‘Reviews’ Archives
The Eye and the Ear
UK, 1945, black and white, 11 mins. Of Franciszka and Stefan Themerson's three surviving films, The Eye and the Ear is much the most successful, and one can only regret that their extensive interests in other fields precluded them making any more in a similar vein. As the title implies, and the explanatory intertitles explain in [...]
Calling Mr Smith
UK, 1944, black and white, 8 minsThe first of two films made by the husband-and-wife team of Franciszka and Stefan Themerson in Britain towards the end of World War II, Calling Mr Smith is a visually virtuosic, despairingly bleak piece of anti-Nazi propaganda that tries to open British audiences' eyes not merely to the physical destruction of [...]
The Adventure of a Good Citizen
Przygoda człowieka poczciwego Poland, 1937, black and white, 10 minsThe last of five films made by the husband-and-wife team of Franciszka and Stefan Themerson in their native Poland, The Adventure of a Good Citizen is the only one to have survived World War II - indeed, it's one of the few remaining examples of what by all accounts was a [...]
The Investigator
A nyomozó Hungary, 2008, colour, 110 minsBy some distance the most enjoyable new Hungarian film I've seen this year, Attila Gigor's feature debut owes a huge amount to traditional noir-styled murder mysteries, but gives all the familiar ingredients a genuinely original spin - while injecting plenty of deliciously dry black comedy into the [...]
Seclusion Near a Forest
Na samotě u lesa Czechoslovakia, 1976, colour, 93 minsFirst of all, some much-needed context. Seclusion Near a Forest (also known as A Cottage by the Wood, though the former title is closer to the original) was the second film that Jiří Menzel made after a five-year ban following the reception of Larks on a String (Skřivánci na niti, 1969), [...]
Sopot 1957
Poland, 1957, black and white, 16 minsBetween 1954 and 1956, Jerzy Hoffman and Edward Skórzewski issued a series of hard-hitting cinematic challenges to a Polish documentary movement that was only just beginning to emerge from the crushing impact of World War II and the more consciously stifling period of Stalinism that followed. Films like Are [...]
Night Train
Pociąg Poland, 1959, black and white, 93 minsBy the time Jerzy Kawalerowicz made his sixth feature in 1959, overnight trains had long been established as an ideal setting for scenarios of intrigue and suspense: Alfred Hitchcock in particular had very much made the genre his own. But although a fair amount of Night Train (also known as Baltic [...]
From Powiśle…
Z Powiśla... Poland, 1958, black and white, 10 minsAfter making short films at the Łódź Film School (among them Day In Day Out/Jak co dzień..., 1955) and collaborating with Władysław Ślesicki on Where the Devil Says Goodnight (Gdzie diabeł mówi dobranoc, 1956) and People from an Empty Zone (Ludzie z pustego obszaru, 1957), Kazimierz [...]
Place of Residence
Miejsce zamieszkania Poland, 1957, black and white, 16 mins Of all the "black series" documentaries presented on PWA's collection, Place of Residence is most explicitly indebted to the Socialist Realist tradition that dominated Polish cinema from the late 1940s to the mid 1950s. Taking its cue from wide-eyed celebrations such as Andrzej Munk's [...]
City on Islands
Miasto na wyspach Poland, 1958, black and white, 9 minsThe rebuilding of the Polish capital is one of the most frequent themes encountered in Polish documentaries of the late 1940s and 1950s, as demonstrated by such films as Brzozowa Street/Ulica Brzozowa (1947), Return to the Old Town/Powrót na Stare Miasto (1954), Warsaw '56/Warszawa 1956 [...]