Surrealist husband-wife duo Stefan and Franciszka Themerson were pioneers of the Polish cinematic avant-garde of the 1930s. Stefan, an architecture student, and Franciszka, a fine-art student, met in Warsaw in the late 1920s and began an innovative, collaborative film practice that parlayed trick photography, photograms, and collage techniques into radical works of experimental moving-image art. Of the five films they created in the prewar period, Europa, made in 1931, was their masterpiece: a kinetic condemnation of creeping fascism across Europe, based on Anatol Stern’s 1929 futurist poem of the same title. Until 2019 it was thought lost forever. Miraculously, a print was discovered in Germany’s national archive. Restored and featuring a newly commissioned soundtrack by Dutch musician-musicologist Lodewijk Muns, Europa forms the centerpiece of this tribute to the trailblazing Polish avant-gardists. The program also includes their three other surviving shorts, as well as reconstructions by artist Bruce Checefsky of two of their still-lost early films.

— Polish Cultural Institute

Presented in partnership with the Polish Cultural Institute New York, with thanks to Tomek Smolarski. Preceded by a reading of selections from Stern’s 1929 poem “Europa” by film historian Russell Merritt.