It was a pleasure to talk with Łukasz Ceranka, Fixafilm CTO and supervisor of Europa restoration. We had a video call during the London Film Festival. We discussed the complex restoration process of one of the most important Avant-garde short films by Themersons, Europa.
How did the research start? It was found in Berlin; how did the process go?
It was found in the Bundesarchiv in Berlin by the Pilecki Institute, and it was described as Europa. That was the beginning of this discovery and our restoration process. The foundation has ownership of all Themersons’ works. As we worked with them before with Calling Mr. Smith, it was natural to come back and work with them again.
It was a twenty-person crew working on it, and it was done just before the pandemic in 2020. Because of the lockdowns, we were waiting to have a premiere until now.
What were the most challenging aspects of this process of restoration? After 90 years, there could be various reasons why the picture is flawed. How did you manage work with this complex situation?
In 1940, it was created as a home movie, so it was not perfectly crafted. The biggest challenge was the print—not the negative. All the laboratories back then were not perfect enough in terms of brightness. Making that print clean was hard. It was a really experimental movie; the main challenge was determining what should stay in the image and what should be restored or removed. We went for the idea of how it should look in the first screening, without any damage from time and processing in the lab. It was difficult for us with a lot of playing around, animation with lights involved in the experimental aspect. We had to think about what was intended to be there and what was done by the almost 90 years of waiting in storage.
On the one hand, you don't want to change that film and remove something that was intended to be there; on the other hand; this film is intense in terms of meaning and visuals. Additional things that are from the lab are disturbing, flickering, and so on, making it harder to watch it and appreciate it. It was difficult to find a balance between making the short film nice for the viewer and preserving its original character.
How important do you think this short film's restoration is for audiences in 2021? This film was just rediscovered—what is the potential of it?
Great and wide question. First of all, it was a famous movie and treated like one of the best avant-garde films of the 1930s, not in Poland only, in general. It was very influential back then. A generation of filmmakers was not able to be in dialogue with it; that's what it was missing. Getting back to it, it allows this to happen - and it's an important aspect of it.
Secondly, the meaning of it is so important. It talks of nationalism, capitalism, Zionism. All those things are relevant now. When you watch it, your first impression is likely to be, "this could be made today," with the same topics that are relevant now as 90 years back. This is a timeless piece of art, and we finally got it back.
There was a lot of trying to imagine how it looks and everybody in their head had a vision of it. Everybody talked about it, and nobody saw it before we found it. It was a myth that was going around. It was really interesting to compare what people had in their minds with its reality. That was also a rare situation to have; it is really fascinating to talk and confront what they imagined to the real thing. There are many reasons why it is so important in contemporary years.
I read that the movie has a newly commissioned soundtrack. Why did you make this choice?
It was a silent movie. There was a discussion about creating a soundtrack for it, but it never happened. It was always shown with some kind of piano accompaniment or recitation of Stern's poems on which Europa is based on. Themersons always thought about it with sound, but they never created it. There was a discussion about doing it with the recitation of a poem as sound. It was a heated discussion about it, but we went for the current soundtrack. It worked well.
What about your next project? What is Fixafilm working on?
There are many things we are working on—restoration-wise and otherwise. We are working with Daniel Bird, a promoter and curator, on a Parajanov film. It was taken over by the KGB when it was finished and confiscated. The people in the lab were ordered to destroy all the materials that did not go into the movie. It was a normal procedure, but they thought that considering how the KGB took this film—in their minds, it would never be shown anywhere - so they faked the utilization of these outtakes. We are already in the process of digitalizing them—almost five hours of it. Because of political problems and the pandemic, the process has been slowed down.