Hans Richter | US Drama 1947
Reviewed by Richard Chatten
Avant garde films are so habitually rough-edged that if I saw this film in isolation I have thought that I’d discovered Ed Wood’s first film; who also made extensive use of interior monologues.
In this collective film the only one of Hans Richters’s distinguished collaborators who actually appears in the film – although if you look quickly you’ll spot a young Stanley Kubrick in Man Ray’s episode – is Max Ernst.
The most memorable sequences are probably Fernand Leger’s ‘Girl with a Prefabricated Heart‘ with a cast of mannequins and Alexander Calder’s depiction of a circus performed by puppets. While the most truly novel use of colour is probably in Richter’s concluding episode ‘Narcissus’; an allegory of racism in which the hero immediately encounters hostility when he suddenly turns blue while participating in a card game.
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