Rhythm 21

We watch white shapes dancing on black background, which changes when the white shape fills up the screen completely, and black lines and figures bounce around on the now white background.

Two Penny Magic (Zweigroschenzauber) starting off with a little magic trick. It then presents an array of images from swimmers, bicyclers, murderers, airplanes in flight, boxers, lovers, runners, becoming in the end a collection of images in a magazine.

Directed by Hans Richter.

A commissioned film for SWB – Schweizerischer Werkbund – Die neue Wohnung was produced for the Basel architectural and interior design exhibition (WOBA) to demonstrate innovative aspects of modern architecture and highlight their differences from the event’s highly conservative approach. Aimed at a bourgeois Swiss public, this version, screened in Basel in 1930, was the outcome of the collaboration between Richter and the members of the SWB, responsible for the script but also for the film’s formal elements, such as a refusal to use animation.

Made for the Zurich National Exhibition in 1939, Die Börse als Barometer der Wirtschaftslage charts the increase of stock exchanges in the history of economic development.

8 × 8: A Chess-Sonata in 8 Movements (1957) is an American experimental film directed by Hans Richter, Marcel Duchamp, and Jean Cocteau released on March 15, 1957 in New York City. It features original music by Robert Abramson, John Gruen and Douglas Townsend. Described by Richter as "part Freud, part Lewis Carroll", it is a fairy tale for the subconscious based on the game of chess. While living in New York, Hans Richter directed two feature films, Dreams That Money Can Buy and 8x8: A Chess Sonata in collaboration with Max Ernst, Cocteau, Paul Bowles, Fernand Léger, Alexander Calder, Duchamp, and others, which was partially filmed on the lawn of his summer house in Southbury, Connecticut.

Experimental documentary focusing on a day in the life of city workers, featuring montage sequences and repetition to emphasise the monotony of routine office work.

'Race Symphony (1928)' belongs to a different style of film-making, most popular popular in the 1920s, known loosely as "City Symphonies." Documentaries such as 'Berlin: Symphony of a Great City (1927)' and 'The Man With a Movie Camera (1929)' celebrated the working-class mechanics of society, often shunning intertitles and instead using diverse optical effects – such as double-exposures, dissolves, split-screen and slow-motion – to communicate story and mood. Richter's entry runs just seven minutes, and documents a typical day at the German races, where sophisticated people turn up in droves to place a bet, watch the horses and celebrate a well-deserved win.