your movie Rhythmus 21, from 1921, was one of the first to try to bring abstract ideas – shapes, light, rhythm – to this medium. By the late 1920s, Richter had had nearly twenty years of career in abstract/cubist painting, and by the beginning of the decade, he had already experimented with the new form of film. It's an explosion in our mind.īut there are real events and issues surrounding the film and its aftermath. And you can interpret it quite differently from the audience in 1928. This is one of the conclusions of the Dada short film by the painter Hans Richter, from 1928, entitled Ghosts Before Breakfast, or Vormittagsspuk, original title in German (“Morning Scare”). When the objects themselves revolt, something terrible approaches the earth and anarchism reveals itself. The weapon does not fire and the target does not stay still. Or perhaps you’ll find further obfuscation, but that aligns with the Dada spirit - in a world that has ceased to make sense, so the Dadaists believed, the duty falls to you to make even less.A film by Hans Richter so far ahead of its time that it was desecrated by the Nazis The ABCs of Dada examines Dada through a great many of these Dadaists themselves, such as Sophie Taeuber-Arp, a teacher and dancer forced to wear a mask for her Dada activities due to the group’s scandalous reputation in the academy architect Marcel Janco, who remembers of the group that “among us were neither blasé people nor cynics, actors nor anarchists who took the Dada scandal seriously” and “Dada-marshal” George Grosz, who declared that “if one calls my work art depends on whether one believes that the future belongs to the working class.” You can find further clarification among UBUweb’s collection of Dada, Surrealism, & De Stijl Magazines, such as Zurich’s Cabaret Voltaire and Berlin’s Der Dada. Perhaps you remember that vintage Onion article, “ Republicans, Dadaists Declare War on Art,” satirizing, among other things, the way proponents of Dada called its fruit not art, but “anti-art.” They made it deliberately meaningless where “real” art strove to deliver messages, deliberately offensive where it strained to appeal to common sensibilities.

Before breakfast dada movie