Stephan & Franciszka Themerson
Lightbox, Tate Britain, London
While the idea of experimental films is likely to elicit responses ranging from eager anticipation to ennui and confusion, artists who question assumptions about the nature of the medium and how it can be an expressive art form in its own right can produce highly rewarding work. Such is the case with the three short films by Stephan and Franciszka Themerson, which are currently showing at Lightbox, a space dedicated to artists’ film and video – one of the more exciting excursions into the realm of the experimental – at Tate Britain.
While the three films can hardly be called new in that they were made in the 1930s and early 1940s, they were pioneers in exploring the possibilities of the way film can be used to conjure up magical and beguiling effects at a time before such complex technologies as computer generated imaging.
Husband and wife team Stephan and Franciszka Themerson – he Polish, she English – met in Warsaw in the late 1920s and were married in 1931. Working in close collaboration, they had a significant influence on the art and philosophy of the avant garde of Eastern Europe during the 1930s, and are among the most important experimental film-makers in pre-war Poland. With the threat of war and the rise of Hitler, they moved to Paris in 1938 before escaping to London. In Poland, they produced five films, of which the only one to survive, The Adventures of a Good Citizen, is now on show. The old and badly battered black-and-white print, flickering and jerky, is a complex cinematic collage. It makes use of live action transformed by technical and other forms of manipulation such as abstract effects painted directly on the film to create a narrative that suggests a busy, almost frenetic life, which may be either imagined or experienced.
In London, the Themersons produced work for the film unit of the Polish Ministry of Information and Documentation, two of which have survived. Calling Mr Smith is a cleverly-conceived rallying call to alert the British public to Nazi atrocities in Europe. Combinations of photographs and fragments of film footage shot as war documentary appear accompanied by flashes of coloured lights that suggest genuine and heartfelt loss. Understated but persistent, the anti-Nazi theme makes use of musical fragments of pieces from Chopin, Bach and Szymanowski that are dramatically contrasted with the infamous and chilling anthem of Hitler’s legions, the Horst Wessel Lied.
The third and, in many ways, the most adventurous film, The Eye and the Ear, is a quest for a purely filmic language that seeks to produce a visual equivalent to music. In some parts, the sounds of an instrument are symbolised by an abstract geometrical shape, which, as the music is played, changes and merges in abstract formation without ever attempting to be a formal representation. Other sections make use of mesmerising visual effects, such as the ripples created by dropping small clay balls into water and the passing of light beams through a special lens in which the rhythm of the waves and sound seem to be one.
The Themersons’ treatment of the medium of film as a tool – whether for the presentation of ideas, for commentary on contemporary society or for the analysis of musical structure – was part of a pioneering spirit that pushed at boundaries, questioned assumptions and helped feed the surge of post-war cultural renewal.
Emmanuel Cooper
Stephan & Franciszka Themerson continues until June 28
