30 YEARS OF EXPERIMENTAL FILM

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The FIR Vault

By Archives • Oct 9th, 2008 • Pages: 1 2 3

At this point I asked who, of present day American experimenters, he admires most. “The Whitney brothers and Fischinger,” he said. “They are not speculators.
Also Frances Lee, McLaren, Len Lye and Stauffacher.” He went on to say that there were some who misused the “sensations so easily obtainable in the medium of the experimental film,” and that surrealism not infrequently was “a blanket excuse for the exhibition of a menu of personal inhibitions.”
And the future?
“The experimental film will have as definite and recognized a place in the future as the documentary film has today.”
I rose to leave.
“Anyway,” he added, “I’ve done exactly what I wanted to do.” Wherewith he brought out a bottle of brandy and we had a nightcap.
“We’re all lineal descendants of Georges Méliès,” Richter said as I again got up to go.
“He was the first to know what the cinema was for-not because he invented the trick film, but because he instinctively knew what the main esthetic of the film is. Wait, I’ll walk with you a bit.”
“Well,” I said at the top of the stairway, “going down will be easier than coming up.”
“Isn’t that always the case?” he smiled. “In everything?”
When we came out into the cold, night air, I made the usual reference to the brass monkey.
“You think this is cold?” he laughed. “You should walk across what used to be the Tiergarten in Berlin on a frosty January night. An icy wind that probably started somewhere in the Urals cuts your face. You can hardly breathe!”

Richter, who calls Méliès his master, visited him at his home at Orly

We walked westward toward Central Park. Richter was busy with the great theme of his life. “It’s still too early to talk of a tradition,” he said. “This year is but the thirtieth anniversary of a movement in an art that is itself only thirty-five years old.”
Then he began to speak of his next project. He wanted to tell the old Greek legend of the

Minotaur in terms of today, “Each of us is in a labyrinth, in which each fights a Minotaur of his own,” he said sententiously. “The thread that led Theseus out of the labyrinth also bound him to Ariadne. Amid the terrors of the labyrinth, of the unknown, this thread is a fragile thing, but it is all we have.”
He stopped, as though what he had just said was his ultimate declaration, as though there was nothing more to say. “I’ll turn back now,” he murmured.

I thought of some of his other vast, unrealized projects, of his modernized CANDIDE (1934), in which CANDIDE’s optimism, set against the onrushing tide of barbarism in Europe, seemed less excusable than ever. I thought of Richter’s thirty years of unswerving fidelity to an ideal. He was, indeed, a solitary of the cinema.

I looked back at him slowly wending his way homeward. His tall silhouette was a deeper shadow in the lighter shades of the night. Suddenly, like one of the abstract patterns in one of his films, it vanished.

The photograph was taken on the night DREAMS THAT MONEY CAN BUY opened in Los Angeles. Fritz Lang is standing between Richter (1) and Man Ray (r). The man in the rear at the extreme right is Theodore Huff.

* The “kino-eye” theories of Dziga Vertov in Russia were something else, and led to the camera being used as the “all-seeing eye” in Eisenstein’s Strike and POTEMKIN, in Schub’s documentaries, etc.

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Tagged as: Hans Richter, Viking Eggeling

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