of Jewish descent. His mother, Ludwika Smulewicz, was also Jewish by ancestry. Franciszka was born in 1907 in Warsaw. Her father, Jacob Weinles, was a well-known painter of largescale, tragic-heroic scenes from the life of the Jewish community, and surely saw his role as political; her mother was the pianist Lucja Kaufman. Her sister also became an artist. Poland implemented a policy of “ethnic pressure,” during the 1920s. Non-Polish minorities were subjected to discrimination with the intention to encourage them to emigrate. The Jews in Poland were not exempt from this treatment. Clearly, the Themersons would have witnessed firsthand various degrees of insularity while living in Warsaw although there is no evidence that they were subjected to such treatment. The Themersons were interested in the modulation of light in a darkened room perhaps more than any overtly political statement. They could have easily chosen other types of objects as they did in Moment Musical (1933), their first sound film, a three-minute commercial in which photograms of light-pierced jewelry, porcelain and glass were animated to music by Ravel. But the fact remains that they chose instead pharmaceutical objects from Stefan’s father’s medical practice, an interesting choice given Piłsudski regime and its motto “Sanacja.” It’s possible that Stefan and Franciszka were unaware of the subtle connection between the two, but in my opinion, there’s enough peripheral evidence to suggest otherwise. They were young, impressionable artists with a distinct knack for parsing the subtleties of language; “pharmacy” and “healing” suggest similar outcomes, whereas the former may be viewed as the empirical end of the political argument, the latter as moral. The tense sociopolitical climate may have influenced the Themersons’ decision to work with cameraless photography, or photograms, although evidence of Stefan’s interest dates back to 1927, when he was still a student in high school. In The Urge to Create Visions, Stefan explains: The strange thing about a photogram is that the essence of it isn’t in it, it is in your eye. Either you see it or you don’t. And, even when you can recognize in it the meek, humble objects that have created it—a comb, a flask, a leaf, a tea-strainer, it is not a representation of any comb, or flasks, or leaves, or tea-strainers, it is what it is, its reality is its own.4 The photogram is a notion of order distinct from reality; it 26
is a representation, an image of an image. It is in fact one of the clearest examples of the category of sign that semiologists have called deictics; the photogram denies the photograph its sign and, in doing so, casts a shadow, a proof of existence, as an equivalent of the object it represents, the indexation of the tale. This semiological property made it an object of deep interest to Stefan and Franciszka. In contrast to Theodor Adorno, who believed that art was powerless to effect political change, the Themersons believed that a new “order” in art could affect public discourse. Because the photogram is a material proof of the process of visualization, it indexes the perceptual ways we make sense of the world. DEMPSEY/MATTESON/KARIMI The following passage from a 1977 letter written by Stefan Themerson indicates that in the beginning of his career he had little exposure to non-Polish film production: … (It [a journal the Themersons were instrumental in publishing] was called “art film”—stupid name but the reason was to separate ourselves from “commercial” film!). I enclose a copy of f.a. from which it becomes obvious that we didn’t see any “avant-garde” films until 1937, when we brought some of them for a screening in Warsaw. (With the exception of 2 films by Len Lye, which we saw in London in 1936.) I remember that Antoni Borman, administrator of Wiadomości Literackie, when I asked for his help in connection with the screening, said: “what’s that, a whim of a millionaire?” No, there were no millions of any sort. No grants either. No, nothing.5 Based on this commentary we may conclude that the Themersons’ films were considerably original. Did they end up inspiring other filmmakers in Poland and elsewhere in Europe? For example, Dada artists? CHECEFSKY The abstraction in the Themersons’ work has been analyzed primarily in stylistic terms, as in Apteka, where a succession of moving photograms is comparable to poetry. On the other hand, an early photogram by Stefan from 1928 shows a bare foot with powder sprinkled around the edges of the paper to resemble the cosmos, the “Great Nebula in Andromeda,” perhaps implying the birth of conscious-