An angry polemic denouncing the trashing of Poland and its national culture under Nazi occupation, with particular emphasis on music; Bach, Chopin and Szymanowski having given way to the "lewd Nazi hymn" the Horst Wessel Lied ("a song of a pervert, whose inglorious death has been elevated to martyrdom"). Made for the Film Unit of the Polish Ministry of Information and Documentation in exile by the recently arrived avant-garde filmmakers Franciszka & Stefan Themerson.
It came at a time when Britain and Germany were at war over Poland, but the nature and extent of Nazi atrocities was still largely treated with disbelief abroad: including by a heckler in the audience ("just a plain bloke - name of Smith...fed to the teeth with all this horror stuff"), who represents what the reviewer for 'The Tablet' described as "the reluctance of the ordinary film-goer, who wants to enjoy himself at the pictures, to be confronted with horrors". (The British Board of Film Censors themselves were particularly upset by a photograph tinted in red of a woman hanging from a gallows.) The stern female narrator turns her ire on the eponymous Mr.Smith for being "selfish and blind", describing herself as a "woman of tortured Europe, who wants you to understand what the Nazis are doing in Europe. Don't you want to know?...In a frenzy of hate and beastliness they drill and march, kill and ravish" as "part of an organised plan to make the people of Europe illiterate and uncivilised".
Created almost entirely in their London flat on a photo manipulation table, the Themersons employ a fanciful technique including visual and acoustic distortions to create an almost abstract, increasingly dream-like stream of consciousness as the film progresses.
It came at a time when Britain and Germany were at war over Poland, but the nature and extent of Nazi atrocities was still largely treated with disbelief abroad: including by a heckler in the audience ("just a plain bloke - name of Smith...fed to the teeth with all this horror stuff"), who represents what the reviewer for 'The Tablet' described as "the reluctance of the ordinary film-goer, who wants to enjoy himself at the pictures, to be confronted with horrors". (The British Board of Film Censors themselves were particularly upset by a photograph tinted in red of a woman hanging from a gallows.) The stern female narrator turns her ire on the eponymous Mr.Smith for being "selfish and blind", describing herself as a "woman of tortured Europe, who wants you to understand what the Nazis are doing in Europe. Don't you want to know?...In a frenzy of hate and beastliness they drill and march, kill and ravish" as "part of an organised plan to make the people of Europe illiterate and uncivilised".
Created almost entirely in their London flat on a photo manipulation table, the Themersons employ a fanciful technique including visual and acoustic distortions to create an almost abstract, increasingly dream-like stream of consciousness as the film progresses.
