The Films of Stefan and Franciszka Themerson

[MichaelB]

I picked this new Lux/CCA Warsaw DVD up at last night's British Library lecture on the Themersons - a Polish couple who dabbled in just about every artform going (visual art, literature, music, film) and who were major figures in the Polish, French and British avant-gardes (they settled permanently in London from the early 1940s).

With a total running time of 30 minutes, it's a somewhat skimpy package - mitigated by the fact that it contains their complete surviving film output: sadly, all but one of their Polish films were lost during World War II. The exception is The Adventures of a Good Citizen (1937), a mordantly funny live-action short about a man who decides to start walking backwards, and the impact this has on his fellow man. Roman Polanski ripped off one of the central motifs - two men carrying a wardrobe - for his famous 1958 short.

The other two films were made in Britain in the mid-1940s. Calling Mr Smith (1943) is a rather hectoring piece of propaganda aiming to convince the unseen Mr Smith about the cultural damage Germany has been wreaking across Europe. But visually it's fascinating, using a variety of animated techniques to create a powerful visual impression of German culture from Bach to Hitler.

But my favourite film was The Eye and the Ear (1944), four songs by Karol Szymanowski given an abstract illustration in a different style for each piece. It's strongly indebted to Oskar Fischinger and Norman McLaren, but with plenty of original touches of its own - I found the final section 'Wanda', consisting of cunningly assembled shots of ripples of water, to be absolutely enthralling.

Technically, the DVD is about as good as it's likely to get - I wasn't too enamoured of the yellow subtitles on The Adventure of a Good Citizen, but they can at least be switched off (and you don't really need them after a first viewing). The print of that film is the only surviving one, so it's a bit ropey in parts, but the two British films are in decent condition. I'm not sure if there was any digital restoration - I'm guessing not, given the likely budget. The sound isn't great, but I suspect this reflects the original. My only other niggle is that I wish The Eye and the Ear had been chapter-stopped, or at least skip-pointed, to allow instant access to its four parts.

The only extra is a hefty-looking book that initially seems as though it's going to give a typical MoC effort a run for its money - until you get halfway through and realise that the second half consists of the same again in Polish. Still, there's lots of good stuff here, including impressions of what the missing films must have been like.

I'm not sure if it's been formally released yet, as there's no mention of it on the Lux site - they're the publishers at the UK end. But their sister site Luxonline currently offers a free streaming copy of The Eye and the Ear here, so you can get a flavour.

[MichaelB]

Just to update my last post, Lux now offers this DVD for sale online.

Here's their shop.

[vogler]

Just to update my last post, Lux now offers this DVD for sale online.

Excellent, I'm definitely going to pick this up at some point. If only I had some spare cash. All these wonderful DVD releases that I can't afford to buy.

I agree with your assessment of these films. I like all three of them but The Eye and the Ear is a true classic of avant-garde film and quite beautiful. Whilst Calling Mr Smith is a propaganda piece, it does show how gifted creative film-makers are able to create something artistic even within the confines of such limited subject matter.