DREAMS THAT MONEY CAN BUY (1947) — co-presented by YOU MUST REMEMBER THIS

In collaboration with You Must Remember This, 7th House presents a rare screening of Dadaist Hans Richter’s kaleidoscopically intoxicating avant-garde landmark, DREAMS THAT MONEY CAN BUY (1947)—a wildly imaginative fable featuring a collision of talents drawn from the 20th century’s artistic vanguard, including Max Ernst, Fernand Léger, Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp, Alexander Calder, and John Cage. Acclaimed writer and podcaster Karina Longworth will join us to give a special presentation on the film and its place in The Bisexuals, the new season of You Must Remember This, launching September 15.

Its wonderfully strange premise is almost disarmingly simple: broke and behind on his rent, Joe discovers that by looking into his own eyes in a mirror he can see the contents of his mind—and realizes he might make a living doing the same for others. Soon he is selling tailor-made dreams to a succession of clients, a framing device that allows Richter and his extraordinary collaborators to move freely between live action, animation, abstraction, dance, music, sculpture, and theatrical fantasy—all through a Surrealist and Dada funhouse mirror. The resulting episodes range from the eerie to the comic, the erotic to the absurd, each operating according to its own peculiar dream logic while somehow cohering into a singular cinematic reverie, made all the more remarkable by its creation in 1947.

Richter had already been knocking around the European avant-garde for decades by the time he made Dreams That Money Can Buy, moving from painting and Zürich Dada into some of the earliest experiments in abstract cinema. Forced to flee Europe by the Nazis, he landed in New York in 1941, where he fell in with a remarkable collection of fellow artists and émigrés, many of whom would eventually find their way into Dreams. Ernst, Léger, Man Ray, Duchamp, and Calder each brought their own ideas and obsessions to the film, with an equally improbable group turning up on the soundtrack: Cage, Paul Bowles, Darius Milhaud, David Diamond, and Louis Applebaum. The lineup itself feels like something out of a dream, but somehow Dreams never plays like a museum piece or a roll call of famous names. It’s playful, seductive, funny, sometimes baffling, and always strange—and far too rarely seen. Keep your eyes peeled for a blink-and-you'll-miss-him cameo by a young Stanley Kubrick!

Karina Longworth on Dreams That Money Can Buy:

The new season of You Must Remember This, titled The Bisexuals, focuses primarily on two people: Montgomery Clift, movie star of the 1940s-60s and tragic symbol of addiction and closeted self-destruction; and Libby Holman, a singer who became a star on Broadway in the 1920s, and infamous in the 1930s when she was indicted for the murder of her first husband. Though Libby was very famous in her heyday and was close with a few people who made movies (including Clift, who was Holman's unlikely lover for many years), she herself never appeared on camera in a film. But she did sing in one. That film was Dreams That Money Can Buy, an omnibus project credited to Hans Richter and featuring contributions from a supergroup made up of Surrealists and adjacent artists, including Max Ernst, Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray and more. Libby's contribution comes in the film's second segment, The Girl with the Prefabricated Heart, which was written and directed by Cubist painter Fernand Leger. The segment is set to a musical narration, with Libby and her collaborator at the time, blues singer/guitarist Josh White, performing lyrics composed by John Latouche (“Cabin in the Sky”). Though Hollywood movies still banned mixed-race romantic couplings in 1947, that censorship did not extend to this avant-garde production, in which Holman and White — who were rumored to be lovers in real life — were free to play out a fractured romance.

Dir. Hans Richter, 1947, 99 mins, United States, English, Unrated, Digital.

Tickets: $12 (All Screenings Are In Person Only)

Please email events@prs.org or phone 323-663-2167 with any questions.