![\"richters01.jpg\"](\"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/09\/richters01.jpg\")
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It’s safe to say that I wouldn’t have paid much attention to illustrations from a toy catalogue from 1880 if I hadn’t recognised the pictures from their fleeting appearance in Jan \u0160vankmajer’s Jabberwocky<\/em><\/a> (1971). One sequence in \u0160vankmajer’s animated film has a battalion of toy soldiers emerging from the sleeves of a boy’s sailor suit. While the soldiers march around a table, a drawer opens and the wooden blocks within build themselves into a variety of architectural forms. Cut into this sequence are the pictures from Richter’s toy catalogues.<\/p>\n The latter have intrigued me ever since I spotted them in the film (the edits are typically brief) for their inadvertent Surrealism, a quality that may also have appealed to \u0160vankmajer. Most catalogues devoted to toy blocks would display their potential constructions in a neutral space; Richter’s catalogue shows the block constructions as life-size architectural creations in otherwise realistic settings. The engraved renderings are rather fine as well, which adds to their strange atmosphere. There’s a definite Escher quality to some of the plates, in the shapes of the buildings\u2014some of which resemble Escher’s famous fantasy constructions<\/a>\u2014and in the disparities of scale, a factor explored in this print<\/a>.<\/p>\n The Internet Archive has two Richter catalogues here<\/a> and here<\/a>, both of which contain illustrations seen in \u0160vankmajer’s film. Wikipedia has a short history of the blocks<\/a> which notes that they also appear in \u0160vankmajer’s Alice<\/em> (1988).<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Previously on { feuilleton } It’s safe to say that I wouldn’t have paid much attention to illustrations from a toy catalogue from 1880 if I hadn’t recognised the pictures from their fleeting appearance in Jan \u0160vankmajer’s Jabberwocky (1971). One sequence in \u0160vankmajer’s animated film has a battalion of toy soldiers emerging from the sleeves of a boy’s sailor suit. … Continue reading “Richter’s “Anchor Blocks””<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[52,8,4,7,18],"tags":[375,216,3527],"class_list":["post-18444","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-animation","category-architecture","category-design","category-film","category-surrealism","tag-jan-svankmajer","tag-mc-escher","tag-vaclav-svankmajer"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pq7rV-4Nu","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18444","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=18444"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18444\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18444"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18444"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18444"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"richters02.jpg\"](\"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/09\/richters02.jpg\")
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\n\u2022 Jan \u0160vankmajer, Director<\/a>
\n\u2022 Don Juan, a film by Jan \u0160vankmajer<\/a>
\n\u2022 The Pendulum, the Pit and Hope<\/a>
\n\u2022 Two sides of Li\u0161ka<\/a>
\n\u2022 The Torchbearer by V\u00e1clav \u0160vankmajer<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"