(1958, b/w) Without dialogue, absurdly comical and tragically farcical, among the eight short films by Roman Polanski, between 1957-62, before his maiden feature, Knife in the Water, it opens with two men carrying a mirrored armoire out of the sea. Leaving the shore for the city, they try to get aboard a trolley with their large piece of furniture, meet a girl who turns her back on them, attempt to enter a cookshop, similarly are denied at a hotel where a man grooms himself in the mirror's reflection (which continues to hang in the air after the wardrobe's moved), get beat up by a gang of toughs (one of whom is played by the young director), before setting the wardrobe down in a yard full of barrels, where once again they're set upon by someone with a wooden stave. Along the way we've glimpsed a man being pickpocketed and another murdered. The two men return to the seashore, traipsing across sand mounds a boy has made with his bucket, back into the water.

In Polanski's first film as a student, Murder (1957, b/w, silent), a man enters another's bedroom, stabbing him to death; Teeth Smile (1957, b/w, silent) has a peeping tom peering through a window at a naked woman, but when he looks again, he sees a man brushing his teeth. Break Up the Dance (1957, b/w, Polish) involves a high-school dance violently disrupted when hooligans climb over the fence as the jazz band plays "When the Saints Coming Marching In."

The electrical box, having a freakish face, in a doll shop with clocks, bursts into flames, engulfing the interior, as rain falls outside in The Lamp (1959, b/w), a montage of surreal imagery.

An old woman, sitting as an attendant inside a men's lavatory in When Angels Fall (1959, b/w and color, Polish), has a reverie (in color) of her youthful romance with a soldier, as men piss in the urinals and use the concealed toilets. A boy with a bird in a cage comes into the room. Her son (so I interpreted the scenes), conscripted into the army, marches off to the First World War, refusing to accept her gift, leaving the bundle trampled in the street. After witnessing his comrade's legs blown off, he hides inside a roofless building where he encounters a foe, whom he shoots, mistaking a friendly gesture of reaching for cigarettes as a threat. The police remove a sick or drunk young man from the premises. Back in civilian life her disturbed son commits suicide; he falls through the ceiling of the washroom as an angel.

A thin man (Polanski) waits on a fat man, sitting in a rocking chair out of doors, in The Fat and the Lean (1961, b/w). Both looking like hoboes, the thin man entertains the fat man by dancing and playing music, prepares and serves his meals, shades him from the sun with an umbrella, fans and gets him a tub of water to cool his feet, wipes his sweaty brow, shines his shoes and manicures his fingernails, lights a cigar for his evening pleasure. But when the lure of the city begins to pull the thin man away, the fat man bribes him to stay with the gift of a goat chained to his foot.

The Polish auteur's last short, Mammals (1962, b/w), is similar in tone with Two Men and a Wardrobe. A pair of clownish men take turns pulling the other across the snow in a sled. One knits while his partner pulls. When the one pulling requires crutches, the other gives up his seat; when the latter becomes blind, his friend takes over the task of pulling. Alternately they fight and do for each other.

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