In the space of four short films, Franciszka (1907-1988) and Stefan Themerson (1910-1988) straddled both Polish and British avant-gardes, of the interwar and immediate post-war periods. A study in synesthesia, anti-fascist agitprop, an exercise in absurdity, and film translation of futurist poetry, constitute a body of work that is incomplete, as it is essential. Born in Poland of Jewish descent, Franciszka and Stefan excelled in the plastic arts and poetry respectively. During the 1930s, they became champions of avant-garde cinema, organizing film screenings of works from the United Kingdom, France and Germany, advocating the idea of a poetic cinema envisaged by the Polish modernist Karol Irzykowski, while making their own works. Derived in part from photograms and stop motion photography, for decades it seemed that only one of the Themersons’ pre-war Polish shorts, Przygoda Człowieka Poczciwego, had survived. Recently, an incomplete print of arguably their key Polish work has come to light: Europa, a literal, visual adaptation of an angry avant-garde poem by Anatol Stern, lamenting both poverty and war. When it came to making his career defining short, Two Men and a Wardrobe (1958), Roman Polanski quoted the key image from the Themersons’ Przygoda Człowieka Poczciwego. Relocated in the United Kingdom, the Themersons utilized both experimentation and abstraction in a wartime lament for Nazi atrocities, Calling Mr. Smith, printed on the uniquely pointillistic Dufaycolor process. Their last filmic experiment, The Eye and the Ear, reconciles animations derived from photograms in an essay on audio-visual analogues – an opening chapter on an as yet uncharted cinematic horizon. Together, these four works, to invoke the turn of phrase coined by Stefan Themerson in his essay on the possibilities of a cinema that eschewed both conventional storytelling and the tyranny of naturalistic cinematic representation, are possessed by a singular urge to create visions.

Daniel Bird