distant lands, and exciting cultures. Still, because these generalizations do not take into account the broad range of professional, social, and religious backgrounds that people brought with them to the cinema in Poland, they are not sufficient to constitute a serious study of changes in audience composition over time in the different cities and regions of the nation.
Early Film Production and Distribution
During the first ten years of moving picture exhibition in partitioned Poland, repertoires originated mainly in other countries. Only a few creative individuals were interested in doing more than simply importing the new medium. Among the first inventors of film equipment in Poland were Piotr Lebiedziński, Jan and Józef Popławski, and Kazimierz Prószyński. Among the first producers were Bolesław Matuszewski and Prószyński, whose Pleograf is synonymous with both a camera-projector of his invention and Warsaw’s first film production company. The number of people involved in turn-of-the-century film production was limited—so much so that these five pioneers of early cinema constituted the film industry in Poland through 1905. They imitated and attempted to improve upon the apparatuses built by others, with the ultimate goal of marketing their own equipment regionally. The sense of “too little, too late” that surrounded their work lingered throughout most of the era with regard to technological developments in filmmaking and projection equipment.
The five film pioneers in the partitioned lands achieved some remarkable accomplishments. The Popławski brothers, working with Lebiedziński, built a Zooskop Uniwersalny, with which they recorded scenes on glass plates in the mid-1890s. The individual contributions of Lebiedziński include the construction of prototypes for motion picture cameras and the manufacture of paper for photographic purposes. Supporting himself with a camera store and photochemical laboratory in Warsaw, Lebiedziński also developed a bulky two-camera system to take and project motion pictures, which he used to make very short films in 1895 or 1896. Documentary and comedy, these short films featured actors from popular garden theater productions. Lebiedziński continued to serve as adviser and vendor to filmmakers until the end of his life.
Kazimierz Prószyński, the son of a successful Warsaw photographer, was educated as an engineer in Belgium but began working on the development of live photography in his mid-twenties. He created the first model of his camera-projector—first called the Kinematograf Uniwersalny, then the Pleograf, and then the BioPleograf before it came to be known permanently by its second name—between 1894 and 1896 in Warsaw. In 1898 and 1899, he began offering public demonstrations of his invention.
The Pleograf was considered more than a new form of entertainment; reviewers hailed it as a victory for the educational, public, and private life of the nation. Tygodnik ilustrowany (Illustrated Weekly) called it less an object for play than a device for scientific education.37 An anonymous reporter for a small Polish-language periodical published in the Prussian partition, Gazeta toruńska (Toruń Gazette) describes a demonstration of the Pleograf: “The camera functioned very lightly and exactly. In general, one may decide that this invention is a finished thing that does not need improvement. Because of its low cost, the camera is very well suited to use by amateurs. It will not be long before every family will be able to own a similar camera and to make enduring live portraits of their loved ones together with their various facial expressions.”38 The editors of Kurier warszawski found that the Pleograf was simpler and quieter, functioned more easily, and allowed more exact movement of the film through the camera than did the Cinématographe.39
Prószyński put the Pleograf to use in Warsaw’s first production company, also called Pleograf, which he founded in late 1901 or early 1902. Between then and its closing in 1903, the company managed to complete and exhibit at least thirteen productions averaging two hundred to three hundred meters in length. These included actualités documenting ambulance runs, horse races, sledding 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
