Ghosts Before Breakfast (Vormittagsspuk)
Germany, 1928. Director Hans Richter.Hans Richter’s Ghosts Before Breakfast (Vormittagsspuck, 1928) challenges the realism of filmic image with abstract and graphic forms. Clothes here are some of the everyday objects that turn against their users between the eleventh and the twelfth hour. A bow tie travels around the neck, undoes itself and despite efforts to hold it down, it slips away, together with the collar. Hats fly off gentlemen’s heads (Richter being one of them) and have to be chased after. Teacups and saucers drop on the floor and break. Beards appear and disappear. Film positive changes into negative. The eleventh hour belongs to objects’ ghosts which muck about with their users in order to disorient and baffle them. Arguably, it is most disturbing when the objects that decide to “follow their own law”, as Richter himself put it, are clothes. When they desert their wearer, they not only physically bare parts the body – a nightmare itself – but they also take with them their representative purpose.
For further reading, see Marion von Hofacker’s essay Richter’s Films and the Role of the Radical Artist 1927-1941.
Past screenings
Between Stigma and Enigma – London
Tuesday 16 May 2006, 20:30 | ICA Cinema
The 1st Fashion in Film Festival – Prague
Thursday 28 October 2006, 20:30 | Kino Světozor
The 1st Fashion in Film Festival – New York
Saturday 17 March 2007, 14:00 | Museum of the Moving Image
The 1st Fashion in Film Festival – Arnhem
Sunday 17 June 2007, 14:00 | Focus
The Fashion Object in Film – Rotterdam
Friday 18 September 2009 | Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen
