The hats won’t stay on heads. The bowtie won’t be tied. The gun can’t shoot and the tar­get can’t keep still. When objects them­selves rebel, some­thing ter­ri­ble is upon the land, and anar­chism will out. This is one of the take­aways from painter Hans Richter’s 1928 DADA short film Ghosts Before Break­fast, or Vor­mit­tagsspuk in its orig­i­nal Ger­man (lit­er­al­ly “Morn­ing Spook”). And you might take that a very dif­fer­ent way than the audi­ence in 1928. That is fine. This is Dada. It is a bomb thrown into the mind.

But actu­al events and prob­lems sur­round the film and its after­math. By the end of the 1920s Richter was near­ly two decades into his abstract/cubist paint­ing career, and at the begin­ning of the decade he had already been exper­i­ment­ing with the rel­a­tive­ly new medi­um of film. His 1921 Rhyth­mus 21 was one of the first films to attempt to bring abstract ideas–shapes, light, rhythm– to the medi­um. Writ­ing in a Ger­man peri­od­i­cal around 1926, he said “…cin­e­ma can ful­fill cer­tain promis­es made by the ancient arts, in the real­iza­tion of which paint­ing and film become close neigh­bors and work togeth­er.”

Ah, but could music and silent film work togeth­er? In 1927 he was asked by the Ges­sellschaft Fur Neu Musik in Berlin to work with com­pos­er Paul Hin­demith on a piece to screen at their annu­al fes­ti­val. Hin­demith sug­gest­ed some­thing pleas­ant, some­thing set in the coun­try­side. Richter ran out of time and shot some­thing in an impro­vi­sa­tion­al style. But, you know, some­times dead­lines real­ly bring out the best in peo­ple. If the lega­cy of Ghosts Before Break­fast is any indi­ca­tion, it did. It’s con­sid­ered by many to be one of the best Dada films for pure inven­tion and play­ful­ness.

If Ghosts has any nar­ra­tive it’s this: objects con­found their human own­ers, while a clock relent­less­ly counts down the min­utes to noon, a play on the Ger­man phrase “Es ist fünf vor zwölf,” lit­er­al­ly “five min­utes to 12” or “time in run­ning out.” (There’s also a duck).

Richter throws it all in: there’s back­wards film, neg­a­tive film, cut-out and stop-motion ani­ma­tion, in-cam­era spe­cial effects. And as a through­line, one of the sim­plest effects: four, then three, then two ghost­ly bowler hats float­ing in the sky, just out of the reach of their own­ers.

And the artist called in his friends to help: Richter used Bauhaus stu­dent and sculp­tor Wern­er Gra­eff, Hin­demith him­self, com­pos­er Dar­ius Mil­haud and his cousin/wife Madeleine Mil­haud, and film edi­tor Willi Pfer­dekamp to pop­u­late the film.

Ghosts has a trag­ic after­life: the Nazis burned the orig­i­nal film and the score Hin­demith wrote for it. How­ev­er that has left a flow­er­ing of music in its wake, as com­posers have tried to fill the gap: Ian Gar­den­er, Jean Has­se, the band The Real Tues­day Weld, and oth­ers. Steve Roden com­posed four ver­sions for a LACMA ret­ro­spec­tive of Richter’s work, using var­i­ous Dadaist tac­tics, includ­ing record­ing a Hin­demith vinyl he had pre­pared with sand­pa­per.

All scores have resist­ed per­fect syn­chro­niza­tion, how­ev­er. Indeed, in 1947 Richter him­self spoke out against that desire:

We should find a way to let the sound and the pic­ture move on its own in the same direc­tion, but nev­er­the­less, sep­a­rate­ly. This refers to the spo­ken word as well as to the musi­cal and oth­er sounds.

Near­ly 100 years old, Ghosts Before Break­fast is still set­ting the table for us, ready with a strong brew of truth.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The First Mas­ter­pieces of Abstract Film: Hans Richter’s Rhyth­mus 21 (1921) & Viking Eggeling’s Sym­phonie Diag­o­nale (1924)

Watch Dreams That Mon­ey Can Buy, a Sur­re­al­ist Film by Man Ray, Mar­cel Duchamp, Alexan­der Calder, Fer­nand Léger & Hans Richter

Dada Was Born 100 Years Ago: Cel­e­brate the Avant-Garde Move­ment Launched by Hugo Ball on July 14, 1916

Ted Mills is a free­lance writer on the arts who cur­rent­ly hosts the Notes from the Shed pod­cast and is the pro­duc­er of KCR­W’s Curi­ous Coast. You can also fol­low him on Twit­ter at @tedmills, and/or watch his films here.

When we imag­ine Char­lie Chap­lin, we imag­ine a man some­how exist­ing in black-and-white. The obvi­ous rea­son is that he became not just a movie star but a cul­tur­al icon in the 1910s and 20s, the era before sound came to the movies, let alone col­or. But to attain such suc­cess required skills tai­lored to the state of the medi­um at the time: that of mak­ing peo­ple laugh with­out say­ing a word, of course, but also of craft­ing an image instant­ly rec­og­niz­able in mono­chrome. Thus we don’t always feel we’re see­ing the “real” Char­lie Chap­lin in tech­ni­cal­ly more real­is­tic col­or pho­tographs, or even col­orized ones. But what would it feel like to watch one of his clas­sic come­dies in col­or?

You can find out by watch­ing the col­orized ver­sion of A Night in the Show above. Orig­i­nal­ly released in 1915, the 25-minute short was direct­ed by and stars Chap­lin, who plays the dual role of char­ac­ters called Mr. Pest and Mr. Row­dy. Both attend the same music-hall per­for­mance, and though Mr. Pest is of the upper crust and Mr. Row­dy is a work­ing man, both get equal­ly ine­bri­at­ed, their dis­parate social class­es pro­duc­ing dif­fer­ent styles of mis­chief-mak­ing.

The Eng­lish-born Chap­lin had pre­vi­ous­ly devel­oped these char­ac­ters on stage, hav­ing played the music-hall cir­cuit him­self since ado­les­cence. Safe to say that, by the time Hol­ly­wood came call­ing, he’d seen far worse than Pest and Row­dy him­self.

The qual­i­ty of this col­oriza­tion will per­haps not win the con­tro­ver­sial process any new con­verts, but it does give us a sense of what an evening at an Eng­lish music hall of the late 19th and ear­ly 20th cen­tu­ry would actu­al­ly have looked like, a valu­able re-cre­ation now that none of us have mem­o­ries of this once-com­mon expe­ri­ence. We can more eas­i­ly imag­ine the kind of spec­ta­cles such estab­lish­ments would have offered, includ­ing but not lim­it­ed to snake-charm­ing and bursts of fire, as well as its ram­shackle exag­ger­a­tions that Chap­lin so ener­get­i­cal­ly sat­i­rizes. We could also con­sid­er this his vale­dic­tion to that envi­ron­ment: the pre­vi­ous year’s-intro­duced the Tramp, who would go on to become his most beloved char­ac­ter of all, ensured that he would soon be able to put the music hall behind him for­ev­er.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

60+ Free Char­lie Chap­lin Films Online

Col­orized Pho­tos Bring Walt Whit­man, Char­lie Chap­lin, Helen Keller & Mark Twain Back to Life

Char­lie Chap­lin Films a Scene Inside a Lion’s Cage in 200 Takes

Char­lie Chap­lin Does Cocaine and Saves the Day in Mod­ern Times (1936)

The Char­lie Chap­lin Archive Opens, Putting Online 30,000 Pho­tos & Doc­u­ments from the Life of the Icon­ic Film Star

When Ted Turn­er Tried to Col­orize Cit­i­zen Kane: See the Only Sur­viv­ing Scene from the Great Act of Cin­e­mat­ic Sac­ri­lege

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.