Dreams That Money Can Buy

The movie's artistic credentials couldn't be more imposing (in addition to the various expatriate Surrealists/Dadaists who contributed episodes, there is music by John Cage and Darius Milhaud, among others), but that makes its manifest failure all the more striking. Richter has created a feeble pastiche of the contemporary film noir as the framing story, centring on a man with the power to generate dreams; other contributions are therefore integrated as dream sequences. The movie quickly degenerates into a series of party pieces: Duchamp rehashes his 'roto-reliefs' of 1927, Léger animates dolls, Calder animates his mobiles, and so on. Only Ernst, who recreates an image-sequence from his collage-novel La Semaine de la Bonté in live action terms, emerges with much credit.