less in Warsaw than in cities in the Kingdom of Prussia, such as Bydgoszcz and Poznań, where the choice of language used in exhibition, as in other aspects of cultural life, was a more politically charged issue.
In her study of cinema in the Polish lands before 1908, Hendrykowska finds that early cinema had become associated with fairs, magic shows, and low forms of entertainment. The word jarmark, which she associates with early cinema, literally means “trash” or “kitsch” but also refers to the fairgrounds where the exhibitions took place. As she points out, the idea that cinema offered entertainment only for a public that needed and liked kitsch corresponds with images of fairgrounds in the contemporary media. She writes, “The fundamental mistake made in this interpretation has several causes. One of them is the acceptance of exclusively aesthetic criteria of value (and these are contemporary criteria) and, at the same time, the omission of the elements of information and knowledge that motion pictures brought with them.” She claims that in the search for elements of kitsch in early cinema, its broader historical and social-cultural context is lost. Within this broader context, cinema before 1908 is “a new element in the spiritual life of the human being, which—although this may sound somewhat pompous—influences the character of human nature.”25
Hendrykowska gives several reasons for the presence of motion pictures at the fair. She claims that live photography found itself in the circus as an extension of pantomime, an element of the traditional circus program that was being phased out because of its expense. She also points out its attractiveness as a new invention and notes that motion pictures disappeared from circus programs in 1905, as circus audiences began to tire of their novelty.26 Jarmark and early cinema shared a tendency toward spectacle and shock rather than narrative. However, she differentiates film programs from other forms of entertainment presented at the fairgrounds. She writes, “Both the jarmark and the cinema offered spectators a certain product—but each of a somewhat different character. The jarmark always shocked with foreignness and exploited incomprehensible occurrences, which were inconceivable, strange, and horrible at the same time for the patron of its booths.” In jarmark entertainments, it was the content that produced astonishment; in cinema, it was the new medium itself that aroused wonder. The true product of the cinema, then, was to Hendrykowska the film rather than the cinematic apparatus, which, though not strange or horrible, was foreign and inconceivable at first. “From the very beginning,” however, “cinema moved in the direction of experiences that were shared by all people. Audiences were shown workers leaving a factory, a child’s breakfast, the Russo-Japanese War, a blacksmith at work, plazas in Paris, and the sea’s waves crashing on the shore. Unlike the jarmark, it was ‘truthful,’ timely, and understandable. Because of these characteristics, it fulfilled an integrating function on a scale that extended far beyond the walls of the first cinemas. Could the fairground’s entertainment capture the minds, hearts, and mass imagination of people to the same extent that cinema did?”27
If early cinema performed an integrating function, which other such spectacles did it resemble? Did it gather audiences for entertainment, for education, for an alternative to legitimate theater, or for all of these? This is a question that no scholar of early cinema may avoid and one of the most difficult to answer, in no small part because the answer differs from region to region. At the root of the problem is the relationship of cinema to modernity, which swept over the continents at a pace less even than that of the Cinématographe. In partitioned Poland, consideration of cinema as entertainment or in comparison to the popular garden theater (or outdoor stage theater) allows scholars to speculate about the gender, class, and ethnicity of its spectators. There is evidence, for example, that the garden theater attracted a cross section of the population, and it may be the case that a similarly broad segment of the population attended the early cinema projections. Hendrykowska is concerned here with a different function of early cinema, however. She writes, “By illustrating the press, photography always created an impression of second-hand information. Film created the illusion that one was participating in the observed events oneself.”28
Were viewers, then, participating in modernity? Hendrykowska continues, “In its first decade, cinema fulfilled viewers’ cognitive needs to a great extent. It provided much more intensive, deeper informational stimuli about the world than did the newspaper. And so film . . . was not only kitschy entertainment but also an inexpensive way to kill free time, an artificial paradise that served to deform the true colors of the everyday.” There are at least three aspects of modernity at stake here: the modern, technological apparatus that replaces the newspaper, the urban construct of leisure time, and the knowledge of the relationship between modernity and nationhood itself, which audiences perceive when they see the true colors of the everyday contrasted with the screen image. Hendrykowska concludes, “Today almost every child knows how the skyscrapers of New York, the canals of Venice, and the plazas of Paris look. At that time, viewers—most often those who had never stuck their noses beyond the borders of the local dive bar in their entire lives—saw these for the first time. I think that films were often the source of information about the world for them.”29
A lack of sources prevents the researcher from determining positively what the first audiences took from the projections. However, it might be useful to consider Hendrykowska’s ideas in the context of the relationship between modernity and nationhood. What might people in a stateless nation of Europe have seen in the first foreign films? Would they have been awed by the skyscrapers of New York or by the possibility of finding work on the docks? Would they have been transfixed by the canals of Venice or by thoughts of the Polish Legion in Italy? Did they search the images of the plazas of Paris for their expatriate cousins?
If early cinema was a source of information about the world beyond the partitions, the lessons that it gave about that world may have been hard to swallow. One piece of evidence of audiences’ sophisticated viewing practices comes from Włodzimierz Perzyński’s 1908 correspondence from Paris, “The Triumph of the Cinematograph.” In it, Perzyński relates, “Just a week after the funeral of King Carlos, I was able to watch it in one of the little theaters on the Grand Boulevard. And as an aside, this living picture convinced me more than all of the articles and telegrams that the people of Lisbon were not all worried about the tragic death of their leader, who had insisted on their reputation as happy Portuguese citizens for his entire life only to find that they were not always happy.”30 For Perzyński, cinema was a means of obtaining the truth, but less the truth of national symbols than the truth of what these symbols masked.
What is certain is that the short films presented by itinerant exhibitors in the partitioned lands influenced the political and cultural reality of the day. The most famous example comes from Stephen Bottomore’s 1984 article, “Dreyfus and Documentary.” Bottomore’s findings that itinerant exhibitor Francis Doublier was able to dupe Jewish patrons of motion picture exhibitions in the Russian partition in 1898 demonstrate that the emotional impact of motion pictures may have lasted much longer than their initial impressions. Through a montage of images, Doublier made it appear that Captain Alfred Dreyfus was landing on Devil’s Island. Doublier showed his films for several months, until one audience member pointed out that there had been no cinema in 1894 when the Dreyfus affair had occurred.31 It is possible, too, that the emotional effects of film were exaggerated by the accompanying music and sound effects or by the practice of hiring barkers (lecturers), who explained the plot and provided dialogue for the projected images. However, there is no evidence that barkers enjoyed significant popularity in the partitioned lands, and exhibitors added film music only gradually in the first decade.
Who were the first audiences? Records of the earliest traveling exhibitors state that they saw their audiences as workers and small business owners. What does this mean, though? Because of regional differences in the growth of working-class political movements, Polish nationals in the Russian Empire were more likely to identify with this description than were Polish nationals in the largely agrarian domains of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, but even within the eastern lands a sense of a working class was not ubiquitous before the 1905 Russian Revolution. Where did the traveling exhibitors imagine that their rural customers worked? Did “small business” indicate farms, shops, or both? In their respective accounts of the period, scholar Stanisław Janicki and cinema owner Antoni Krzemiński give different answers. Janicki writes, “Cinema was