The Best Old Movies on a Big Screen This Week: NYC Repertory Cinema Picks, February 17-23
The Adventure of a Good Citizen (1937)
Directed by Stefan and Franciszka Themerson
The opening credits text following the title of the Themersons’ short film declares Adventure as “an irrational humoresque in which everyone may recognize the poetic possibilities of the Good Citizen, who asks the public not to misinterpret his lyrical flight from reality for nonsensical extravagance.” The Polish couple’s nine-minute sound work was one of only seven films that Stefan and Franciszka made, and their only pre-Second World War film to survive today. Its title character (played by Antoni Drąźkowski) is an industrious clerk who—inspired by things he overhears one day—decides to begin walking backwards. The gradually self-emboldening man aids two lumbering wardrobe-carriers on their journey outdoors and helps release an amazing flying stream of plants and animals; myriad fellow citizens, meanwhile, angrily hunt their peer while carrying signs declaring the necessity of walking forwards. They eventually come upon the wardrobe in a forest, and discover themselves confronting not men, but a mirror. “You must understand the metaphor, ladies and gentlemen!” the Good Citizen calls from his newfound home in the sky. The film shows moving backwards to be a progressive act. The Adventure of a Good Citizen will open a program at Anthology of eight diverse Polish avant-garde works, five of which—like the Themersons’ film—will screen on 35mm. Aaron Cutler (February 18, 7:30pm at Anthology Film Archives as part of a program copresented by Millennium Film Journal)