Stefan Themerson

Europa is a 12-minute anti-fascist film made in 1931 in Warsaw, Poland by surrealists Stefan and Franciszka Themerson. The film is based on Anatol Stern's 1925 futurist poem Europa. It uses collages and photograms, and articulates the sense of horror and moral decline its makers were witnessing. The film, while long thought to have been lost, is considered an avant-garde masterpiece.

Stefan Themerson plays himself in the role of a poet who accuses political and religious leaders of stealing the tools of his trade. His goal is to expose the demagogues as thieves. A researcher launches an investigation and discovers that the poet is unwilling to take back hidden contaminated tools. He (the poet) has devised a method to reveal the reality behind the poem. He wants to strip the words of their associations, sever their ties to the past, scrub them clean of their dictionary definitions. He calls his method Semantic Poetry.

Tim Boerhave, a philosophy lecturer, loses his legs in a bomb attack. Who is responsible? The last image before the explosion is that of a large black dog with a sardine tin attached to its collar, jumping up against the kitchen door. For Tim, the question of who did it is less urgent than the question of why. No one has claimed responsibility for the attack. He can't think of any reason why he was targeted. While his house is being rebuilt, he and his family retreat to a quiet family hotel to recover. Day and night, he locks himself in his hotel room. He is obsessed with mapping out what preceded the explosion on that fateful morning. Who is the perpetrator? Why is Tim the victim?

A photogram, used previously only within art photography, is adapted to create abstract moving patterns.

In the early inscriptions, this film is presented as a “lyrical bounce from reality” but not “senseless extravagance.” The plot involves a trek official to the advice of “There will be a hole in the sky even if you go back”, the procession of two people with a wardrobe and a march of people defending the established rules (“Down with walking backwards”). The formal aspect in the movie is a lot of trick shots using a mirror, photographs and negatives.