About Hans Richter (1888-1976)

During the 1920s there was a battle for the soul of the motion picture. Would it be an extension of theater, with scripts, actors and plots? Would it be a medium for instruction, propaganda and education? Or, as the painter Hans Richter and his colleagues imagined, would it be a work of art in motion? Between 1921 and 1929, Richter was at the center of a movement, along with Marcel Duchamp, Fernand Leger, Man Ray and others, to free cinema from all theatrical constraints. They called it Absolute Cinema. Richter’s abstract animation, "Rhythmus 21" (1921) and his playfully Dadaist, "Ghosts Before Breakfast" (1926), helped to define a broad aesthetic range for this new exuberant art cinema. Richter’s dancing, iconoclastic images have withstood the test of time. They have stayed fresh and continue to inspire other artists.

Richter’s radical political ideas and passion for the avant-garde resulted in his exile from Germany when the Nazis labeled him a ʻdegenerate artistʼ. Finally, in 1940, on the eve of his arrest by police in Switzerland, Richter escaped from Europe, arriving in New York with little money and a limited command of English. Within a year he secured a teaching position at the newly formed Institute of Film Techniques at The City College of New York, arguably the first film production school in America. For the next 17 years, Richter was an influential figure to generations of American filmmakers, opening their eyes to documentary, experimental and European films the likes of which working class students from New York City had never seen. Some of the personalities who moved through the Institute, including Woody Allen and Stanley Kubrick, went on to careers in mainstream cinema.

Perhaps Richter’s most enduring imprint was made on an emerging group of independent filmmakers in New York who became known collectively as The New American Cinema movement. Film artists such as Jonas Mekas, Shirley Clarke and Ken Jacobs followed Hans Richter’s passionate example to make film as art. In America, Hans Richter was also a magnet for a group of expatriate European artists whose lives have also been disrupted by World War II. His friends Jean Cocteau, Max Ernst, Marcel Duchamp and Fernand Leger, along with his American-born neighbors Alexander Calder and Man Ray, made pilgrimages to Richter’s Connecticut studio and New York loft to collaborate with him on his surrealist films, "Dreams That Money Can Buy" (1946) and "8X8" (1958).

The 60-minute documentary film "HANS RICHTER: Everything Turns–Everything Revolves" charts Hans Richter’s epic journey through the century as he struggled to establish film as a unique art form.