themselves Polish in 1870. In spite of the emigration of more than three and a half million people of Polish descent (mainly to the United States and South America), this number had doubled by 1914. Thanks to the support of the Western Allies in the war, good timing, and a lot of luck, what had seemed impossible finally happened. In 1918, the empires fell apart, and Poland became an independent country. Released from captivity in Germany, military leader Piłsudski was named provisional head of the Rzeczpospolita Polska, or the Second Republic of Poland. His political party, the PPS, supported a democratic parliamentary system, a collective system of industrialization, agricultural reform, and labor unions. The new country had many social and economic issues to resolve, and both external hostilities and internal dissension marred the first years of independence.
First, the Polish-Soviet War of 1919–21 erupted over the issue of Poland’s eastern borders. In April 1919, the Polish army acquired Vilnius and, in July of the same year, secured the eastern part of Galicia from Ukrainian independence-seekers living there. One of the most decisive battles, called the “Miracle on the Vistula” by the Polish victors, became a popular subject for filmmakers in the years that followed. The war ended in March 1921 (one day after the country’s new constitution was passed) with the Treaty of Riga, which established the eastern borders almost exactly where they had been before the partitions (to the disappointment of Lithuania, which had wanted to keep Vilnius).
In the west, violent arguments over border issues became common in the mixed German- and Polish-populated area of Upper Silesia. Mutual resentment led to the migration of these groups away from each other, and several thousand people fled the country in the first years of independence. As the interwar period progressed, the lack of trust between Poles and Germans in the areas of the former German Empire hampered the development of good relations. This was particularly apparent in the regional film industry, where spats over film distribution and exhibition were commonplace until World War II.
The country was in a dire political and economic situation. The first elected president, Gabriel Narutowicz, was assassinated just one week after his election in 1921. It took several years to replace the interim currency with the new, permanent złoty. In the meantime, the government had to deal with both inflation and the demands of citizens, many of whom had expected immediate economic stability and good working conditions along with independence. Perhaps the most devastating government control on the film industry was put in place under the difficult economic conditions of the early 1920s. Strapped for funds, the government placed taxes on so-called luxury items. Tickets to the cinema were among the most heavily taxed of these items, putting moviegoing out of the reach of poorer citizens and subsequently leading to the closing of cinemas across the country.
According to census records, the population of Poland was just over twenty-seven million in 1921. Nearly one-third belonged to non-Polish minorities. When the final borders were drawn in 1923, Poland stretched from Poznań and Katowice in the west, Zakopane and Drohobych in the south, Białystok in the east, and Vilnius in the north. Present-day Gdańsk became the Free City of Danzig. Ukrainians (approximately four million people) and Belarusans (approximately one and a half million people) inhabited much of the eastern lands, speaking their own languages and aspiring to national independence. Among the Ukrainian lands, the desire for independence was so strong that violence between Poles and Ukrainians was commonplace. Ukrainians and Belarusans did not hold positions in the Polish government, universities, or other professional offices.
In May 1926, an armed coup led by Piłsudski replaced democratic institutions with authoritarianism. Piłsudski, who took the position of minister of war instead of president, was determined to rule with a heavy hand. He called his program of reform sanacja, or purification. His regime brought much-needed economic stability to the region in the late 1920s, which was reflected in the golden age of silent film production. However, the crash of the New York Stock Exchange and the ensuing Great Depression in the United States took their toll on the Polish economy in the early 1930s. The Polish economic depression and Piłsudski’s growing intolerance of opposition were obstacles to filmmaking, as they were to other social and cultural endeavors. To some, Piłsudski was Poland’s savior; to others, he was a dictator with no tolerance for political opposition. Adolf Hitler’s rise to power in Germany heightened tensions between the neighboring states, which the signing of the Polish-German Non-Aggression Pact in January 1934 did not altogether alleviate. More changes came with Piłsudski’s death in June 1935, when arguments and accusations broke out over the relevance of his regime. After an initial period of general reluctance to participate in elections and in public life, minorities, conservatives, socialists, and other groups engaged in fierce battles in the political arena. Even as the country regained economic stability in the late 1930s, it lacked social and political stability.
A lively café culture and literary movement known simply as “the twenty years between the wars” took shape (dwudziestolecie międzywojenne) as a refuge from this chaos. The enthusiastic, optimistic poets associated with the literary magazine Skamander inaugurated this era with their gatherings at Warsaw’s Café Ziemiańska. After them, in the capital and, to a lesser extent, in the country’s major cities, energetic writers and artists gathered in informal literary-artistic associations to search for new means of expression. They did not have to look further than out the windows of the cafés—on the same stretch of Marszałkowska Street in Warsaw that hosted the most sophisticated of cafés were the cinemas. Some recognized a potential new art form in the films shown at these cinemas, others repudiated them, and still others viewed them with ambivalence.
Any study of cinema requires deep attention to the processes of inclusion and exclusion. How does one account for the fact that cinema is concurrently an international commodity and a national product? How does one account for regional differences in cinema production and exhibition? The tendency has long been to draw the line along the languages chosen for production and, within these boundaries, to consider the influences of the major world centers of production on filmmaking in the smaller centers and to trace the influence of immigrants from smaller centers on works from major ones. Cinema in Poland, then, has become Polish cinema, Yiddish cinema, Ukrainian cinema, and Lithuanian cinema. Because of the great care that scholars have shown to avoid ingesting the cultural products of neighboring countries, it has become Russian and German cinema to a lesser degree. As a result, certain cinematic events have disappeared entirely from the history books.
This book attempts to recapture the multilingualism and social diversity of cinema in the partitioned lands and independent Poland and to show that the establishment of a national identity through film is a complicated matter in which oppositional principles were only sometimes at play. To this end, it accepts all films, regardless of language, made in the regions of the three empires that later became an independent country and, thereafter, in that country. It avoids mention of the careers of filmmakers, actors, and others outside of this geographic area because of space constraints and the inevitable judgments concerning loyalty to the nation that such mention entails. Instead, this book is concerned with the activity that took place in a certain region at a certain time. As it challenges established models of the region’s national cinemas, it creates a new framework for the study of film production and exhibition in early, silent, and early sound cinema. At the same time, this project seeks to expose and analyze an enduring ambivalence to a language-based national cinema and a unique belief in the communicative properties of images in Poland. Using Irzykowski’s “law of the looking glass” as its starting point, it locates these characteristics in the privileging of visual imagery over dialogue by film directors, producers, distributors, critics, and audiences in every stage of the industry’s development during the first four decades of cinema.
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The First Films, 1896–1908
Itinerant Exhibitors: Lumière in the Austro-Hungarian, Prussian, and Russian Empires
THE TRAVELING EXHIBITORS WHO INTRODUCED motion pictures to the area eventually brought their demonstrations to all the main cities of the partitioned lands and to many of the small towns as well. Various factors influenced their choice of routes and stopping places. Railway lines allowed the exhibitors to move among the small towns along the routes from Warsaw to other cities in the Russian Empire and the Kingdom of Prussia. Rail connections