Now THIS is what I call a blurb:
When an unknown black poodle inexplicably explodes in philosophy professor Timothy Chesterton-Brown's back yard - paralyzing the professor and killing his guest, a graduate student diligently interviewing friends of a deceased literary master to learn the color of the Great Man's eyes - we enter the mystery of the sardine. It is a mystery whose unwitting detectives are not trench-coated sleuths but, rather, include a twelve-year-old Oxonian mathematician named Ian, author of Euclid Was an Ass; his mother, Miss Prentice, a palmist; his beloved, Emma, daughter of the professor, for whom he names his most important postulate; a bureaucrat, Joseph Kszak, dubbed the Minister of Imponderabilia; the Great Man's widow and his secretary, affectionately known as the Dancing Ladies; and Lady Cooper, the aging daughter of a famous Polish general. The clues they unearth - drawing on philosophical logic, the occult, intuition, and everything in between - lead them far from the tiny sea-coast town with the exploding poodle: we find them hunting in Majorca, Rome, Warsaw, and London. The solution ultimately lies, however, at the furthest and most magical reaches of reason, which can only be deduced by this mystery's most visionary detectives.
Sorry to drop all that on you at once, but that's the blurb of what sounds like the greatest novel ever written, and I just happened to find it at an estate sale in a pristine, hardback First Edition for $2. It's called The Mystery of the Sardine, and its author, Stefan Themerson, was not only a novelist but also a philosopher and composer (at least of the 2-act opera St. Francis and the Wolf of Gubbio, or Brother Francis' Lamb Chops (!)). He also made experimental short films in the 30's and 40's with his wife Franciszka, who was herself a painter, illustrator and stage designer. Oh, and Stefan also did the illustrated initials to the chapters of one of the greatest books ever written, Raymond Queneau's Exercises in Style:
Obviously the Themersons are too amazing to ignore, and ignore I shalln't. I obviously can't review the book here, but there's a sad catch to this article - all but three of the short films are lost, which for somebody used to a world where any movie can be seen by anybody is worse than if they never existed, because at least then I wouldn't be angry that they disappeared.* There are three left: Przygoda czlowieka poczciwego (The Adventures of a Good Citizen), Calling Mr. Smith from 1942 and The Eye & the Ear from 1945. Fine souls have uploaded all three to YouTube and we're knocking down all of 'em today.
An "irrational humoresque", The Adventures of a Good Citizen starts with a couple intertitles I can't read. Then official looking people look right and left as per signs that flash on the screen, then walk right and left through mirror trickery. This sets the stage for blitz-speed comic setpieces of men answering the phone and then backing up through paper walkways, as well as men trying to move a large mirrored bureau. If you were thinking that sounded like a film that featured a lot of footage of people in reverse you'd be right. Among those who move forward are two teams of protesters that appear to be walking into each other as per the Eisenstein 180-degree rule. Then the people moving the mirror find themselves stopped in the woods and have altogether too much fun with it. I suspect you might have altogether too much fun with this short, especially considering the overcaffeinated music by Stefan Kiesliewski. What I'm saying is that everybody who reads my blog is already irrational.
Made after the Themersons settled in England, Calling Mr. Smith begins by opening Encyclopedia Brittanica to set the theme - art as a reflection of the soul of the age, rattling off the artistic "peaks" of various European cultures. Then church organs and sculptures melt through trick photography. A swastika glides by and the narrator (presumably Franciszka) says that Nazism (as well as murder and atrocity) are the peak of German culture - and then the film splits, leaving a silhouetted fragment on the screen and the projectionist bumble-yelling. The projectionist is the Mr. Smith of the title, and we realize that Calling Mr. Smith is an anti-Nazi propaganda film, now a bit ironic as Joseph Goebbels was the Reich Minister of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda and helped pioneer the concept of propaganda in the 20th century. The Themerson's investment in anti-Nazism is the occupation and large-scale suppression of their Polish homeland and its people and Nazism's wide suppression of the arts, including much of Germany's artistic past (including the music of Bach) and Polish composers such as Chopin and Szymanowski, each composer illuminated through a glass darkly as distant, monochrome silhouettes of leaves, violins and children bend and break across the screen. While the Themerson's illustrate how the occupation of Poland has wreaked havoc in many ways, including showing a list of some 200 illustrious Polish professors who were sent to concentration camps, their accusation of Germany's suppression of the arts is an important one, as Hitler's stance on what kind of art was acceptable to the Reich was a very narrow one and was largely an excuse to suppress Jews by labeling their art as "degenerate". Gallery shows and concerts were mounted showcasing "degenerate" art and music, and many of these subjugated figures weren't given their just exposure until decades later. I normally don't like discussing propaganda films here but this one has a real artistic merit, using the device of still images passed over a skewed looking glass to great effect and utilizing a metafictional element in the use of a projectionist who doesn't want to screen the film we are currently watching. It's a haunting piece, capitalizing on distant sadness and personal neglect, and would make a heck of a double feature with Winsor McCay's The Sinking of the Lusitania as the most artistically valuable propaganda films of all time.
The Eye & the Ear is an attempt to create a visual experience equal to that of an auditory experience, chiefly that of listening to four orchestrally-accompanied songs from Slopiewnie by Karol Szymanowski, previously featured in Calling Mr. Smith and long regarded as one of the greatest Polish composers of all time. This film features the most animation of the three - while the previous two had featured momentary stop-motion animation The Eye & the Ear uses both stop-motion and traditional animation much more extensively, first to show falling leaves and growing branches, then later Art Deco geometry and score analysis. The visuals are extraordinary, utilizing collage, modern design and special photographic effects to great illustrative effect. Fantasia may have come out five years prior but not even Fantasia approached the modernist potential of this kind of music-illustration cinema. The four songs show a full range of psychological approaches to visualizing music, from fluid thematic representation to free-association collage, mathematical abstraction and finally a gripping subconscious simplicity. It's the best of the surviving Themerson films by far and a masterful cinematic tribute to the emotional and psychological power of modern Classical music.
If you're going to watch any of these watch The Eye & the Ear, but really we should be checking every attic and storage room in Poland and England for the rest of these dark beauties. The Themerson's were simply unstoppable and I'm really glad to have chanced upon their work. This article has been a long time coming and hopefully can act as a bit of a warm-up to my SIFF 2015 overview, or at least that dang belated article about Household Saints. The moral of this story is that $2 is never too high a price when dealing with genius.
~PNK
*Of course, my greatest sadness in cinema is over a movie that never came to be, Salvador Dali's collaboration with the Marx Brothers. Holy Shit. Without hyperbole, that would have been the greatest movie ever made.
Obviously the Themersons are too amazing to ignore, and ignore I shalln't. I obviously can't review the book here, but there's a sad catch to this article - all but three of the short films are lost, which for somebody used to a world where any movie can be seen by anybody is worse than if they never existed, because at least then I wouldn't be angry that they disappeared.* There are three left: Przygoda czlowieka poczciwego (The Adventures of a Good Citizen), Calling Mr. Smith from 1942 and The Eye & the Ear from 1945. Fine souls have uploaded all three to YouTube and we're knocking down all of 'em today.
An "irrational humoresque", The Adventures of a Good Citizen starts with a couple intertitles I can't read. Then official looking people look right and left as per signs that flash on the screen, then walk right and left through mirror trickery. This sets the stage for blitz-speed comic setpieces of men answering the phone and then backing up through paper walkways, as well as men trying to move a large mirrored bureau. If you were thinking that sounded like a film that featured a lot of footage of people in reverse you'd be right. Among those who move forward are two teams of protesters that appear to be walking into each other as per the Eisenstein 180-degree rule. Then the people moving the mirror find themselves stopped in the woods and have altogether too much fun with it. I suspect you might have altogether too much fun with this short, especially considering the overcaffeinated music by Stefan Kiesliewski. What I'm saying is that everybody who reads my blog is already irrational.
Made after the Themersons settled in England, Calling Mr. Smith begins by opening Encyclopedia Brittanica to set the theme - art as a reflection of the soul of the age, rattling off the artistic "peaks" of various European cultures. Then church organs and sculptures melt through trick photography. A swastika glides by and the narrator (presumably Franciszka) says that Nazism (as well as murder and atrocity) are the peak of German culture - and then the film splits, leaving a silhouetted fragment on the screen and the projectionist bumble-yelling. The projectionist is the Mr. Smith of the title, and we realize that Calling Mr. Smith is an anti-Nazi propaganda film, now a bit ironic as Joseph Goebbels was the Reich Minister of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda and helped pioneer the concept of propaganda in the 20th century. The Themerson's investment in anti-Nazism is the occupation and large-scale suppression of their Polish homeland and its people and Nazism's wide suppression of the arts, including much of Germany's artistic past (including the music of Bach) and Polish composers such as Chopin and Szymanowski, each composer illuminated through a glass darkly as distant, monochrome silhouettes of leaves, violins and children bend and break across the screen. While the Themerson's illustrate how the occupation of Poland has wreaked havoc in many ways, including showing a list of some 200 illustrious Polish professors who were sent to concentration camps, their accusation of Germany's suppression of the arts is an important one, as Hitler's stance on what kind of art was acceptable to the Reich was a very narrow one and was largely an excuse to suppress Jews by labeling their art as "degenerate". Gallery shows and concerts were mounted showcasing "degenerate" art and music, and many of these subjugated figures weren't given their just exposure until decades later. I normally don't like discussing propaganda films here but this one has a real artistic merit, using the device of still images passed over a skewed looking glass to great effect and utilizing a metafictional element in the use of a projectionist who doesn't want to screen the film we are currently watching. It's a haunting piece, capitalizing on distant sadness and personal neglect, and would make a heck of a double feature with Winsor McCay's The Sinking of the Lusitania as the most artistically valuable propaganda films of all time.
If you're going to watch any of these watch The Eye & the Ear, but really we should be checking every attic and storage room in Poland and England for the rest of these dark beauties. The Themerson's were simply unstoppable and I'm really glad to have chanced upon their work. This article has been a long time coming and hopefully can act as a bit of a warm-up to my SIFF 2015 overview, or at least that dang belated article about Household Saints. The moral of this story is that $2 is never too high a price when dealing with genius.
~PNK
*Of course, my greatest sadness in cinema is over a movie that never came to be, Salvador Dali's collaboration with the Marx Brothers. Holy Shit. Without hyperbole, that would have been the greatest movie ever made.
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