Hans Richter: Early Works

A selection, repeated a number of times, of early works from the great German dadist/surrealist artist Hans Richter.
His early pieces are purely formal experiments. He seems unable to wish to use three dimensions, but has an interesting take on the speeds of movement, gradually into scenes and then sudden quick motions. Interesting in its affect, though one knows what Richet meant when he described them as purely intellectual, not at all emotional.
There is a little bit of a sigh of relief when Richter starts using bodies. He becomes interested in collage techniques, which are well used to again express the way cinema is able to have various levels of reality together at once.
Richter is at his very best when he shows himself to be a master of the montage technique. His short film 'Race' is perhaps his finest work, using non-chronological images to create a tight intense atmosphere, before then moving well on to a tension relieving but still powerful long duration shot of the race itself.
We then move onto 'Ghosts Before Breakfast', once again, which we now see as if anything one of Richter's more straightforawrd works. He likes to abstract from the personal, to abstract from internal emotion, rather he uses the method of montage to create his own rythms. It is interesting how these either clash or are used with the speed of rythm in the content.
Richter is not a master filmaker, he uses the form for his own artistic ends rather than for an appreciation of the possibilities of the medium itself, manipulating for its own sake on occassion. These pieces though are fascinating, the early ones for their abstract purity, the latter for their stabs at Eisenstein-esque theory along with some other insights.