Dreams That Money Can Buy

Marcin Giżycki

Abstract

Giżycki writes about the little-known film Dreams That Money Can Buy, made by Dadaist Hans Richter in the United States in 1944-1946. This experimental exercise, considered Richter’s most important American film, combined six scenarios written - besides Richter - by Max Ernst, Fernand Léger, Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp and Alexander Calder. Giżycki presents a profile of Richter, his relationships with Expressionists and Futurists and the circumstances behind the making of the film, loaded with absurd humour. Giżycki describes the film’s segments, pointing to numerous inspirations of Richter’s collaborators (Leger’s Mechanical Ballet, Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase and Ernst’s colla­ges). He also remarks that the framing device of the sequences is a parody of film noir. According to Giżycki, although the names of great artists were listed in the opening credits, the film had never been distributed or researched because it wasn’t made at the right time - in the second half of the 1940s Surrealism was already a thing of the past. Today, the film may be interpreted as a kind of a documentary record of actions of the great artists or a little patinated and charming experiment.