According to Warhol in Popism, they were still doing KISS movies in the summer of 1964 when Gerard Malanga and Mark Lancaster did one - in August 1964. According to Bob Colacello, the idea for KISS - close-ups of couples kissing each other for three minutes each - came from the old Hayes Office regulation forbidding actors in movies from touching lips for more than three seconds.
Warhol also produced a silkscreen called The Kiss, based on a film still from the Hollywood horror classic Dracula (1931) of Bela Lugosi biting the neck of his co-star, Helen Chandler.The silkscreen was done on November 22, 1963. Amy Taubin, who would later become the film critic for the Village Voice, first saw some of the KISS films in 1963 at the Grammercy Arts Theater on West 27th Street. At this time the KISS series of films was called The Andy Warhol Serial "because it was shown in weekly four minute installments." - from



KISS
ANDY WARHOL
55 MIN
USA

Man With a Movie Camera : Dziga Vertov - (1929)

Man with a Movie Camera (Russian: Человек с киноаппаратом, Chelovek s kino-apparatom; Ukrainian: Людина з кіноапаратом, Liudyna z kinoaparatom), sometimes called The Man with the Movie Camera, The Man with a Camera, The Man With the Kinocamera, or Living Russia is an experimental 1929 silent documentary film, with no story and no actors, by Russian director Dziga Vertov, edited by his wife Elizaveta Svilova. Vertov's feature film, produced by the Ukrainian film studio VUFKU, presents urban life in Odessa and other Soviet cities. From dawn to dusk Soviet citizens are shown at work and at play, and interacting with the machinery of modern life. To the extent that it can be said to have "characters," they are the cameramen of the title and the modern Soviet Union he discovers and presents in the film. This film is famous for the range of cinematic techniques Vertov invents, deploys or develops, such as double exposure, fast motion, slow motion, freeze frames, jump cuts, split screens, Dutch angles, extreme close-ups, tracking shots, footage played backwards, stop motion animations and a self-reflexive style (at one point it features a split screen tracking shot; the sides have opposite Dutch angles). The film has an unabashedly avant-garde style, and emphasizes that film can go anywhere. For instance, the film uses such scenes as superimposing a shot of a cameraman setting up his camera atop a second, mountainous camera, superimposing a cameraman inside a beer glass, filming a woman getting out of bed and getting dressed, even filming a woman giving birth, and the baby being taken away to be bathed. Vertov was one of the first to be able to find a mid-ground between a narrative media and a database form of media. He shot all the scenes separately, having no intention of making this film into a regular movie with a storyline. Instead, he took all the random clips and put it in a database, which Svilova later edited. The narrative part of this process was her job. She had to go into that random pool of clips that Vertov filmed, edit it, and put it in some kind of order. Vertov's purpose of all this was to break the mold of a linear film that the world was used to seeing in those days. Vertov's message about the prevalence and unobtrusiveness of filming was not yet true—cameras might have been able to go anywhere, but not without being noticed; they were too large to be hidden easily, and too noisy to remain hidden anyway. To get footage using a hidden camera, Vertov and his brother Mikhail Kaufman (the film's co-author) had to distract the subject with something else even louder than the camera filming them. The film also features a few obvious stagings such as the scene of a woman getting out of bed and getting dressed (cameras at the time were fairly bulky and loud) and the shot of chess pieces being swept to the center of the board (a shot spliced in backwards so the pieces expand outward and stand in position). The film was criticized for both the stagings and the stark experimentation, possibly as a result of its director's frequent assailing of fiction film as a new "opiate of the masses." Dziga Vertov, or Denis Arkadevich Kaufman, was an early pioneer in documentary film-making during the late 1920s. He belonged to a movement of filmmakers known as the kinoks, or kinokis. Vertov, along with other kino artists declared it their mission to abolish all non-documentary styles of film-making. This radical approach to movie making led to a slight dismantling of film industry: the very field in which they were working. This being said, most of Vertov's films were highly controversial, and the kinoc movement was despised by many filmmakers of the time. Vertov's crowning achievement, Man with a Movie Camera was his response to critics who rejected his previous film, One-Sixth Part of the World. Critics declared that Vertov's overuse of "intertitles" was inconsistent with the film-making style the 'kinos' subscribed to. Working within that context, Vertov dealt with much fear in anticipation of the film's release. He requested a warning to be printed in Soviet central Communist newspaper, Pravda, which spoke directly of the film's experimental, controversial nature. Vertov was worried that the film would be either destroyed or ignored by the public eye. Upon the official release of Man with a Movie Camera,

Vertov issued a statement at the beginning of the film, which read:
"The film Man with a Movie Camera represents

AN EXPERIMENTATION IN THE CINEMATIC TRANSMISSION

Of visual phenomena

WITHOUT THE USE OF INTERTITLES

(a film without intertitles)

WITHOUT THE HELP OF A SCRIPT

(a film without script)

WITHOUT THE HELP OF A THEATRE

(a film without actors, without sets, etc.)

This new experimentation work by Kino-Eye is directed towards the creation of an authentically international absolute language of cinema – ABSOLUTE KINOGRAPHY – on the basis of its complete separation from the language of theatre and literature." This manifesto echoes an earlier one that Vertov wrote in 1922, in which he disavowed popular films he felt were indebted to literature and theater.

MAN WITH A MOVIE CAMERA
DZIGA VERTOV (1929)
68 MIN
USSR

Permutations - John Whitney (1966)

John Whitney, Sr. (April 8, 1917 - September 22, 1995) was an American animator, composer and inventor, widely considered to be one of the fathers of computer animation.

Whitney was born in Pasadena, California and attended Pomona College. His first works in film were 8 mm movies of a solar eclipse which he made using a home-made telescope. In 1937-38 he spent a year in Paris, studying twelve-tone composition under Rene Leibowitz. In 1939 he returned to America and began to collaborate with his brother James on a series of abstract films. Their work, Five Film Exercises (1940-45) was awarded first prize First International Experimental Film Competition in Belgium in 1949. In 1948 he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. During the 1950s Whitney used his mechanical animation techniques to create sequences for television programs and commercials. In 1952 he directed engineering films on guided missile projects. One of his most famous works from this period was the animated title sequence from Alfred Hitchcock's 1958 film Vertigo, which he collaborated on with the graphic designer Saul Bass. In 1960, he founded Motion Graphics Incorporated, which used a mechanical analogue computer of his own invention to create motion picture and television title sequences and commercials. The following year, he assembled a record of the visual effects he had perfected using his device, titled simply Catalogue. In 1966, IBM awarded John Whitney, Sr. its first artist-in-residence position. By the 1970s, Whitney had abandoned his analogue computer in favour of faster, digital processes. The pinnacle of his digital films is his 1975 work Arabesque, characterized by psychedelic, blooming colour-forms. His work during the 1980s and 1990s, benefited from faster computers and his invention of an audio-visual composition program called the Whitney-Reed RDTD (Radius-Differential Theta Differential). Works from this period such as Moondrum (1989 - 1995) used self-composed music and often explored mystical or Native-American themes. The Whitney film collection is housed at the Academy Film Archive at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, where its preservation and restoration are ongoing. Several of the films (including James') have been preserved by and are housed at The Center for Visual Music in Los Angeles.

“In PERMUTATIONS, each point moves at a different speed and moves in a direction independent according to natural laws’ quite as valid as those of Pythagoras, while moving in their circular field. Their action produces a phenomenon more or less equivalent to the musical harmonies. When the points reach certain relationships (harmonic) numerical to other parameters of the equation, they form elementary figures.”- John Whitney



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Early Abstractions # 3 - Harry Smith (1946 - 1957)

Harry Everett Smith (29 May 1923, Portland, Oregon – 27 November 1991, New York City) was an American archivist, ethnomusicologist, student of anthropology, record collector, experimental filmmaker, artist, bohemian and mystic. Smith is a well-known figure in several fields. People who know him as a filmmaker often do not know of his 1952 Anthology of American Folk Music, while folk music enthusiasts often do not know he was "the greatest living magician" according to Kenneth Anger.
Smith died of cardiac arrest while singing in Paola Igliori's arms, in Room 328 at the Hotel Chelsea in New York City, and his ashes are in the care of his wife, Rosebud Feliu-Pettet.

Critical attention has been most often paid to his experimental work with film. He produced extravagant abstract animations. The effects were often painted or manipulated by hand directly on the celluloid. Themes of mysticism, surrealism and dada were common elements in his work. Information especially about Smith's early films is very contradictory. This is partly due to the work-in-progress nature of experimental filmmaking as films are often reedited (hence the different runtimes), occasionally incorporating reassembled footage of different films, or showed with varying music tracks. For instance, the handmade films now known as No. 1, 2, 3, and 5 were accompanied by an improvising jazz band on May 12, 1950 when they premiered as part of the Art in Cinema series curated by Smith's friend Frank Stauffacher at the San Francisco Museum of Art. Initially Smith intended to use Dizzy Gillespie songs (vide infra). Later he showed the films with random records or even the radio as accompaniment. Harry Smith stated that his films were made for contemporary music, and he kept changing their soundtracks. Harry also re-cut Early Abstractions to sync with Meet the Beatles! picked out by his wife, Rosebud Feliu-Pettet. After Smith's death artists such as Philip Glass or DJ Spooky provided musical backgrounds for screenings of his films: Glass at the 2004 summer benefit concert of the Film-Makers' Cooperative and DJ Spooky at several venues in 1999 for Harry Smith: A Re-creation, a florilegium of Smith's films put together by his close collaborator M. Henry Jones who tries to screen the films in the manner intended by Smith - as performances - using stroboscopic effects, multiple projections, magic lanterns, and the like.

The present-day numbering system which Smith introduced some time between 1951 and 1964-5 (the year the Film-Makers' Cooperative started distributing 16 mm copies of his films) includes only films that survived up to that point. Thus this filmography is in no way a comprehensive list of all the films he has ever made, all the more as he is known to have lost, sold, traded or even wantonly destroyed some of his own works. The dating of the film presents another puzzle. Since Smith frequently worked for years on them and kept little to no documentation, the information varies considerably from one source to another. Therefore all available information has been added to the following list, inevitably resulting in a loss of clarity but having the advantage of giving the whole picture. The films are also known by variant designation, i.e. Film No. 1, Film # 1 or simply # 1.

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EARLY ABSTRACTIONS # 3
HARRY SMITH (1946-57)
6 MIN
USA

Un Chien Andalou - Luis Bunuel (1929)

Un Chien Andalou is a sixteen minute silent surrealist short film produced in France by the Spanish director Luis Buñuel and artist Salvador Dalí. Its title means "An Andalusian Dog", but it is normally released under its original French title in the English-speaking world. It was Dali's first film and was initially released in 1929 to a limited showing in Paris, but became popular and ran for eight months.[1] It is one of the best-known surrealist films of the avant-garde movement of the 1920s.

The film has no plot in the conventional sense of the word. The chronology of the film is disjointed, jumping from the initial "once upon a time" to "eight years later" without the events or characters changing very much. It uses dream logic in narrative flow that can be described in terms of then-popular Freudian free association, presenting a series of tenuously related scenes.

The film opens with a title card reading "Once upon a time". What may be the film's conclusion unfolds; a middle-aged man, (played by Buñuel), sharpens his razor at his balcony door and tests the razor on his thumb. He then opens the door, and idly fingers the razor while gazing at the moon, about to be engulfed by a thin cloud, from his balcony. There is a cut to a close-up of a young woman, (Simone Mareuil), being held by the man as she calmly stares straight ahead. Another cut occurs to the moon being overcome by the cloud as the man slits the woman's eye with the razor, and the vitreous humour spills out from it.
The subsequent title card reads "eight years later". A slim young man, (Pierre Batcheff), bicycles down a calm urban street wearing what appears to be a nun's habit and a locked box with a strap around his neck. A cut occurs to the young woman from the first scene, who has been reading anxiously in a sparingly-furnished upstairs apartment, and she hears the young man approaching on his bicycle. She promptly throws aside the book she was reading to look out the window. She emerges from the building and attempts to revive the young man after witnessing him collapse from the bicycle.
Later, the young woman assembles pieces of the young man's clothing on a bed in the upstairs room, and seemingly through concentrating on the clothing causes the young man to appear near the door. The young man and the young woman stare at his hand, which has a hole in the palm from which ants emerge. A slow transition occurs focusing on the armpit hair of an unknown figure and a sea urchin at a sandy location. An androgynous young woman appears in the street below the apartment, poking at a severed hand with a cane while surrounded by an angry crowd and police.
The crowd clears when the police place the hand in the box previously carried by the young man, and the androgynous young woman contemplates something happily while standing perilously in the middle of the now busy street, clutching the box. She is then run over by a car and a few bystanders gather around her. The young man and the young woman watch these events unfold from the apartment window. The young man seems to take sadistic pleasure in the androgynous young woman's danger and subsequent death, and as he gestures at the shocked young woman in the room with him, he leers at her and grasps her bosom. The young woman resists him at first, but then allows him to touch her as he imagines her nude from the front and the rear. The young woman pushes him away as he drifts off and attempts to escape by running to the other side of the room. The young man corners her as she reaches for a racket in self-defense, but he suddenly picks up two ropes and drags two grand pianos containing dead and rotting donkeys, stone tablets containing the Ten Commandments, and two rather bewildered priests (played by Jaume Miravitlles and Salvador Dalí) who are attached by ropes. As he is unable to move, the young woman escapes the room. She finds the young man in the next room, dressed in his nun's garb in the bed.

The subsequent title card reads "around three in the morning". The young man is roused from his bed by the sound of a doorbell (represented visually by a martini shaker being shaken by a set of arms through two holes in a wall). The young woman goes to answer the door and does not return. Another young man dressed in lighter clothing (also played by Pierre Batcheff) angrily arrives in the apartment, possibly to punish the other young man for his lecherous actions against the young woman. The second young man forces the first one to throw away his nun's clothing and then makes him stand against a wall.

The subsequent title card reads "Sixteen years earlier". We see the second young man from the front for the first time as he admires the art supplies and books on the table near the wall and forces the first young man to hold two of the books as he stares at the wall. The first young man eventually shoots the second young man when the books abruptly turn into pistols. The second young man dies and swipes at a nude figure in a meadow, and a group of men carry his corpse away as the figure suddenly disappears into thin air.

The young woman comes into the apartment to possibly confront the first young man and sees a death head moth. The first young man sneers at her as she retreats and wipes his mouth off his face with his hand. Subsequently the first young man makes the young woman's armpit hair attach itself to where his mouth would be on his face through gestures. The young woman looks at the first young man with disgust, and leaves the apartment sticking her tongue out at him.

As she exits her apartment, the street is replaced by a coastal beach, where the young woman meets a third man who she walks with arm in arm. He shows her the time and his watch and they walk near the rocks, where they find the remnants of the first young man's nun's clothing and the box. They seem to walk away clutching each other happily and make romantic gestures in a long tracking shot. However, the film abruptly cuts to the final shot with a title card reading "In Spring", showing the couple buried in sand up to their shoulders, presumably dead after the unknown events of the opening scene, possibly bringing the film full-circle.
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UN CHIEN ANDALOU
LUIS BUNUEL (1929)
16 MIN
FRANCE

Film Studie - Hans Richter (1924)

Berliner Hans Richter (1888-1976) was a pioneer of the avant garde cinema, a member of the Dada movement. He began playing with silent film as art expression in 1921, & it's hard to imagine filmmakers like Luis Bunuel & Fritz Lang weren't influenced by Richter, whose influence among Berlin & Paris avant gardists & surrealists of the '20s is undeniable.
However, the claim that his first film was completed in 1921 may have been a fib concocted two or three years later, merely to fudge his dates a hair ahead of Walther Ruttmann's Opus 1 (1922) as the first avant garde film experiment in Berlin, a point or possibility which art & film historians will likely always argue.
 
Richter's earliest experiments were hardly more than tests, Rhythm 21 (Film ist Rhythmus aka, Rhythmus 21, 1921) consisting of squares of lights growing or shrinking, pulsating white on black, implying a drum-beat without sound.


Rhythm 23 (Rhythmus 23, 1923) is an extension of the same film but with more angles & overlays added, & adding lines rather than adhering to the squares of the original. It looks so similar that the academic argument that both "21" & "23" were made in 1923 looks rather likely. Richter himself at some exhibitions showed these two together as a single film called Un film de Hans Richter.

The hand-colored Rhythm 25 (Rhythmus 25, 1925) was the final "chapter," The most interesting thing about these early-20s little experiments is how much they resemble some aspects of 1950s beatnik art & 1960s op art, but brought to motion & life before those later forms arose.

The "Rhythmus" series flow very smoothly in form & appearance into Film Study (Filmstudie, 1925) consists of a mesmerizing & complex play of light, motion, & faces, with eclipses becoming rolling eyeballs, spotlights seeking in the dark, running a scant seven minutes.

Another experimental silent film at eight minutes is Inflation (1928) which is sometimes categorized as a documentary, though that's a stretch. By now he's well beyond playing with light & shadow. Inflation explores the subject of money through photographs & with with stop motion animation techniques, adding faces of people impoverished & enriched by the unpredictability of finance. It functions almost as a political cartoon in motion, building to a chaotic & catastrophic climax.


Ghosts Before Breakfast (Vormittagsspuk, 1928) is said to have initially been a sound film but the Nazi attempt to destroy all copies as "degenerate art" has left us only a silent version. This short film functions even without the sound it once had, & likely the only thing lost was a musical score. Using stop motion techniques we see the rapid motions of a clock, flying hats settling like a flock of birds in the bushes, a neck tie that refuses to stay tied, windows opening & closing as they elect, hoses coiling & uncoiling themselves & spraying the flying hats, & other inanimate objects becoming animated for their own benefit. Pistols multiply like mammals, dancing about & cocking their triggers. A great many men hide behind a slim pole.

Broken dishes put themselves together. A seed grows into a small bush in a short time. Men fight & march or crawl about & chase the flying hats. Body parts fly loose. In the end the hats find heads to their liking & the clock strikes twelves. All this in six minutes, it has a Lewis Carolly sort of feel to it & is a marvelous bit of animation, & perhaps the best of his early short films. It comes off quite lighthearted, comical enough to evoke laughter. Yet Germany had so recently brought about a violent world war & was swiftly headed for another, the imbedded doomful allegory of Ghosts Before Breakfast is not difficult to deduce.

Race Sympathy (Rennsymphonie, 1928) originated as a seven minute "documentary" introduction to an early sound feature film. But it is a stand-alone short building up a collage of travel imagery inside & outside trains, busses, doubledeckers, automobiles, & on horses. It leads to a considerable crowd arriving at the races & the bandstand. It's largely pointless except for the fact that its age gives the footage a vintage veneer of interest.

Yet another surrealist silent film was Twopence Magic aka, Two Penny Magic (Zweigroschenzauber 1929) 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. Body-building acrobatic jugglers put on a show for an audience of heavy smokers in the experimental short Everything Turns, Everything Resolves (Dreht sich, alles bewegt, 1929). It doubles the usual length of his early films, at fifteen minutes, & with Ghosts Before Breakfast stands among Richter's most intriguing early works.
The best sequence has the flabby muscle man walking straight up the wall & across the celing above the stage. It's effective & amusing. Though really a silent film, Richter provided this one with a musical soundtrack by Walter Gronostay in order to call it a sound film.  -by Paghat the Ratgirl

"Richter's first film in a Surrealist vein the mood of FILM STUDY is lyrical and poetically evocative. Its magic propels us into a world fantasy, forcing us to dream with open eyes, as objects and forms float past, transforming themselves as if by a logic beyond rational comprehension. The music is by the noted composer Darius Milhaud."--Standish D. Lawder.

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FILM STUDIE
HANS RICHTER   (1924)
4 MIN
GERMANY

Symphonie Diagonale (1921)

In this piece, Viking Eggeling (1880-1925) experiments with film as a new means of expression, adding a dimension that is inaccessible to the artist as painter: time. This revelation enables him to use movement as matter, which is why he constructs his Diagonal Symphony like a painting in motion. The rhythm provides a silent harmony of images.
Swedish painter and film-maker Viking Eggeling lived and worked in Paris, where he befriended artists Modigliani, Arp and Kiesling. In 1918, in Zurich, the writer Tristan Tzara introduced him to Hans Richter, the German Dada artist, film-maker and writer. It was the beginning of a fruitful collaboration. In 1920, the two artists began experimenting with film, assisted by the German UFA studio special effects technicians.
Eggeling moved to Berlin in 1921, where he continued his work on Horizontal-Vertical Orchestra (Vertikal-horizontal Symphonie). He kept company with a number of artists from the Bauhaus school, the Dada group November and the journal De Stijl. In 1923, he met Erna Niemeyer-Soupault and worked with her on Diagonal Symphony, a film that has left its mark on generations of film artists, including Oskar Fischinger, Walter Ruttmann and Norman McLaren.
In 1924, Eggeling held a private showing in Paris for Fernand Léger. The first public showing took place on 3 May 1925 in Berlin. Viking Eggeling died two weeks later on 19 May 1925.
The source material comes from a nitrate negative, originally acquired by the Filmhistoric Collections of the Swedish Film Society, which later became the Archival Film Collections of the Swedish Film Institute. The film format has been altered. The current copy dates from 1993. In May 1994, two minor modifications were made to bring the film as close as possible to the original version, as Eggeling wanted it. The Cinémathèque Française has another 18-minute version.
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Ghost Before Breakfast (1927)

Hans Richter created the film Ghosts before Breakfast, also known as Vormittagspuk, in 1927. This was a silent experimental avant-garde film and it was the fifth film that he had made. The film itself is considered to be one of the first surrealistic films ever made. Richter's interest in Dadaism is shown directly in this work as he challenges current art standards of the time by presenting a theme of obscurity and fantasy. Clocks, legs, ladders, hats, and people undergo total irrational happenings in unusual settings. Men have beards magically appear and disappear before the viewer's eyes, hats fly around in the air, a man's head comes off and floats in the air, tea cups fill up by themselves, objects and characters move in reverse, men disappear behind a street sign, etc... . All brought together by associative logic, the flying hats perform this function by continually reappearing to the sequence of shots to tie the film together as a whole. This film digs into the viewer's mind for inner experience in thought and idea. It gives the audience a chance to release nervous tension when witnessing these abstractions shown through images. Richter tries to increase the viewer's knowledge of reality by showing them surrealistic fantasy. He accomplishes this through his use of rhythm, and his use of the camera.

Rhythm is a very important element in all of Richter's works. It can be seen in this film as well. Rhythm was shown in the use of movement in the characters. All of the characters seemed to have moved at the same spaced distance from one another and at the same speed. This clarified a sense of rhythm and intensified a sense of stability in the frame. The same number of characters or items also seemed to preserve rhythm. This may be found constantly throughout the film. If there were three hats then the next shot would contain three men. The numbers did fluctuate, but a number would remain constant throughout a couple of shots. Shapes in the film also preserved rhythm. This can be seen in Richter's bulls-eye scene. The circles of the bulls-eye fill the screen and are spaced equally apart from one another. The target then breaks up and the circles spread out in the frame to relocate in different areas continuing to preserve rhythm. Rhythm is demonstrated in the scene with the guns that form a pin wheel type image and then start to spin. The five guns are equally spaced from one another and a rhythm is present in the speed at which they turn. The reoccurring image of the flying hats forms a rhythm as it ties the film together as a whole.
The way that Richter used the camera stressed his world of fantasy. One way that he did this was by experimenting with the camera and the film in it. It was almost a form of what we know now as trick photography. This is present in the scene when images are placed on top of each other (bulls-eye scene). This scene has the bulls-eye displayed, but with a man behind it. In this scene the man's head falls off and drifts around in the target.

Richter also used fast motion to demonstrate a blossoming branch. We watch a branch bloom within a few seconds. Richter does this to clarify the use of time in his film and show a fantasy version of time. In this comical trick film, he also uses slowed down film speed. There is one scene with tea cups on a tray that come crashing to the ground. He slowed down the speed to intensify the breaking of the china and to clarify how the cups shatter as they make impact.

To go along with these slowed down and speed up transitions in the film Richter also demonstrated film played back in reverse. This was found in many spots: tea cups going back together, water going back into a hose, etc . . . . By doing these type of tricks Richter brought the viewer into the world of fantasy because one would never see this happen in reality.

Negatives were also used in this film. Richter used negatives of the film and placed them in different spots, thus showing comparison and contrast between the objects presented in both a "real world" versus a "negative world". Since the film was in black and white we see the comparison made in the shades of black, white, and gray.
Richter's handling of the camera emphasized how abstract and "shocking" the shots would come out. Positioning of the camera was constantly changing. This helped in making each upcoming shot more interesting to the viewer by providing a new outlook on the subject being presented. It helped distinguish the different shots by separating them. It would clarify that some thing new and unexpected was happening, thus intensifying a feel of curiosity of what will happen next. Many of the shots led into each other through the use of motion vectors even though the scenes might be unrelated. That is what makes this work so abstract - the unrelated scenes tied together by flying hats. No one scene would last for a long time and a lot of the edits were cutaways that were made very quickly. The edits helped in presenting the abstract and unexpected scenes to the viewer.

Through all of these cuts each shot or scene maintained a well balanced frame with well proportioned shapes and sizes that compared or contrasted their relativity. The use of these objects and characters demonstrated Richter's interest in showing the x, y, and z axes. He demonstrated a sense of depth in many scenes such as the target scene, the unraveling of the hose scene, people walking and then disappearing behind a pole (exaggerated plane?), etc... . Richter filmed a lot of the scenes in his film by alternating the camera from primary motion (camera is stationary while objects/characters have movement in the frame) to secondary motion (camera moves along with objects/characters). Primary motion was shown in the gun scenes while secondary motion was shown in the flying hat scenes. The secondary motion of the camera in the flying hat scenes helped bring the mystery of the hats closer to the viewer. His camera movement helped clarify the situations at stake and intensify the viewer's reaction to what was being presented./

One element of filming that Richter makes use of is lighting. He is demonstrating the lighting on many images to produce different effects of light/shadows. By doing this different textures are shown and it also helps in visualizing depth. This clarifies the size of the objects or situation in the frame by intensifying the "feel" (texture) of each subject displayed./
Richter made this film with continually changing shots so that the viewer does not just stare at the screen, but rather pay close attention and be curious of what is to come up next. Images of violence is a way that he keeps the viewer's attention. The act of violence is clarified through the images of the breaking cups, the guns, the floating or drifting head, and the fist fighting scene. Fear is intensified by these images. The piano composition, functioning as the only sounds in this silent film, intensifies a feeling of "intense excitement". The shots of the flying hats may clarify that actual ghosts are wearing them which also may intensify fear or shock the viewer because of the bizarreness that is being presented in the frames. The men eventually receive their hats back from "the ghosts" as they sit down to have tea for what it looks like could be breakfast. This is where Hans Richter might have titled this film Ghosts before Breakfast.
The opening scene of the film deals with time which is shown at the beginning and at the end of the film by use of a clock. This somewhat states to the viewer that the film was all time related, but contained associative logic due to the reappearing flying hat scenes. Both elements of time and rhythm are well preserved by the clock. At the end of the film the clock splits in half and each piece sweeps to their side of the frame to reveal the word "Ende". It seems to show that not only did Richter want to shock the audience into a non-real world, but to also do it by rhythm and time. These elements would form a "fantasy trance" of curiosity causing the audience to want to see what is next. This was especially true in a time when film was new and he was demonstrating special effects. People were not used to slowed down time, speeded up time, and reverse time shown in moving images, not to mention the negatives that present a world of fantasy.
Richter made good use of all of these elements when putting together Ghosts before Breakfast. He stirred up the viewer with curiosity to await the next surprise into the fantasy world as he took the viewer into different time zones of fantasy. This ten minute film from 1927 definitely demonstrates elements that can be found in the films of today. In 1927, these elements were most likely more powerful due to the "newness" of this medium. Hans Richter presents a journey through fantasy in time as the viewer witnesses the film Ghosts before Breakfast.
--Joe Cartman

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Kodachrome Revisited : Jon Behrens (1987)

KODACHROME REVISITED I made this film by shooting around 180 rolls of 35mm slide film. I then hand processed the film in a very sloppy manner. I never mounted the film into slides I simply took the 35mm strips of film and spliced them together. Some of the rolls used in this film were shot by random people I sent a roll of film to, that they shot and sent back to me. The Throbbing Gristle provided the films soundtrack.
1987, 35mm, color, sound,
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KODACHROME REVISITED
JON BEHRENS  (1987)
5 MIN
USA

Cowboys Were Not Nice People (1990)

This is an outstanding film by Larry Kless and was very inspireing to me as a filmmaker - JB

"I produced this art film in 1990 completely on an optical printer reshooting 16mm film frame by frame. It won awards at various film festivals and was screened internationally. Here's the artistic description, "History paints a heroic picture of the so-called "cowboys" of history. Using the hero as a metaphor to questions his validity, this film explores the mythical frontiers of western culture and the romanticism of colonialism."
Flag this video" - Larry Kless
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