Published to coincide with the Pompidou Centre\'s major Dada exhibition. Features Rhythmus 21 by Hans Richter, Symphonie Diagonale by Viking Eggeling, La Retour a la Raison by Man Ray, Entr\'acte by René Clair and Francis Picabia, Le Ballet Mecanique by FPublished to coincide with the Pompidou Centre's major Dada exhibition.
Features Rhythmus 21 by Hans Richter, Symphonie Diagonale by Viking
Eggeling, La Retour a la Raison by Man Ray, Entr'acte by René Clair and
Francis Picabia, Le Ballet Mecanique by Fernand Léger and Dudley
Murphy, Fimstudie by Hans Richter, Emak Bakia by Man Ray and Ghosts
Before Breakfast by Hans Richter.

In a late text, written in 1961, Hans Richter sketched a portrait of Dadaist cinema (1) in which he included three of his own films: Rythmus 21 (1921), Filmstudie (1926) & Vormittagspuk (Ghosts before breakfast, 1927) as well as Viktor Eggeling's Symphonie diagonale (1921), Man Ray's Retour a la raison (1924) & Emak Bakia (1926), Rene Clair & Francis Picabia's Entr'Acte (1924) &  Fernand Leger & Dudley Andrew's Ballet Mechanique (1924) but, curiously, not Marcel Duchamp's Anemic Cinema. What was it that provoked Richter to unite these films (almost all completed after the disbanding of the Surrealist movement in 1922; all from different countries - Switzerland, France, Germany; all formally & stylistically different) under the Dadaist flag? What links the graphic essays of Eggeling & Richter to the photographic experiments of Man Ray, or Clair & Picabia's anarchic & iconographic provocations to the rhythmic poetry of Leger & Dudley Andrews? Given the absence of a unifying Dada stategy & the rejection of any possible general principle - theoretical or otherwise (2) - there is nonetheless a thread that runs through Dada: the deconstruction of the subject or, more precisely (to use an expression coined by Richter in his 1961 text), the Hunting of the Subject; subject being understood as the logical subject of the action taking place, as well as the subject of the narrative (intrigue).