PRZYGODA CZLOWIEKA POCZCIWEGO — aka THE ADVENTURE OF A GOOD MAN, according to Google Translate, is a short experimental comic allegory I guess you’d call it, by Poland’s Stefan Themerson. Made in 1937.
Near as I can make out, a man starts walking backwards as a result of a misheard phone call, with absurd consequences. It’s pretty good — lots of visual invention, much of it extremely pleasing to the eye, allowing for the fact that the print looks as if it was dug up out of somebody’s garden. We’re lucky to have the film at all — many of Themerson’s films are lost. Fascinating guy — according to Wikipedia, “a writer of children’s literature, poet and inventor of Semantic Poetry*, novelist, scriptwriter filmmaker, composer and philosopher.” His subject at university was physics.
Themerson gets a lot of visual interest out of the two men carrying a wardrobe through his film, and it seems highly likely to me that Polanski saw this before making his own TWO MEN AND A WARDROBE. Again, in that film, the real visual pleasure comes from the mirror on the front of the wardrobe. Something Polanski later gets a sensation out of in REPULSION. Not only that, but his film is a similar kind of allegory to Themerson’s, it seems likely he’d have appreciated the earlier film. Someone should ask him. Whatever his other qualities, he appears to be honest to a fault.
*Don’t know what it is.
shadowplay 