German Dadaist Hans Richter collaborated with Viking Eggeling to
produce a large body of “scroll drawings” that depicted sequential
transformations of geometric forms that he described as “the music of
the orchestrated form.” Richter saw film animation as the next logical
step for expressing the kinetic interplay between positive and negative
forms. Richter’s silent films of the late 1920s demonstrated a more
surreal approach that combined animation with live-action footage.
At the time, these shocking films challenged artistic conventions by
exploring fantasy through the use of special effects, many of which are
used in contemporary filmmaking. In Ghosts Before Breakfast (1927),
people and objects engage in unusual behavior set in bizarre and often
disturbing settings. Flying hats continually reappear in conjunction
with surrealistic live images of men’s beards magically appearing and
disappearing, teacups filling up by themselves, men disappearing
behind street signs, and objects moving in reverse. In a scene containing
a bull’s eye, a man’s head becomes detached from his body and
floats inside the target. In another scene of a blossoming tree branch,
fast-motion photography was used. Richter also played back the film
in reverse and used negatives to defy the laws of the natural world.