Hans Richter Biography

Dadaist painter who began making avant-garde films in the late 1910s. Richter pioneered the technique of painting directly onto rolls of film, creating abstract, rhythmic works which emphasized the two-dimensional nature of the film frame ("Rhythmus 21" 1921, "Rhythmus 25" 1925). He collaborated with Eisenstein and others on "Sturm uber La Sarraz" in 1929 and made primarily commercial and industrial films in Switzerland and France before emigrating to the US in 1941. The following year, Richter was appointed Director of the Institute of Film Techniques at the City College of New York, where he taught for nearly 15 years. His best known American work is "Dreams That Money Can Buy" (1944), featuring sequences contributed by himself, Fernand Leger, Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst and Alexander Calder. Richter continued to collaborate with some of these artists in Switzerland, where he settled in 1952.