UK, 1944, black and white, 8 mins
The 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 Poland but also of its history and culture – and the possibility that the same thing might happen to them if they let Hitler triumph, and why it matters (an opening title states “The products of various arts practised by a people constitute an objective and most important record of the spirit of that people”). The film was made for Concanen Films, a British production company that spent the war years specialising in Anglo-Polish propaganda (its other titles include White Eagle, Diary of a Polish Airman, A Polish Sailor and Scottish Mazurka). Like the Themersons, the film’s producer Eugeniusz Cękalski had also been active in independent film circles in the 1930s, where their paths would have originally crossed.
The film opens with a whistle-stop tour of European civilisation from the Greeks to the present, emphasising how different cultures tended to excel in differing fields: Greek sculpture, Roman architecture, Italian painting, English literature, German music. This last point leads to a brief abstract interlude in which gigantic close-ups of organ pipes and distorted images of ecclesiastical architecture and religious sculpture is accompanied by Bach’s Toccata in D minor, the fusion of these various elements illustrating the cumulative aesthetic and spiritual impact of different art forms when combined to create something embodying a particular national culture. But cut to the 20th century, and “German culture” now comes branded with a swastika, and its products are shown in graphic close-up: dead children, starving families…
…and then at the word “Stop!”, the film jumps off the projector and comes to rest diagonally across the image, sprocket holes and soundtrack clearly visible. The film has been halted by the Mr Smith of the title, who describes himself as “a plain bloke” and demands to know the identity of the female narrator. “A woman of tortured Europe”, she replies. She tries to persuade Mr Smith of the importance of her message, but he’s unimpressed: “I’m fed to the teeth with all this horror stuff”. He’s probably also put off by her hectoring tone, and her subsequent invocation of his apathetic neighbour Mr Jones almost certainly doesn’t help. (Neither does, at least for a present-day viewer, her use of the word “beastliness”, a term with a little too much of a touch of P.G. Wodehouse to effectively convey notions of absolute evil.)
But the stridency is understandable under the circumstances. As she goes on to demonstrate, Adolf Hitler is now the embodiment of German culture, its Shakespeare (Mein Kampf), its Leonardo (his crude daubs) and its patron of architecture, while the music of Bach has been replaced by the Horst Wessel song. A newsreel montage shows ordinary Germans and their children gleefully waving swastika flags. Worse, Hitler has been systematically eliminating culture that doesn’t meet his strictures – and indeed people. (A shot of a hanged woman fell foul of the British Board of Film Censors, but the Themersons refused to cut it). To Mr Smith’s explanation that that’s the sort of thing that happens in war, the narrator explains that she’s more concerned about what happens after the war, when the Nazi plan to turn non-Aryan nations into illiterate and uncivilised slaves will be fully enacted. (It’s worth noting that this film was made before the discovery of the extermination camps).
It’s at this point that the film begins to focus on the Themersons’ native Poland, explaining how Poles were excluded from seats of learning, and university buildings have become secret police headquarters. Polish literature has been suppressed, as have works by Polish composers. The film’s second musical interlude sets a spinning 78rpm disc of a Chopin piece against Stefan Themerson’s trademark photograms of spinning and tumbling leaves, suggesting the onset of a cultural winter (to emphasise this, the record is subsequently crushed under a jackboot). A third musical section is a dry run for the Themersons’ The Eye and the Ear (1945), as it uses various extreme close-ups of parts of a violin, overlaid in multicoloured layers, to illustrate one of the Karol Szymanowski pieces featured in the later film. As these shift into abstract shapes and colours, they are eventually overlaid by Polish religious statues (by the polymath Stanisław Wyspiański, best known as the author of the play The Wedding/Wesele). The narrator reappears, this time in more conciliatory mode, as the eloquence of the film’s images have made her point for her.
Much more than the Themersons’ other surviving films, Calling Mr Smith is of its time: it was commissioned as a propaganda piece, and has all the drawbacks of that form. But individual sequences are immensely powerful, and the film’s overall message about the fragility of culture and civilisation couldn’t be more heartfelt: the Themersons themselves had recently resettled in a different country – where, as it transpired, they would spend the rest of their lives.
- Directors: Franciszka and Stefan Themerson
- Dialogue: Bruce Graeme
- Photography: Franciszka and Stefan Themerson
- Editing: Franciszka and Stefan Themerson
- Producer: Eugeniusz Cękalski
- Production Companies: Concanen Films, Polish Film Unit
DVD Distribution: Calling Mr Smith is included in the DVD compilation The Films of Franciszka and Stefan Themerson (Region 0 PAL), a collaboration between LUX in London and Polish Audiovisual Publishers (Polskie Wydawnictwo Audiowizualne/PWA) in Poland.
Picture: The print doesn’t appear to have undergone full restoration, and there’s quite a bit of surface damage, though never to the point of affecting watchability. It’s hard to tell if the muted colours are intentional or a by-product of the Dufaycolor process fading over time – though it’s probably safe to assume that the reds were originally intended to be punchier.
Sound: Typical 1940s mono, with noticeable background hiss, though it’s never at the expense of clarity.
Subtitles: The film is in English throughout, but optional Polish subtitles are available.
Links
- Luxonline page for Calling Mr Smith (includes video clip)
- The Themerson Archive (official website)
- Gaberbocchus Press (official website)
- Stefan and Franciszka Themerson (Luxonline – includes links to video excerpts)
- Luxonline articles: Franciszka and Stefan Themerson (Jasia Reichardt/Nick Wadley), The Films of Stefan and Franciszka Themerson (Marcin Giżycki), The Themersons and the Polish Avant-Garde (A.L.Rees)
- Wikipedia entries on Stefan and Franciszka Themerson.