in Warsaw parks, and a summer concert of the philharmonic, as well as the one-shot fiction film Powrót birbanta (The Return of the Merry Fellow, 1902) and Walkirie (The Valkyries, 1903), part of a live performance of Richard Wagner’s opera. A comedy, The Return of the Merry Fellow, featured actor Kazimierz Junosza-Stępowski as a young man attempting to walk home after an evening of heavy drinking. Prószyński took advantage of every opportunity to project his films, appearing at such events as a Festival of the Association for the Care of the Terminally Ill in Warsaw and an agricultural exhibition in Vilnius. Audiences could watch all of his films at the Teatr Elizeum-Palais d’Illusion on Karowa Street and his short documentaries in a theater in the Ogród Saski in spring 1902. Eventually, the difficulty of obtaining high-quality celluloid and the camera’s constant malfunctioning turned entrepreneurs away from the Pleograf. In spite of its lower cost, Prószyński’s Pleograf was never able to replace the imported systems. Prószyński’s status as a Warsaw intellectual helped him little when it came to finding support for his inventions, which most people in his community ignored or belittled because they saw them as less technologically advanced than foreign inventions. More importantly, audiences soon grew bored with Pleograf films. Uninterested in short films about daily life in their own city and unwilling to support Prószyński in his creative endeavors, they rejected his work and, eventually, convinced him to leave the partitioned lands. Potential business partners may have avoided him because of his reputation for lax management of finances and unwillingness to consider the prospect of material gain. Most likely, though, his failures had a lot to do with his attitude toward serving his nation. In writing Prószyński’s biography, Władysław Jewsiewicki found that he was known for his aversion to what he considered lofty nationalist slogans.40 Pleograf folded in 1903, but Prószyński continued to work on his inventions in Belgium, England, and France. For example, he attempted to make and exhibit sound film through use of the gramophone. His experiments took place in London between 1908 and 1912, during the period when Léon Gaumont and Thomas Edison were developing their own picture-sound synchronization techniques, and resulted in the invention of the Photophone.
There is little evidence of filmmaking outside of Warsaw. Most likely, the first film with a Polish title made in L’viv was W kawiarni lwowskiej (In a L’viv Café), which premiered in that city in June 1897. According to Dobrochna Dabert, a second film titled Odsłonięcie pomnika Adama Mickiewicza we Lwowie (Unveiling the Adam Mickiewicz Statue in L’viv) was also registered; Władysław Mickiewicz (the bard’s son) took part in the October 30, 1904, celebration.41 Like Warsaw in the scenes captured by Prószyński’s Pleograf, the city of L’viv featured prominently in these films. By choosing to film the unveiling of a statue of Mickiewicz, the filmmakers were reflecting and celebrating the place of Polish literature in the Austro-Hungarian city.
By 1902, filmmakers already had sketched a range of uses for the medium based on permitting audience members to recognize, empathize, and laugh with the figure on the screen. Establishing a national industry took some time, however. Although the reason for this may have been the economic impossibility of establishing in the partitioned lands a national film industry on a level with that of France or the United States, it also may have had as much to do with audiences’ general distrust of Prószyński and local filmmaking in this period. According to Irzykowski’s law of the looking glass, viewers wanted to see the events that they had experienced, but in abstraction from reality. Unfortunately for Prószyński, his first films offered the audience identification with a myriad of inconsistencies in their daily and long-term existences. They wanted something else. The law of the looking glass, even more than infrastructure, was at the core of a national industry. Poet Anatol Stern’s recollection of Prószyński speaks volumes in this regard. He writes, “I still remember well a meeting and conversation with Kazimierz Prószyński, a pale, thin man of somewhat diabolic appearance, who contested with the Lumière brothers for the victor’s palm in the invention of the motion picture apparatus. What’s more, I have been always deeply convinced that if Prószyński had been born under a lucky star, then the name of his Pleograf would have replaced ‘cinematograph,’ and today, along with millions of people, we would be talking about world ‘pleography’ and not ‘cinematography.’”42
For the first decade of cinema in the partitioned lands, companies in the large cities of the empires or locals doing business with them handled film distribution. While Berlin and Vienna presumably supplied films for the German and Austro-Hungarian empires, the companies of Jadwiga Golcz (called Golcz i Szalay, though Szalay’s identity is not clear), Piotr Lebiedziński, and Julian Dreher established the first distribution networks in Warsaw and Łódź in 1899 to buy and sell foreign films. Golcz even organized the first exhibition of film and cinematic equipment in Warsaw in 1901.43 For the most part, however, the early entrepreneurs were not dependent on their services. They preferred to travel to larger cities such as Paris and Berlin in order to buy their films directly. In 1905, representatives of major foreign companies began to come to smaller cities to sell films and equipment, making the process easier. The relative abundance of foreign production and dissatisfaction with local production meant that foreign films dominated the screen at the turn of the century. Consequently, so did images of foreign cities and cultures.
Polish-speaking residents of Poznań, as Hendrykowska has explained, understood the first film camera as an import from Germany. According to Hendrykowska, they associated it with claims of German technical proficiency and believed that it symbolized the “genius” that German nationalist movements in the area were promulgating. In the Prussian partition, where Polish speakers were on the whole considerably poorer than their German-speaking neighbors, this stereotype provoked anger and resentment. Seeing them as a form of German propaganda, Polish speakers kept a certain distance from German films.44 This situation was an early example of a problem that recurred throughout the pre-1939 period: popular reception of films and technology from “foreigners”—a category that sometimes included the ethnic majority and sometimes ethnic minorities—depended more on contemporary politics than on quality. German and English films fared the worst in the patriotism disputes, even when they fared the best in terms of critical acclaim and financial success. For much of the period, a general rule may have been that the farther the setting from the Polish lands and from areas with a high concentration of Polish immigrants, the better. Scenes of life in Paris, Indochina, and Siam found far more acceptance than scenes of life in Berlin or Moscow, for example. Films from distant lands fulfilled the public’s desire for information about geography, cultures, and customs; they did not mirror a known external reality, but appealed to audiences’ desire for abstraction from the complexity of external reality. Scenes of daily life in other parts of the world offered an opportunity to find commonalities (everywhere, people wash clothes, feed children, attend funerals) and avoid differences (such as access to water, quality and quantity of food, life expectancy). At the same time, audiences perceived less threat of cultural or political manipulation from these films than from films made in neighboring countries.
There were many German-language newspapers in Prussian Bydgoszcz. As unexceptional as it was, then, that the German-language publication Bromberger Tageblatt (Bromberg Daily) first brought the news of moving pictures to the residents of Bydgoszcz, the implications were far-reaching. As both Hendrykowska and Guzek have pointed out repeatedly, Polish-speaking residents of the area learned of the phenomenon of cinema in the German language. The resulting association that many Polish-speaking residents drew between cinema and the German Empire is rooted in the period just before the traveling exhibitors appeared. Cinema was, from the outset, western, inorganic, and an obstacle to self-expression partially because of the language in which it was first introduced to the Polish minority and because of the rural population’s reliance on itinerant exhibitors to bring it to them. There were, of course, other reasons that do not relate directly to cinema. A wave of political events began in the Prussian partition in 1896, when, under pressure from Prussia, the local administration changed Poznań’s city colors from the red and white of the former Polish flag. The next few years saw the names of towns and villages throughout the Prussian partition changed from Polish to German, and the Polish language eliminated from church services. At the same time, the Prussian government invested heavily in the area’s infrastructure, effectively setting in motion an ongoing debate over the benefits and drawbacks of colonialism.45