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“Ernst was obviously an astute observer of what qualities go into making an experience oneiric.”—Deirdre Barrett, IASD president
DIRECTED BY: Hans Richter
FEATURING: Jack Bittner
PLOT: Fresh from the bank and owing cash, Joe needs to get some money—fast. A solution hits him for quick green, and soon he’s selling people dreams. Most come to buy (one comes to sell), but the ephemeral business ain’t all swell.
BACKGROUND:
- One loft apartment, $25,000 (partly supplied by Peggy Guggenheim), three years of filming, and the involvement of some of the contemporary art-world’s heaviest hitters is all it took to create Dreams That Money Can Buy.
- The film won of the Venice Film Festival’s special award for “Best Original Contribution to the Progress of Cinematography”.
- At its New York City premiere, Dreams was projected on wall and ceiling of the venue, instead of the screen.
- Stanley Kubrick, aged 19 at the time, shows up as an extra, securing his place amongst the cool kids of cinema five years before his directorial debut.
INDELIBLE IMAGE: In a feature-length showcase from the avant-garde’s best, choosing just one is an odd request. G. Smalley suggests the scene from Max Ernst’s “Desire” where an elderly butler (Ernst himself) pulls first a shirtless man, then a pallid, corpselike woman in a nightgown out from under the sleeper’s red-velvet curtained canopy bed. It helps that the room is filled with smoke (possibly from an incinerated telephone) and that the sound accompaniment is a trancelike looped recording of men and women chanting backwards.
TWO WEIRD THINGS: Bouncy beatnik narrator; escaping out the window with Zeus-bust luggage into death color-drop explosion
WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: This dream anthology has pep, humor, surrealism, and cool to spare, all presented in the confines of a brownstone apartment.
Promo trailer for a London screening of Dreams that Money Can Buy (1947)
COMMENTS: It is the intersection of Capitalism and Surrealism. It is the business office where subconsciousness is the sole agenda. It is where receipts are signed for accessing the inscape. It is wires and tricks and nightclub ballads performed by ardent mannequins. It is counseling and robbery with a wry smile. It is an anthological collaboration between Max Ernst, Fernand Léger, Man Ray, Alexander Calder, with John Cage and Darius Milhaud composing from the sidelines. It is Dreams That Money Can Buy, “written and designed” by Hans Richter: Dadaist, filmmaker, and all around avant-gardian of the incorporeal.
It is also everyman Joe (Jack Bittner), sitting through the “party of the first part” chanting of a trio of lawyers and leasers, stamping and cycling paperwork in growing cacophony of ritual jargon. The process gives Joe a place to stay, and work: but what work? He’s a self-appointed bum—but a bum who can see inside himself. “Why, that makes you an artist!” the glibly rhyming narrator intones, and that’s more than most can claim. This artist needs dough, and there’s no better way to get it than dreams-for-cash, ’cause everybody dreams.
Between Joe’s humble beginnings as a down-at-the-heel salesman and his vibrant crash into melancholy color-bursts, Richter showcases his artist buddies, as dream logic takes over the narrative. Client one, a boring banker (both with a capital “B”), seeks capital “R” romance, and finds his desire in Max Ernst’s opening short film. Smoke, lace, stairs, sashes, and transformation ensue. The Banker is pleased. Next, a young woman promoting all the causes under the sun (a particular favorite—and a poorly underserved group—being “Daughters of American Grandfathers”) enters Bittner’s office. Just sign on the dotted line. Her pencil-sharpened mind elicits a tragic love song between two mannequins. And so on. Dreams throughout, of all tones, from enigmatic to wholly abstract, are bookended by Joe’s office encounters. Those themselves become increasingly irrational, until at last he’s pulled into his business machinations and brought along a circuitous path to his own doom.
Bearing in mind the pedigree of these creatives, the end result feels both surprisingly and expectedly irreverent. The title lays down the tone, however: against the odds, Richter et al. craft something of a paean to capitalism. Joe is a perfect blend of schmoe and entrepreneur, seeing a gap in the market and brazenly filling it to best of his abilities. Wheeling and dealing, demanding no specific payment for his talents, he is much like his film’s creators: Richter, Ernst, Ray, Duchamp, and so on, all aimed to provide the world something for which there was no physical—or logical—need. They are Joe: they just happen to eschew stuffy offices.
For Joe is an artist, but in the case of the artists involved in Dreams That Money Can Buy, the art in question questions everything, especially seriousness (Dadaism 101). A gangster client demands horse-race results in his dreams, but instead receives a gentle kaleidoscope of dames; the blind grandfather, the only one to sell to Joe instead of vice versa, is blessed with the most visually tactile imaginings of mobile sculptures and wiry circus performers; and Joe himself eventually turns blue, much to his chagrin, and is forced to explore a new place in society–no longer an everyman, but a blue guy, shunned and suspect.
This final dream, Richter’s story, descends depths and ascends heights (all from the one building used for the film, mind you), with Joe climbing a ladder whose rungs disappear both from below and above. The intensely effete narrator intones Joe’s psychological developments with growing fervor, as the dreamer’s grip on time and place diminishes: he is become a detached observer of all that was and will be of himself, seeing everything all at once as if in a transdimensional state of perfect awareness. The knife cuts, the rope untangles, and in a smash of pretentious imagery, our dream merchant disintegrates into beautiful color.
The weight of the last splash fuses with the smirking heartsickness of the closeout song, “I get the most peculiar feeling I’ve been dreaming of you,” to end on something wistfully whimsical. Something unclear, and half-remembered, but deeply satisfying. Something, indeed, you couldn’t dream to put price on.
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:
IMDB LINK: Dreams That Money Can Buy (1947)
OTHER LINKS OF INTEREST:
Dreams That Money Can By “Catalog” — PDF scan of film program, providing credits and remarks from various contributors.
“Senses of Cinema”, Great Directors (Issue 49)— Profile of Hans Richter’s career as a filmmaker
Dreams That Money Can Buy – short synopsis of the entry for the film in the Routledge Encyclopedia of Modernism (full article available to subscribers)
LIST CANDIDATE: DREAMS THAT MONEY CAN BUY (1947) — This site’s original List Candidate review
HOME VIDEO INFO: If your dream is to buy a complete, clean version of this public domain film, you may have to wait. The Internet Archive has a clean copy, albeit incomplete—as do several YouTube channels. A burned DVD is available from Alpha Video (buy), which boasts ten more minutes than the options mentioned above, but it is still ten minutes shy of the 99-minute runtime listed on IMDb. Maybe a sweet centennial edition will spring forth from Criterion in a couple decades.
