Hottoceame The Age of Commercialism

Stevecorp Don't listen to the negative reviews

Casey Duggan It’s sentimental, ridiculously long and only occasionally funny

Philippa All of these films share one commonality, that being a kind of emotional center that humanizes a cast of monsters.

Horst in Translation (filmreviews@web.de) "Ghosts Before Breakfast" or "Vormittagsspuk" is a German short film that runs slightly over 6 minutes. As this one was made almost 90 years ago, it is still silent and black-and-white. Sound films and color were still fairly rare back at this point. It is a solid experimental movie. I may be a bit biased as I am not that big on the genre of experimentalism in movies, but some of the visual effects and camera tricks (relapse, acceleration) made for a decent watch. Still, I must say it is basically the same what Méliès has done 30 years earlier already, only with better material and advanced technology, but not really with innovative idea except maybe 2 or 3 scenes. All in all, a fairly mediocre watch and I can't recommend it.

Zbigniew_Krycsiwiki Dada. Surreal. Experimental. Avant garde. Weird. Yet I couldn't stop watching. Watching. Watch. Stop watch. Stopwatch moving in time lapse photography; is the message here that time flies when one is having fun? Are we supposed to be having fun here? Bowler hats flying through the air turn into tea cups immediately before they land and crash into pieces.Bow ties and handguns and x-rays of handguns with minds of their own.I like the bits with the fire hoses, and the concentric circles, bull's eyes, which don't want to be shot at. And who can blame them? Bearded men stroking their beards and their negative images doing likewise.Is the plot everyday items rebelling against everyday routine, or just excuses to show trick photography? Making art out of something ugly? Anti art? The clock strikes twelve, splits into two even pieces. Ende. Ende. Ende neu.

MartinHafer If I had to pick one art film to watch, it would be Hans Richter's "Ghost Before Breakfast". This is unusual because it's not his entire film-- just a six minute portion that somehow avoided being destroyed by the Nazis--who felt that the film was decadent and anti-German! Huh?! What pin-heads! Additionally, the original sound is missing, though the music accompanying it now seems very fitting and works very well.The film has no traditional narrative whatsoever--which is true of almost all art films!! Instead, tons of tiny film clips are edited together in a manner that might look random--but as a whole they work together very well. The overall effect is actually quite whimsical and charming-- something you rarely would say about an art film. I loved watching the flying derbies, the spinning clock hands and the like! Weird and kind of fun.

ackstasis Well, I'm pretty much speechless. Avant-garde cinema often does that to me. What can I say? What can I possibly say about a film that features eerie floating bowler hats terrorising a group of young businessmen? Director Hans Richter developed a reputation for bizarre, abstract film-making, and I can certainly say that 'Ghosts Before Breakfast (1928)' fits the bill nicely. There's a certain charm to it – a rhythmic editing tempo that retains its momentum throughout the running time, even if there appears to be little apparent connection between the wacky visual sequences with which Richter presents us. The best way to describe the film is that it presents ordinary-looking household objects behaving in peculiar ways, whether that be the levitating hats, the disappearing beards, the self-spooling fire hose or the rickety ladder that doesn't lead to anywhere. Whether the director is trying to make some sort of obscure philosophical point, or simply having fun with all manner of optical trickery, fans of the surreal will surely relish this brief snippet of domestic insanity.Richter uses stop-motion animation extensively, it being one of the simplest ways to simulate motion. The result of this technique is movement that is oddly fractured and dream-like, a warped reality that doesn't quite make rational sense {director Norman McLaren also recognised how disorientatingly-unreal this pixilation technique feels, and later used it to interesting effect in his own short film, 'Neighbours (1952)'}. The flying hats are probably dangling on wires, though I couldn't spot any, and it must have taken a lot of practice to perform the aerial motion without tangling the support lines. Also present in the director's bag of tricks are numerous double-exposures, cross-fades and blurred photography. Richter delights in toying with the concept of time, frequently repeating the same shots over and over – sometimes reversed, sometimes sped up, sometimes slowed down – such that the characters' movements lead nowhere. Is he implying something about our everyday dependence upon trivial household possessions, and that we can't get anywhere without them? Well, I don't know; I just thought it was zany.