Calling the Eye and the Ear - the short films of Stefan and Franciszka Themerson

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.

The Voice in the Pendulum in the Wall: THE NINTH GUEST (1934)

If there's one genre the 20's and 30's couldn't get enough of it was the "Old Dark House" thriller: a group of varied Mrs. Odds and Mr. Ends trapped in a spooky mansion with danger lurking in shadows and secret doorways, but not too dangerous to keep the audience from laughing.  These were often based on popular stage plays, the most notable example being The Cat and The Canary, which was remade a number of times after it's successful 1927 adaptation starring Laura La Plante.  Though I think the most interesting entry in the genre (that I've seen) is James Whale's The Old Dark House, which turns the ODH conventions on their head and maintains a quirkily dark sense of humor, The Ninth Guest isn't too shabby by comparison.  Based on a best-selling novel, The Invisible Host by Gwen Bristow, and made by studio workhorses with studio casting, The Ninth Guest...actually, let's take a look at that novel for just a seco-WHOA!

Ho-Lee-Krap, is that an awesome cover.  Actually, I think the novel does a much better job of setting the mood for the film than the it's poster, as it covers the main elements: terror among modern style and technology, rather than swooners at midnight (though the clock is a part of things).  Let's get the party started.

A flurry of telegrams are sent to eight people, all wealthy, powerful figures in business, academia, and high society.  Each is an invitation to a party in their honor, each telegram saying that the receiver is the sole celebree, as if the guests wouldn't be bothered with a party unless they were the main event.  Though the host is unknown, they all gather at a Penthouse apartment out of curiosity, and possibly out of their interlocked past.  The Penthouse is not only up to the minute in Deco decor, it's quite high tech, with an electric iron gate, a timeclock in the kitchen, and an embedded wall clock, it's pendulum a rod seen only through a curved slit a few feet below the hands.  Movies from this era often used lavish homes as settings, using a fantasy of the super wealthy as an escape from the Great Depression, though I'm not sure why anybody would aspire to be any of the guests at this particular function.  One guest appears in an encrusted dress that glitters like a disco ball, but her efforts to impress may have been wasted; everyone attending burns a loathing torch for each other, enemies made by years of competition and treachery.

No one is certain why they're there; if they can't stand one another why assemble them for drinks?  The butler, his bumbling assistant, and the chef have all been given specific instructions and monitor the progress of the evening with some fear.  As soon as a few guests attempt to leave, the first fright occurs: the radio starts talking to them, under the moniker WITS.  The eight have been gathered to play a game, "a game of death."  The phone lines have been cut, and the front gate has been electrified.  The voice claims to be someone they all know; he also knows their secrets and weaknesses.  For those who don't want to play, the voice offers a bottle of poison on the mantle.  It also claims that before 11:00, the most reprehensible of them will die.  It tells them to use a provided key to look behind a nearby door; they find a corpse and electrician's tape.  Glitter girl makes a break for the gate and is stopped before reaching it, but a vase falls against it and shoots sparks all around (quite odd for ceramic, really).  They take the staff hostage and split up, offering a montage of shadows, doorknobs, feet on stairs, and illuminating light fixtures, a fine piece of direction.

One man, a businessman whose desk was surrounded by chic lamps and stock charts, strays back into the living room and tries to speak with the radio, offering $50,000 for his life (as he thinks himself the worst of the lot, and it's already ten to 11).  We get an interesting shot from inside the radio, and his face is one of genuine worry.  The radio doesn't have to answer him, though; he pours everybody drinks, each one possibly spiked with the poison.  The radio announces that his death is part of the plan, and that they have met the ninth guest: Death.  He didn't even have to drink to die; he merely cut his finger on the poisoned bottle cap.  With one death down the hatch, our host announces that they are to play with two sides: them on one and him on the other, "with Death as the referee."


I don't want to spoil the rest for you, because the ride is pretty suspenseful, holding up remarkably well after 80 years.  Unlike a lot of thrillers of this era, The Ninth Guest is almost totally devoid of comic relief*.  Even though we know next to nothing about the victims the actors know who they are, each character offering enough contrast from one another to create a crackling, tense dynamic (much like the cast of John Carpenter's The Thing).  What drives each of them is their secret crime, and they are all interesting and shameful; the voice says of a society woman who offs herself via cocktail, "She is unworthy of her company."  The "game" is a relentless, measured act of high revenge, and the terror comes not only from the threat of death but also the threat of being exposed.  Image is so important to these upper crust leeches that living with the truth is worse than death.  And it's interesting for the viewers to find themselves siding with characters they would cross the street to avoid in real life.  Each of the deaths is taken seriously, and the various snuffs thuds in the viewer's psyche.  One of my favorites is a character who gets shot in the dark: when light returns the camera tracks in on his frozen face, only backing away when he slumps to the floor.  For a movie that thinks little of its subjects it certainly knows how to make the viewer cringe at their passing.

I said before that The Ninth Guest was the work of studio workhorses, and that's not untrue, but they've done some really terrific work in embellishing this thriller for the screen.  The Penthouse set is spectacular, with a heap of shadows playing off an engaging and sneaky floor plan.  In addition to a disembodied hand made of marble, there are a number of masks on the walls, and the sliding front door has a gargoyle-like visage across it, reminiscent of a mandala in its complexity.  At one point the ceiling lights in the living room go out and we see that the clock and its pendulum are backlit, the pendulum slit an ominous smile.  Guest has a real fascination with its hidden technology, and the movie even opens with a montage of the telegram system (featuring women wearing clip-on phone transmitters).  Much in the fashion of early sound films there is no background music aside from the opening and closing credits, which adds considerably to the film's palpable dread.  The camera work is fluid and observant, with a lot of deft tracking and some interesting tricks that hint at the host's presence without giving it away.  I know this kind of cinematography is par for the course in 30's movies, but it really works in Guest's favor.


And once all is revealed, the finale is really pretty tragic.  However, the downer ending is met by peppy end credits music, a funny quirk of these movies (like Island of Lost Souls, chasing burning rubble with a theme that could fit a Three Stooges short).  That said, The Ninth Guest is a fast-moving, suspenseful thriller that got a lot of work put into it for standard studio fare, holding up to this day.  It's only 65 minutes long and in public domain, so you should just go ahead and download the sucker: http://archive.org/details/TheNinthGuest


~PNK

*One of the most painful elements in genre movies from this period is annoying comic relief, and if you think characters like Jar Jar Binks are irritating you haven't even BEGUN to see annoyance.  One of the most exciting and creative Old Dark House movies is The Bat Whispers, shot in an experimental widescreen format and featuring some of the most breathtaking camera work I've seen in an old movie.  Unfortunately the film is saddled with the most horrible, screeching Irish maid stereotype I've ever seen, and she gets about 40 minutes of ear-raping screen time.  Even Dracula had two comic relief staff members at the loony bin, and the rediscovered Karloff movie The Ghoul had one, too.  I really wanted to love The Bat Whispers but that maid ruined it.  Jeesh.