production. A film on paper, on the other hand, implies theoretical and critical studies. I work with remaining artifacts including contact prints of original film strips onto photographic paper, film stills, period magazines and books, notes from a journal, storyboard sketches, and personal accounts. The artifact casts a shadow, a proof of existence as an equivalent of the object it represents; it is a mimetic image of the truth. I employ strategies such as collaboration and interpretation, humoristic or comic imagination resulting in a blurring of authenticity in the content, context and meaning of the original filmmakers vision; nothing I produce is purely authentic. In other words, claiming authenticity suggests an awareness of historical roots, finding meaning in tradition. The limitation of available artifacts in a remake of a previous film, especially a lost or destroyed film where few documents exist, can undermine the past resulting in a radical shift of meaning in its tradition. Whether an authentic reproduction or not, my films assert their own ideology in difference to the first version; they constitute a new reading or a reinterpretation of a previous film. My films acquire new meaning by their intertextuality, not simply the product of the original filmmaker, but of a relationship to other films and to the structures of film itself.
Special thanks go to Professor Thomas Spencer Ladd of the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth for making this interview possible.
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The term “photogram” refers to images produced through a camera-less photographic technique which involves placing objects directly on a photosensitive material then exposing that material to light. The technique is often associated with the work of Man Ray, though Man Ray preferred the term “rayograph” to “photogram.” To produce their films, the Themersons put photograms in motion using a “trick table” assembly designed by Stefan. Their device replaced the photosensitive surface with a suspended sheet of glass covered with translucent paper on which objects were placed, illuminated with moving lights from above, and photographed from below. In English, the term is usually rendered as “sanation” (from the Latin for healing, “sanatio”). It is noteworthy that according to the Piłsudski government, “Sanacja” referred to the “moral healing” program of the Polish body politic. Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans., R. HullotKentor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 227–8. Cited in Lambert Zuidervaart, “Theodor W. Adorno,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2008), accessed January 1, 2011, http://plato.stanford. edu/archives/fall2008/entries/adorno/. Stefan Themerson, The Urge to Create Visions (Amsterdam: Uitgeverij De Harmonie, 1983), 60. Ideas in this English translation were formulated in the mid-1930s by Stefan Themerson; see further, idem, “O potrzebie tworzenia widze?,” Film Artystyczny FA 2 (1937). Excerpt from English translation of a 1977 letter from Stefan Themerson to Józef Robakowski. Quoted in Franciszka Themerson, Stefan Themerson, and Karol Symanowski, The Films of Franciszka and Stefan Themerson/Filmy Franciszki i Stefana Themersonów (London and Warsaw: LUX and Center for Contemporary Art, 2007), 12. Transcription from the original letter in Polish appears on page 51. Richard Raskin, The Art of the Short Fiction Film: A Shot by Shot Study of Nine Modern Classics (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2002), 13. Jasia Reichardt and Nick Wadley, “Franciszka and Stefan Themerson,” accessed August 16, 2010. http://www. luxonline.org.uk/artists/stefan_and_franciszka_themerson/essay%281%29.html. Reichardt and Wadley are caretakers of the Themerson Archive. In the Loxonline article, they reflect on Stefan Themerson’s views of cinema. They write, for example, that “His feeling for film-making was to do with the sovereign properties of the medium itself.” They also provide the following verse by Themerson about the nature of photogram:
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It is something unique. It is a photogram. It doesn’t represent anything. It doesn’t abstract from anything. It is just what it is. It is reality itself. 8 9 10 11 12 13
See further, Themerson, The Urge to Create Visions, 75. Themerson et al, The Films of Stefan and Franciszka Themerson, 34. Ibid, 35. Ibid, 35-36. Themerson, The Urge to Create Visions, 60-61. Ibid.
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