Considered a lost, "legendary" masterpiece of early avant-garde film before its unexpected 2019 rediscovery in a German archive, Stefan and Franciszka Themerson's Europa (1931) displays all the trappings of early experimental cinema: jarring jump-cuts, bewildering or shocking juxtapositions, strange animated sequences, provocative photo-collages, etc. Yet the artists themselves insisted that their film, assembled frame-by-frame in Warsaw and based on Anatol Stern's 1925 poem of the same name, entailed too much intentional design and pointed political commentary to be called an "experiment."

In this talk, Paloff argues that Europa, rather than offering an artistically reimagined vision of a tradition-bound society, begs to be experienced as a digest of the interwar European experiment. Against appearances, the Themersons saw themselves as operating at the intersection of both established and developing artistic traditions, just as twentieth-century Europe represented the collision of modernity with traditional ways of life. Whereas the filmmakers knew precisely what their film aimed to convey, however, they regarded the new European order as a vast experiment whose outcome was uncertain—and potentially disastrous.

Benjamin Paloff is the author of Lost in the Shadow of the Word (Space, Time, and Freedom in Interwar Eastern Europe) (Northwestern University Press, 2016), which was named 2018 Best Book in Literary Studies by the American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages, and of two poetry collections, And His Orchestra (2015) and The Politics (2011), both published by Carnegie Mellon University Press. He has translated about a dozen books and many shorter literary and theoretical texts from Polish, Czech, Russian, and Yiddish, notably works by Dorota Masłowska, Marek Bieńczyk, Richard Weiner, and Yuri Lotman, and he has received grants and fellowships from the Michigan Society of Fellows (2007-2010), Poland’s Book Institute (2010), the Stanford Humanities Center (2013), and the National Endowment for the Arts (2009, 2016). His research focuses on philosophical dilemmas, particularly in metaphysics and the ethics of representation, in modern Central and Eastern European literature, as well as on translation theory and practice.

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