“Every­body dreams. Every­body trav­els, some­times into coun­tries where strange beau­ty, wis­dom, adven­ture, love expects him.” These words, a tad floaty and dream­like them­selves, open 1947’s Dreams That Mon­ey Can Buy. “This is a sto­ry of dreams mixed with real­i­ty,” the nar­ra­tor intones. He can say that again. Direct­ed by Hans Richter, painter, graph­ic artist, avant-gardist, “film-exper­i­menter,” and ener­getic mem­ber of the Dada move­ment, the pic­ture takes a sto­ry­line that seems mun­dane­ly real­is­tic — impe­cu­nious poet finds apart­ment, then must fig­ure out how to pay the rent — and bends it into all man­ner of sur­re­al shapes. And I do, lit­er­al­ly, mean sur­re­al, since sev­er­al of the scenes come from the minds of not­ed avant-garde and sur­re­al­ist artists, includ­ing, besides Richter him­self, painter and pho­tog­ra­ph­er Man Ray, con­cep­tu­al­ist Mar­cel Duchamp, sculp­tor Alexan­der Calder, and painter-sculp­tor-film­mak­er Fer­nand Léger.

Joe, the film’s pro­tag­o­nist, finds he has a sort of super­pow­er: by look­ing into the eyes of anoth­er, he can see the con­tents of their mind. He prompt­ly sets up a sort of con­sul­ta­tion busi­ness where he exam­ines the uncon­scious thoughts of a client: say, an unam­bi­tious banker whose wife lives “like a dou­ble-entry col­umn: no virtues, no vices.” He then uses the abstract mate­ri­als of their thoughts to come up with a self-con­tained, some­what less abstract dream for them to dream: in the banker’s case, a dream called “Desire,” which takes the form of a short film by Dadaist painter-sculp­tor-graph­ic artist-poet Max Ernst. For Joe’s oth­er, dif­fer­ent­ly neu­rot­ic cus­tomers, Richter, Man Ray, Duchamp, Calder, and Léger come up with suit­able for­mal­ly and aes­thet­i­cal­ly dis­tinct dreams. While all these artists imbue Dreams That Mon­ey Can Buy with their own inim­itable sen­si­bil­i­ties (or non­sense abil­i­ties, as the case may be), I feel as though cer­tain mod­ern film­mak­ers would have the time of their lives remak­ing it. Michel Gondry comes to mind.

Dreams That Mon­ey Can Buy will be added to our col­lec­tion, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Clas­sics, Indies, Noir, West­erns, Doc­u­men­taries & More.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Man Ray and the Ciné­ma Pur: Four Sur­re­al­ist Films From the 1920s

Un Chien Andalou: Revis­it­ing Buñuel and Dalí’s Sur­re­al­ist Film

The Hearts of Age: Orson Welles’ Sur­re­al­ist First Film (1934)

The Seashell and the Cler­gy­man: The World’s First Sur­re­al­ist Film

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture and writes essays on lit­er­a­ture, film, cities, Asia, and aes­thet­ics. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

Locat­ed in the Mont­par­nasse sec­tion of Paris, the Idem stu­dio was orig­i­nal­ly built by the print­er Emile Dufrenoy in 1880, as a space to house his lith­o­graph­ic press­es. Mov­ing into the next cen­tu­ry, var­i­ous own­ers pre­served the art of lith­o­g­ra­phy, pro­duc­ing lith­o­graphs by the likes of Matisse, Picas­so, Miro, Braque, Cha­gall, Léger, Cocteau, and oth­ers. Today, the tra­di­tion con­tin­ues. And, amaz­ing­ly, the ate­lier still uses 19th cen­tu­ry flatbed machines, pow­ered by a gas steam boil­er, to keep the tra­di­tion of lith­o­g­ra­phy alive. While on a recent trip to Paris, the sur­re­al­ist film­mak­er David Lynch paid a vis­it to Idem and fell in love with what he saw, so much so that he pro­duced a short doc­u­men­tary high­light­ing Idem’s artis­tic process. As a pref­ace to the film, Lynch wrote on the Idem web site:

Hervé Chandès from the Fon­da­tion Carti­er brought me over to Idem and intro­duced me to Patrice For­est. I see this incred­i­ble place, and I get the oppor­tu­ni­ty to work there. And this was like a dream! It just opened up this brand-new world of the lith­o­g­ra­phy and the mag­ic of lith­o­g­ra­phy, the mag­ic of the stones. And it was a great, great thing! This thing of lith­o­g­ra­phy, this chan­nel of lith­o­g­ra­phy opened up and a bunch of ideas came flow­ing out and it led to about a hun­dred lith­o­graphs. I will say that Idem print­ing stu­dio has a unique, very spe­cial mood, and it is so con­ducive to cre­at­ing. Patrice has the great­est atti­tude for all the artists and he cre­ates this space of free­dom and this joy of cre­at­ing. It’s so beau­ti­ful! And I think the place is very important—in oth­er wors, the same stone could be moved to anoth­er place, and I think that the work that comes out would be dif­fer­ent. It’s a com­bi­na­tion of the stone, the place, the peo­ple, this mood, and out comes these cer­tain ideas.

You can find the short film, Idem Paris, list­ed in our col­lec­tion of 525 Free Movies Online. You can also find a primer explain­ing the basics of lith­o­g­ra­phy here.

via Bib­liok­lept

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Free: The Guggen­heim Puts 65 Mod­ern Art Books Online

Wass­i­ly Kandin­sky Caught in the Act of Cre­ation, 1926

How the CIA Secret­ly Fund­ed Abstract Expres­sion­ism Dur­ing the Cold War