March 08, 2007

Hats Off

Vormittagspuk stillIt's Thursday, so it must be time for Paul Hindemith and Darius Milhaud to star in a Weimar-era avant-garde German version of Peter Gabriel's "Sledgehammer" video! That's Vormittagspuk ("Morning Ghosts"), directed by Dada luminary Hans Richter in 1928 (with music by Hindemith). The Nazis deemed it "Degenerate Art" and destroyed the negative, but a print survived, and, of course, is now available on YouTube. Richter later spent some time in America, where, among other things, he collaborated with Jean Cocteau on the late surrealist romp 8x8: A Chess Sonata (portions of which are also online—check out this sequence featuring Paul Bowles awakening to compose from a slowly draining swimming pool.)

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