of the films, Obrona Częstochowy (The Defense of Częstochowa), was supposed to have been another enormous production with as many as six hundred extras in one scene. Hertz claimed that Sfinks did not finish the film because the government refused to allow them to use Russian soldiers as extras,19 though it is also likely that the company ran out of money in the middle of this project and had nothing left with which to make the Sienkiewicz dramas. At any rate, Puchalski soon moved to Moscow, and Hertz shelved the idea. In order to recoup part of its losses from the failed endeavor, the company made several small films, which were relatively unsuccessful.
The situation provides, yet again, an example befitting Karol Irzykowski’s law of the looking glass. Audiences were thrilled to see an adaptation of a Polish novel made in Italy and clamored for a domestic equivalent. Its execution, however, proved impossible because of the weakness of the film industry in the occupied territories. Enthusiasm for national culture was greatest when inhabitants of another nation presented it in a positive light. The desire to see events in abstraction was strong. When they expressed national pride when they watched Quo vadis? in a glorious, extravagant, and foreign form, audiences were envisioning themselves within a global picture—a modern picture of abundance—that they had long been told excluded them.
Zagrodzki and a group of actors formed a production company known as Kooperatywa Artystyczna in the years before World War I. Their major films included Sąd Boży (God’s Trial, 1911), based on Stanisław Wyspiański’s drama Sędziowie (Judges), and Ofiara namiętności (A Victim of Passion, 1912). Much was made of the cooperative’s choice to adapt ambitious literary works, yet critics disparaged it for its reliance on theatrical techniques and its focus on acting. By contrast, the newsreels and short documentaries that were the domain of photojournalist and filmmaker Fuks fared better. His depictions of the funerals of famous people and court proceedings were shown at the Olympia cinema in Warsaw’s emerging entertainment district.
Competition between the major companies was fierce, even if the stakes were low. As one story goes, Towbin attempted to sabotage Sfinks’s premiere of Quo Vadis? by projecting a secretly borrowed copy of it in his theater a day earlier. In revenge, Hertz used his political connections to have the theater closed in the middle of the screening. In another, Towbin kidnapped and held for ransom French actor Max Linder, who was traveling to Warsaw at Hertz’s invitation, in 1914.20 No amount of pressure from other companies could stifle Hertz, however. Within five years of its formation, Sfinks had managed to swallow almost every one of its competitors. This is not to imply that competitors necessarily fought against their incorporation into Sfinks or that its owner, Hertz, had to fight for friends. He had friends and respect. He had money, a vision, and the willingness to incorporate other companies into his own rather than to destroy them. However, he refused to make certain types of films. What was lost in his dealings, for the first time but not the last, was the production of silent films based on Yiddish texts.
“Everybody’s” Secret Pastime: The Inteligencja and the Issue of Intertitles
The history of cinema in Poland is, in large part, a history of people alternately participating in and negotiating ways to avoid the linguistic and class tensions with which they lived on a daily basis. From the outset, audiences connected cinema inexorably with national language, and national language with religion, ethnicity, wealth, power, a general sense of belonging, and entitlement. Although cinema could have been—and at times was—used to advance the ideologies of various branches of the Polish nationalist movement, it also exacerbated existing conflicts between speakers of different languages under the partitions. As cinema attendance grew between 1908 and 1914, two major exhibition issues arose: First, many intellectuals struggled to reconcile a traditional commitment to distinguishing between high and low culture with their budding interest in motion pictures; second, as distributors began placing intertitles in domestic languages on their imported films, concerns over national languages surfaced. In both cases, filmgoing evolved into a more or less explicit political act.
It is difficult to know where motion picture projection took place between 1907 and 1914. Information on the number and size of theaters is hard to obtain and often contradictory, with the exception of certain theaters in a few cities. At the end of 1907, there were three permanent cinemas in Poznań, a city of 148,000: Mettler’s, Pałacowe, and Residenz. This number tripled in the next two years.21 In 1908, there were between twenty and thirty motion picture theaters in Warsaw. As in Poznań, the number of cinemas and their seating capacities grew rapidly. As of fall 1911, the largest of the sixty-odd motion picture theaters in Warsaw advertised seating for two hundred people;22 by 1913, the Apollo, with room for 750 people, was in operation. In Łódź, there were ten cinemas in 1912. In Lublin, the Oaza held one thousand people and was the fourth cinema in the city by 1911. In the entire area of Galicia, there were at least seventy cinemas in 1913. In Bydgoszcz, the Kristal had room for 750 people by 1914.23 According to Jewsiewicki, on the eve of the World War I, there were approximately three hundred permanent theaters in the partitioned lands. They accommodated thousands of spectators each day. By all accounts, there was a relaxed, liberated atmosphere in the cinemas, where people could clap, comment on the action on the screen, and enjoy the reactions of their neighbors in the crowd. Fires, however, were a major problem before World War II. For example, a fire partially destroyed one of the oldest motion picture theaters in Warsaw, Oaza.
The location and architecture of cinemas facilitated their appeal. In large cities, the city center, with its trendy restaurants and bars, supported the most cinemas. In Warsaw, many of these were located in the area that was by then the motion picture theater district along the busy commercial sections of Marszałkowska and Nowy Świat streets. The cinemas were open from 3:00 PM until 10:00 PM or midnight (including special showings “for men only” at 10:00 PM) and by all accounts had a constant clientele that overflowed into neighboring cafés. Banaszkiewicz and Witczak note that Warsaw’s working-class neighborhoods, too, housed a large number of cinemas. They quote an editorial in Goniec wieczorny (Evening Dispatch) about a motion picture theater in the working-class neighborhood of Wola, which alleges that the cinema was profiting immensely from a regular audience of workers paying an average of twenty kopecks per ticket.
Once such entertainment districts were established, they became the usual venues for film premieres. Exhibitors learned very quickly that building an entertainment district in a central location encouraged competition and attracted a certain type of clientele, in particular, people who were willing to pay higher ticket prices than those in residential districts. The experience of attending a motion picture program quickly became intertwined with other urban experiences. With its lively café culture, Warsaw became the center of film exhibition just as it had become the center of film production. The entertainment district was important to other cities and towns, as well. From Vilnius to L’viv, it became a symbol of progress and politics. In the small, unindustrialized city of Kraków, the popularity of Cyrk Edison beginning in 1906 meant that later cinemas were more likely to succeed if they were located in the same part of town, near other symbols of modernity.24
The first Warsaw motion picture theaters outside the central entertainment district opened in neighborhoods that were centers of Jewish culture. On Targowa Street in the Praga section of the city (across the river from the city center) was the Praski Iluzjon, while the Arkadia and Feniks were located on Dzika Street in Nalewki. In smaller cities, such as Łódź and Poznań, only a few exhibition sites were not located on or just off the main streets, which were Piotrkowska Street in the former and the intersection of Świętego Marcina and Berlińska streets in the latter. The availability of choices slowly shaped exhibition practices, as people belonging to a particular social, economic, or religious class chose to frequent specific cinemas based on the size of the cinema district, the number of residential areas, and the degree of segregation in each city. For the most part, though, exhibitors placed large cinemas that catered to a diverse crowd in key parts of each city.
Small-town cinemas were different. According to Stanisław Janicki, the first cinema exhibitions in the small Silesian town of Skoczów took place in the Teatr Elektryczny on Saturday, June 28, 1913, at 4:00 PM and 8:00 PM. The advertisements claimed that the films, which included beloved French features and some documentaries, would be projected using French equipment.