INTRODUCTION

Realityfilm and Tate Modern presented Dreams That Money Can Buy with live music by The Real Tuesday Weld and narration by English alchemist David Piper with Brazilian chanteuse Cibelle. The event was co-produced by Marek Pytel.

Dada artist, filmmaker and writer Hans Richter created the extraordinary colour sound film Dreams That Money Can Buy (1946), which features a penniless protagonist who has the ability to create dreams and devises a business selling them to others. Among his customers are some of the greatest names in the Dadaist/Surrealist movements, including Man Ray, Max Ernst, Marcel Duchamp and Fernand Leger, all of whom make a contribution to the film and whose works are on show in Tate's new Poetry and Dream wing.

Hans Richter's 1946 film Dreams That Money Can Buy takes viewers into the dream-world realm of the unconscious. This Surrealist work is actually seven experimental films rolled into one bizarre story.

Ordinary – and penniless – Joe discovers he has an amazing capability: he can look into his own unconscious. As his financial state is in despair, Joe puts his newfound psychic abilities to good use by starting a mind-reading business. Clients essentially pay him to look into their eyes. In the process, he sees reflected images of their unconscious and brings their dreams to life. Each dream then unfolds on the screen for our voyeuristic pleasure.

If you feel as though you've seen some of the dream images before, you probably have. Dreams celebrates the talent of artists whose work flourished during the Dada and Surrealist movements. Richter's film is based directly on paintings, drawings and scripts by: Man Ray, Max Ernst, Alexander Calder, Ferdinand Léger, Marcel Duchamp and Richter himself. Each dream pays homage to one of the artists, bringing their work to life.

Each dream vividly unfolds in beautifully saturated Technicolor, a surreal colour scheme far from life's colour tones. Particularly interesting segments of Dreams include ‘case number two', with its annoyingly catchy tune ‘Woman with a pre-fabricated heart’, and ‘case number four', an ode to Marcel Duchamp's Nude Descending A Staircase. In Richter's Dreams, art comes to life through stop-action animation and music. There's no literal dialogue in the film; we hear characters speaking, but they never open their mouths. This adds to the dream-like quality of the film, making even the non-dream sequences seem especially surreal.

While watching Dreams, you have to remember the context in which the film was made. When Richter created the film, directors were still experimenting with a relatively new medium. Richter fuses traditional modes of artistic expression (paintings and drawings) with this new medium.

Dreams embraces the 'illogical logic' of the Surrealist movement. The world that Richter creates is strange and almost impossible to describe, and yet everything seems vaguely familiar. Surrealist filmmakers didn't intend to make films that unfolded in a logical order. They wanted viewers to revel in the beauty of images themselves, and appreciate films for their aesthetic value.

At one point in the film, one of Joe's clients says: ‘This is all nonsense! Although it is an interesting picture.’ In the same vein, Dreams That Money Can Buy may not ‘make sense’, but it is a beautiful piece of art in and of itself.

Jess Emili

Film courtesy of British Film Institute

Part of UBS Openings: The Long Weekend - Surrealist Saturday

See Collection Display: Poetry and Dream

  Music & Performance