Calling Mr. Smith


Calling Mr. Smith is a short experimental anti-Nazi Polish-British film from 1943, created by Franciszka Themerson and Stefan Themerson.

Development

The film was written, directed, photographed and edited by Franciszka Themerson and Stefan Themerson, in association with the Film Bureau of the Ministry of Information and Documentation of the Polish government-in-exile in London. It reused some materials from the 1942 Black Book of Poland, a Polish report on German war crimes.

Contents

The 10 or 11-minutes-long film juxtaposes still and moving images from war photographs and newsreels showing the outrages of war with flashes of colorful lights. It uses techniques such as anamorphic lenses, the Dufaycolor technique, cartoon animation, photomontages, photograms and double exposure. The narration is considered amorphous and abstract.
The soundtrack contained classic music scores by Johann Sebastian Bach, Fryderyk Chopin and Karol Szymanowski, as well as the distorted German anthem.

Reception and analysis

The film was censored in the UK due to a controversial scene showing a hanged woman on the gallows, which the Censorship in [the United Kingdom|British censors] demanded be removed, which Themerson refused to do. This meant that the film could not be shown in public cinemas. Nonetheless, the film was well received by contemporary British critics, and has been described as "a sensation in London film circles"; it has also been described as "the only experimental film made in England during the war".' While the rhetoric of the film was considered commonplace for its time and place, the combination of images with classical music, and the overall tone, was well received.'
The aim of the film was to show the terror of German occupation to the British public, and criticize their passivity. By contrasting Bach music with contemporary German anthem, images of cultural artifacts and childish, comic-book font with war atrocities, the film posed a question to the viewers: how could a cultured nation such as Germany commit terrible, barbaric-like atrocities? The film also showed the Polish culture during [World War II|destruction of Polish culture by the Germans]. Some imagery of the film invokes Polish martyrology.
The use of German newsreels has been described as an early example of found footage, and as a satire of propaganda.
The film style has been described as Futurist and Dada-like, and inspired by Norman McLaren’s Hell Unlimited as well as Themerson's own Europa.
As the film also contained scenes of German atrocities against Polish Jews, it is also considered one of the early Holocaust films.