Hans Richter

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

A farcical war between the forces of Commercial Cinema and Independent Cinema. (imdb)

A man buys and sells dreams.

An early, serious abstract animation composed solely of squares and rectangles that change shape. (expcinema.com)

Abstract short by Hans Richter.

Experimental documentary focusing on a day in the life of city workers, featuring montage sequences and repetition to emphasise the monotony of routine office work. (BFI Screenonline)

Entertaining Dadaist experimental short, similar to Man Ray's work, full of shifting geometric shapes, stock footage of seagulls, flying eyeballs, and glaring floating heads. (imdb)

Inflation (1928) is an experimental silent film at eight minutes which is sometimes categorized as a documentary. By now Richter is 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. (weirdwildrealm.com)

A chaotic series of Dadaistic, Surrealistic and symbolic scenes involving the theme of chess in one way or another.

Free-form association between images with disorienting and juxtaposed sound and all the standard themes of the Dada movement such as games of chances, dice, word-games, etc.

'Race Symphony (1928)' belongs to a different style of film-making, most popular popular in the 1920s, known loosely as "City Symphonies." Documentaries such as 'Berlin: Symphony of a Great City (1927)' and 'The Man With a Movie Camera (1929)' celebrated the working-class mechanics of society, often shunning intertitles and instead using diverse optical effects - such as double-exposures, dissolves, split-screen and slow-motion - to communicate story and mood. (imdb)

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.

A day at the carnival -- sensational tent shows where miracles can be seen for the price of admission, boisterous noise of crowds and barkers, shrill and gaudy circus music, the violence of the street ten-fold. This is the substance of Everything Turns, Richter's first sound film. At its premier at Baden-Baden Richter got into a fight with two Nazi officials who disliked the films 'modernism.' (mubi.com)

A commissioned film for SWB - Schweizerischer Werkbund - Die neue Wohnung was produced for the Basel architectural and interior design exhibition (WOBA) to demonstrate innovative aspects of modern architecture and highlight their differences from the event's highly conservative approach. Aimed at a bourgeois Swiss public, this version, screened in Basel in 1930, was the outcome of the collaboration between Richter and the members of the SWB. (mubi.com)