Watch Ghosts Before Breakfast For Free

good back-story, and good acting

Absolutely the worst movie.

The film makes a home in your brain and the only cure is to see it again.

The best films of this genre always show a path and provide a takeaway for being a better person.

"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.

This is a nonsense short but, at least, has a welcome surreal touch to it (though the official label would be "Dadaist") – unlike the other "avant-garde" films I watched at the same time…which were mostly highbrow and, frankly, anti-entertainment!Reportedly, this was originally accompanied by a soundtrack which was destroyed by the Third Reich when it rose to power as an example of "degenerate art"; since here we get to see usually inanimate, albeit extremely innocent-looking, objects (such as hats and shirt collars) springing to life and refusing to blindly 'acquiesce' to their masters' whims, the oppressive socio-political connotations were immediately apparent to the Nazi regime!Other memorable images that were later imitated by artists of even greater renown than its maker are those involving a number of persons disappearing behind a lamp-post (a trademark of Tex Avery cartoons) and the one where a male group unaccountably loses its set of full-grown beards to the womenfolk (which Luis Buñuel would 'borrow' for disparate effect in his first two own "avant-garde" but infinitely superior efforts)!

Hans Richter, noted for his abstract shorts, has everyday objects rebelling against their daily routine.This film was apparently destroyed by the Nazis, with only some copies escaping without sound. And what a strange film it is. Maybe not the sensually decadent picture the Nazis thought it was, but weird. I can see Dali or Lynch finding a compatriot in Richter.Is there a message here? I do not know. Looks more like just a man having fun with his actors and a camera, but what do I know? I do know one thing: I have to look more into the films of Hans Richter, because they are just my style.

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.