An erotic meander through the nighttime streets of New York by a foreign young woman questioning her own feelings. “Peter Emanuel Goldman, filmmaker, composer, artist’s model, writer, was born in 1939 in New York, where he studied history, then cinema at Brown University. His lightning spurt of work ran from 1962 to 1968, when he abandoned cinema, only returning to moving images in 1983 to make a video essay … Goldman summed up his brief film decade: ‘For me and my friends back then, the 1960s was a time of despair and despondency. It was all coffees and cafe conversations, folk music, poetry, sexual starvation, irreconcilable conflicts, despair, lack of direction, chaos.’ … In a context in which cinema’s main analgesic function is to teach us to withstand the world, Goldman’s films turned out to be too honest, too sincere, too stark, too precise to be viewed head on” (Nicole Brenez).

Monsieur Fantômas is a unique surrealist homage to the criminal mastermind from the feuilletons of Souvestre and Allain. The film, subtitled “A Surrealist Film”, parodies both the church and the police, but above all, it is a poetic quest for love. Fantômas (played by Léon-Michel Smet, father of Johnny Hallyday) is pursued by three bumbling agents – a nod to Hergé’s Thompson and Thomson and Magritte’s anonymous figures. The film is steeped in absurdity: a priest in women’s underwear, nuns in masks, and Fantômas transforming into a double bass. A scene featuring a nun in a swimsuit walking past a one-way street sign reveals Moerman’s provocative humour. Yet his Fantômas is also a tragic hero, an Orpheus searching for Eurydice. Shot in dunes and monasteries, the film references Magritte’s painting Le Viol and the poetry of Paul Éluard. Though technically rough, the film embraces improvisation: the execution by cannon and the farandole of nuns dancing around a pole are pure poetry. Premiering in Brussels alongside Buñuel’s Un chien andalou, the film was considered a masterpiece by some (including Éluard). Today, it remains a fascinating curiosity, a “joyful and marvellous” (Dominique Païni) rebellion against conventional cinema.

Bruno Mestdagh

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