The Struggle for Form

Perspectives on Polish Avant-Garde Film, 1916–1989

Kamila Kuc, Michael O'Pray, Kamila Kuc, Michael O'Pray

• Publisher: WallFlower Press
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9780231850650
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

This is the first comprehensive English-language account of the Polish avant-garde film, from its beginnings in the early decades of the last century to the collapse of communism in 1989. Taking a broad understanding of avant-garde film, this collection includes writings on the pioneering work of the internationally-acclaimed Franciszka and Stefan Themerson; the Polish Futurists' (Jalu Kurek, Anatol Stern) engagement with film; the Thaw and animation (Jan Lenica and Walerian Borowczyk, Andrzej Pawlowski, Zbigniew Rybczynski); documentary (Natalia Brzozowska, Kazimierz Karabasz, Wojciech Wiszniewski), Polish émigré filmmakers (Roman Polanski, Jerzy Skolimowski, Andrzej Zulawski) as well as essays and documentation on the highly influential Film Form Workshop (Józef Robakowski, Ryszard Wasko, Wojciech Bruszewski). Including a mix of historical writings from early film magazines with commissioned essays, this book constitutes an important source on the rich, complex and diverse history of the Polish film avant-garde, which is presented from the perspective of both British (A. L. Rees, Jonathan Owen, Michael O'Pray) and Polish (Marcin Gizycki, Ryszard Kluszczynski, Kamila Kuc) authorities on the subject. This book is thus an indispensable introduction to the theories and practices of critically important avant-garde artists and filmmakers.

CHAPTER ONE

THE THEMERSONS AND THE POLISH AVANT-GARDE: WARSAW – PARIS – LONDON

INTRODUCTION TO THE REVISED VERSION

A.L. Rees

This essay was originally commissioned for the first issue of PIX journal (winter 1993/94) by its editor Ilona Halberstadt, a Polish-born, Oxford-educated film enthusiast and former academic, whose interests cross many fields: contemporary music, social and political philosophy, world cinema, the avant-gardes. PIX was an extraordinary venture, or adventure, in independent film publishing. Ilona’s boundless energy and tenacity somehow overcame a distinct lack of money to produce a stylish and beautifully designed journal full of unexpected artistic and intellectual conjunctions that reflected her wide and eclectic taste – for Bernardo Bertolucci and Patrick Keiller, for Viking Eggeling and Michelangelo Antonioni.

The first PIX featured a 60-page inner section – ‘Close-Up’ – wholly devoted to the films of Stefan and Franciszka Themerson. This contained original texts and documentation, a host of amazing photographs and letters from the Themerson Archive run by historians and curators Nicholas Wadley and Jasia Reichardt (Franciszka Themerson’s niece), and full documentation of all their films, whether lost or surviving. My task was to put them into a wider international context of experimental cinema in the 1920s to the 1940s, when the Themersons made their films, and to give some idea of what else was going on in Polish avant-garde film culture at the time.

For the historical side, I entirely relied on the few scattered secondary sources I could find in English translation, since I know no Polish, and on the evidence of the available remaining films (very few, as it turned out). But there was some guidance. David Curtis and Deke Dusinberre had championed the Themersons’ films in the major survey ‘Film as Film’ at the Hayward Gallery in 1979, and the catalogue had information on some very obscure but fascinating filmmakers, like Kazimierz Podsadecki and Mieczysław Szczuka. Dusinberre’s pioneering catalogue article ‘The Other Avant-Gardes’ – on prewar film experiment in Britain, Poland and the Netherlands – benefitted from conversations with the Themersons themselves in their Maida Vale flat, an archipelago of modern art as well as a working studio space.

A few years later, the programmer at the London Film Makers’ Co-operative, Jo Comino, was also bitten by the Themerson bug. She got their films into LFMC distribution, fittingly enough since the Themersons had set up the first Film Co-operative in Poland in 1935, and wrote a back-page profile for the Monthly Film Bulletin in July 1983 of what she called their ‘multi-media career’. The tradition continues: the currently available DVD of the Themersons’ films is published by LUX, the LFMC’s successor.

What this meant was that the Themersons lived to see a revival of interest in their films, and indeed the whole of their prodigious creative work, with major exhibitions and screenings here and abroad. Stefan Themerson’s own extraordinary book on film – The Urge to Create Visions – bookends this era. Drafted between 1936 and 1947, it was eventually published in 1983. During this revivalist period in the mid-1980s, I showed and introduced the films on various occasions, and talked to the filmmakers several times. Polite, charming and helpful as my hosts always were, my well-meaning attempts to get details from them about the lost films, and their production, were like trying to pull teeth. They would much rather talk about their current work and ideas! At this time both were in their late seventies, and neither were in good health, but they determinedly kept working and publishing until their deaths (in 1988).

How did you make an experimental film in Poland in the 1930s? How did you get access to prints, to labs, to cameras? They made light of such problems. It wasn’t that difficult, if you wanted to get things done. How did they get away with the frontal nude shot in Europa? Well, Stefan took the film to the censorship board, where it was viewed by the panel, some in military uniform. So what happened? Nothing, said Mr Themerson. He was too young and shy to mention it (he was twenty-two) and they were too embarrassed to comment on it, so they just passed the film, and that was that.

In fact, as revealed in a letter to his friend the film director Aleksander Ford, written from London in October 1945, and published in PIX 1, nothing was easy. Looking back at their early days, Stefan Themerson wrote:

When I think of our youthful years with film, I am reminded of the struggle for bits of film stock; for prediluvian cameras; for work benches cobbled together from odd sticks; for thousands of bits of paper from customs and the censor, which one had to get, come what may, just to see the avant-garde films from the West from which we had been isolated by a fortified wall.

Now he is ‘overwhelmed by feelings of friendly envy’ for the new avant-gardes to come, who will realise their creative ideas and will ‘find in their own hand the apparatus they need for this art’. That, certainly, has come true.

By the time I wrote the essay that follows, both Themersons were dead and I could no longer ply them with questions they didn’t want to bother with, although I am very sure that in their lifetime they were pleased that younger filmmakers and exhibitors were so eager about these works of their own youth. I had a motley collection of catalogues and programme notes to work with, which contained the little I was able to glean about such exciting (and still unknown in the UK) critics and writers of the early Polish avant-garde as Karol Irzykowski and Stefania Zahorska, with a few translated citations from their work. These were too fragmentary and even scrappy for me to think of footnoting (and PIX, which was not an academic journal, had few footnotes anyway).

My main sources were Mr Themerson’s own writings, especially the rich harvest of data and ideas in The Urge to Create Visions (Gaberbocchus/De Harmonie, Amsterdam, 1983); the facsimile edition in English of Anatol Stern’s poem ‘Europa’ (1929), with information and notes about the 1932 film (Gaberbocchus, London, 1962); the essays by Dusinberre and Jo Comino noted above; and the catalogue Stefan i Franciszka Themerson – Visual Researches, a wonderful exhibition catalogue of their films (Muzeum Sztuki, Łódź, 1982) with essays by Urszula Czartoryska and Janusz Zagrodzki.

For background and detail about abstract art, film and Constructivism in pre-war Poland, I used the catalogue Constructivism in Poland 1923 to 1936, edited by Hilary Gresty and Jeremy Lewison (Muzeum Sztuki, Łódź; Kettle’s Yard Gallery, Cambridge, 1984). Also invaluable was the catalogue Constructivism in Poland 1923–1936: BLOK, Praesens, a.r., prepared and edited by the Muzeum Sztuki, Łódź; the exhibition shown in 1973 at Museum Folkwang, Essen and Rijksmuseum Kröller-Müller Otterlo. All the Muzeum Sztuki publications noted here were introduced by its Director, Ryszard Stanisławski, and contain contributions by Janusz Zagrodzki. I belatedly and gratefully acknowledge these and other scholars who I pillaged while writing my own essay. I have made a few minor changes and corrections, but otherwise it appears as published in PIX after Ilona tore into the first and later drafts and – as the best of editors – showed me how to try to improve it. For her advice, and knowledge, I am still grateful.

THE THEMERSONS AND THE POLISH AVANT-GARDE: WARSAW – PARIS – LONDON

A.L. Rees

Polish artists between the two world wars shared a passion for the new art of cinema with such early – and diverse – modernists as Man Ray and Fernand Léger, who made films themselves, and those like Picasso, Malevich and Heartfield, who planned to do so. Among the prime movers for a Polish avant-garde cinema were members of the Constructivist movement. Like its sister groups in the Soviet Union, Holland and Germany, Polish Constructivism was both rationalistic – in its search for aesthetic purity – and socially utopian, in its faith that machine-age functionalism could build a new cultural order in the aftermath of world war. The first art movement to unambiguously embrace the mass media and the modern age, Constructivism saw art as a unified force field, in which the classic arts of painting, sculpture and architecture (purged of realism, romance and ornament) were linked with craft tradition and the new arts of photography, montage, design and cinema.

The young Polish artist Teresa Żarnower wrote as a Constructivist in 1923 that ‘the artist has the broadest scope for expression in the cinema, where elements of the individual branches of art may be combined,…enhanced by the perfection of technical methods’. As was common in this period, the dream of a new cinema came before the reality. Although Żarnower’s artistic collaborator Mieczysław Szczuka began work on abstract films only two years after her statement on cinema, they were unfinished by his early death in 1927. The fulfilment of the Constructivist vision of film only came in the 1930s, just as the ‘Cubist Cinema’ mooted by French artists around 1912 had to wait a decade before the finance and the technology were available for such films as Léger’s Ballet mécanique. But by the 1930s, Polish Constructivism was no longer at the forefront of art as a single voice, having split into factions. Rising militarism and fascism in Europe and dwindling prospects for utopia also battered the principle of hope embodied by the movement. Poland was itself ruled by a general, and soon had Hitler on one side of the border and Stalin on the other.

In this apparently grim climate, the young Themersons – just out of their teens – made the first Polish abstract films, and with wit and humour pursued the vision of film heralded by their older acquaintances, themselves also only in their twenties, the Constructivists Szczuka and Żarnower. In the case of the Themersons’ film Europa (1932), these near-contemporary predecessors were honoured in letter as well as spirit, since the film partly stemmed from their own design and graphics.

In complex ways, the Constructivist legacy was passed to a new generation of experimentalists in the 1930s. Like France, where such writers as Louis Aragon, Maurice Raynal and Guillaume Apollinaire were amongst the first to support the new cinema, so too did Poland produce a number of important critics to promote non-narrative film. As early as 1913, Karol Irzykowski had attacked the failure of film drama to construct an imaginative cinema free of theatrical conventions. He continued as a voice of the avant-garde throughout the 1920s and 1930s, publishing his influential book The Tenth Muse in 1924, the same year as the first of Breton’s Surrealist manifestos.

Despite the enthusiasm of earlier Polish Constructivists for film, the Polish avant-garde largely skipped the phase of graphic abstraction that led to the early films of Eggeling, Richter and Ruttmann in Germany, which the last two had, in any case, abandoned around 1926–27 for the first lyrical documentaries. Reviewing the situation in 1928, the critic Stefania Zahorska argued that graphic cinema should be superseded by films that abstracted the texture and light of the objective reality caught by the camera-eye, and edited by montage methods derived from musical form. She voiced a concept of photogenic filmmaking that had been eloquently promoted in France by the writings of the Polish émigré director Jean Epstein, as well as by Man Ray and Henri Chomette. Zahorska was writing in advance of the first flowering of the Polish experimental cinema, but she signalled the direction it was to take: a mixture of poetics, montage and documentary. Like Irzykowski and Jerzy Toeplitz, she supported the new filmmaking throughout the pre-war period.

The period between 1930 and 1934 was formative for the Themersons. In contrast to Constructivism, characterised by a formal bias, it was characterised, in the phrase of Karol Irzykowski, by ‘the search for content’, and parallel slogans were also promoted by Hans Richter in Germany as the hopeful 1920s dwindled into the harsher 1930s. Irzykowski now argued that artists and filmmakers faced pressing problems of social reality and should take their subject matter from anti-fascism, anti-authoritarianism, the needs of mass audiences, the critique of visual conventions and clichés, and the growing struggle for women’s rights. Artists were exhorted to mix new cinematic techniques with overtly social statements, blending poetry and polemics.

The Constructivist era and its aftermath is bridged by the prolific Mieczysław Szczuka, a pioneer filmmaker who died in 1927, in a climbing accident, aged twenty-nine. Szczuka’s best-known work is in the theory of architecture – but he was protean and active in design, photomontage and graphics (coincidentally, Stefan Themerson, when making his first film, was still an architecture student). A vigorous debater in the complex stages of later Constructivism, Szczuka was a member of the group which invited Mayakovsky to visit Poland, and as a leftist radical, though not a Party member, he was also a graphic designer for Polish Communist publications, while also nevertheless designing advertisements.

Szczuka was a fierce defender of functionalist design and held that the category of art would disappear within a commitment to social practice. His essays attack purist definitions of art, the issue over which the main Constructivist group BLOK split in 1926, and which led to the exit of the painters and founders of the group Katarzyna Kobro and Władysław Strzemiński. (They had studied in the Free Studios in Moscow in 1918–1919 and worked with Malevich in Vitebsk. But even as purists they showed an interest in social activity typical of the Polish avant-garde: Malevich when visiting his homeland was criticised by his disciples for metaphysical traces in his theory of art; and in 1932 they persuaded the socialist council of the industrial city of Łódź to support one of the first museums of modern art, the still-functioning Muzeum Sztuki.) Szczuka agreed with Tatlin’s Productivist group in Russia and the Bauhaus school in Germany that artists should collaborate with factories to produce strictly utilitarian objects.

But while Szczuka was arguing for a strict functionalism in design, he was also working on ideas for abstract films. In 1924, BLOK published his article ‘Essential Elements for an Abstract Film’, accompanied by a diagram of geometrical shapes and forms on a filmstrip – a graphic notation rather than anything that could be actually shot, like many outline plans of the period. Szczuka notes: ‘Movement as change in place; the coming and going, but not changing, of geometrical forms, the disintegration or construction of forms’. A mini-scenario goes on to refer to colour, brightness, direction, interplay of shape, tempo, harmony and pauses.

The film was eventually drawn out on long rolls of paper, according to Stefan Themerson, who saw them in Szczuka’s studio after the artist’s death. The impulse for the film was probably related to the work of the ex-Dadaist Viking Eggeling, who had begun using the ‘Chinese scroll’ method in Zurich around 1919, later moving to Berlin, where he died in 1925 after completing his surviving project, Diagonal Symphony. Szczuka could have found details of Eggeling’s films in the international art press (e.g. De Stijl), but could also have learnt of them from his friend Henryk Berlewi, recently returned from Germany, where he had belonged to the radical November Group in 1921–23. Berlewi too was experimenting with light-play as well as abstract paintings that gave the illusion of pulsating, and had reviewed his friend Eggeling’s work in the journal Albatross.

The following year, 1925, Szczuka began the more adventurous film He Killed, You Killed, I Killed. The words of the title were to be shown and per-mutated in different typefaces and intensities, and evidently it aimed to elicit an emotive and physical response through its wordplay. Here abstraction now passes through language, the word doubling as a visual sign in the montage structure. As with the earlier abstract film, it is not known how far Szczuka got with it before his death. The only comparable semiotic film of the period is Duchamp’s Anemic Cinema (1926), with its revolving spirals and scatological puns, or more distantly Man Ray’s use of allusive titles in L’Etoile de mer (1928). Szczuka’s second film predates the semiotic cinema of the structuralist 1970s by more than forty years.

Szczuka was to leave another legacy to the avant-garde cinema, in contrast to these lost and certainly uncompleted films, in the designs he prepared with Teresa Żarnower for the publication of the Futurist poem ‘Europa’, by the young socialist writer Anatol Stern. This project was to pass through many interlinked media and variations. Published in 1929, two years after Szczuka’s death, the poem is a strident attack on the destructive militarism of European capitalism. In a later tribute, Stern commented on its experimental typography and collaged illustrations:

Szczuka shows in two of his images the two faces of modern art. Chaplin bursting into sardonic laughter before the European spectacle he contemplates and Petrarch, crowned with laurels, among a thousand others, turning his back on the continent drowned in a sea of blond. Szczuka saw only the two extremes; he abhorred the debauchery of nuances.

In the words of another advocate of collage as a device in art, Walter Benjamin, the poem and its design imply that ‘every document of civilization is also a document of barbarism’.

During an era rich in collaboration, it is interesting that Stern too treats the images of ‘Europa’ as equal in meaning to his own text. His stress on Szczuka’s thou...

Table of contents

• Cover 
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents 
• Acknowledgments
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction
• 1. The Themersons and the Polish Avant-Garde: Warsaw – Paris – London
• 2. ‘The Inexpressible Unearthly Beauty of the Cinematograph’: The Impact of Polish Futurism on the First Polish Avant-Garde Films
• Excerpts from the ‘Archives’ of the Polish Avant-Garde
• 3. The Search for a ‘More Spacious Form’: Experimental Trends in Polish Documentary (1945–1989)
• 4. Avant-Garde and the Thaw: Experimentation in Polish Cinema of the 1950s and 1960s
• 5. Avant-Garde Exploits: The Cultural Highs and Lows of Polish Émigré Cinema
• 6. The Mechanical Imagination – Creativity of Machines: Film Form Workshop 1970–1977
• 7. The 1980s: From Specificity to the New Tradition – Avant-Garde Film and Video art in Poland
• Film Form Workshop: Manifesto and Artists’ Statements
• 8. A Rebellion à la polonaise
• Bibliography
• Filmography
• Index of Names