One of the few surviving avant-garde films from the inter-war period (from 1937), i.e. films that sought to convey the unseen obvious, is Przygoda człowieka poczciwego (The Adventure of a Kind Man), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FlaFGPiioPQ by Stefan and Franciszka Themerson, with music composed by Stefan Kisielewski.
The backwards plot, about the consequences of a good-natured clerk walking backwards, reveals the motif of two people carrying a wardrobe with a mirror (yes, yes, Henryk Kluba and Jakub Goldberg lugging a wardrobe along a Baltic beach in Polanski’s 1958 etude, that was already the „second season” of this symbolic transport service in film history). Will we see season three, and will the motif of carrying something as big and heavy as a wardrobe fill the frames and our minds?
It would be nice, because every thread that is picked up, every thread that is connected – this is a typical Łódź wisdom – is a joy to behold. Reality has to be constantly mended and repaired, because we are still unable to produce Reality 2.0.
What might a frame of porters providing a transport service look like in 2024? Banally, it will not be an image perceived and fixed by the human gaze. The first better algorithm asked to mill over a scene from a Themersons’ film will instantly sniff out a series of frames as sterile, extremely functional, and anonymous as the face of a courier who has already turned around and is speeding away before we have managed to collect our current parcel.
Look at how seamlessly the image machine crosses bits of human anatomy with objects. Pure functionality, just legs and boxes in a smooth space. We can see it as little more than playing with the metamorphosis of an old 20th century avant-garde using AI. We can also think, if not of those early (black and grey and white and silent) images of a new species whose existence we stubbornly refuse to notice: the service man, the perfect (professional) nobody. He just moves things, delivers, serves, tightens, votes – nothing personal. Such an all-round professional servant doesn’t need eyes, so why look into his eyes?
An efficient, autonomous control system, legs and a cargo/service area, possibly an advertising enclosure.
Have you noticed that, as in Themersons’, as well in Polański’s, the porters have no prints on them, no corporate suits? Amateurism, carrying things and product placement are the same thing today.
Anyone who carries is no longer a „working man” or homo faber, but homo blandus.
His population will grow rapidly in the reality of the new technological feudalism.
Perhaps we should try to design a wardrobe for the dawn of these new times.
A film wardrobe, a wardrobe that reflects and multiplies worlds, as in the Themersons’ film.
Will it be a wardrobe dressed like a Dakar racer, with a code instead of a mirror?
It’s all the same, we just have to get there.
Like a donkey, we are getting more and more indifferent to get there by tomorrow.
























































































































































































































