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
This debate was not limited to the Prussian partition, however. A similar situation arose in the Russian and Austro-Hungarian empires in areas with high concentrations of Lithuanians and Ukrainians. Piotr Wandycz writes that the government of Vilnius “was successful in exploiting and fanning Lithuanian antagonism to the Poles. The average Lithuanian thought of a Pole as a lord and class enemy, but Russian schools propagated hatred of everything Polish. Virtually no political counterpropaganda came from the loyalist Polish aristocracy or from the gentry isolated in their old-type historic patriotism. Within the church, linguistic Polish-Lithuanian friction multiplied as the younger clergy promoted Lithuanian national ideals.”46 A small Belarusan national movement was a perceived threat to the Russian government, while in eastern Galicia, “[t]he political picture was changing. The Polish administration was willing to make cultural concessions and assumed that it would thereby gain the Ukrainians’ gratitude. The latter viewed such concessions as a token of more to come. Consequently, they felt deceived, and the Poles became irritated.”47 All the ethnicities in the region, including Belarusans, Germans, Jews, Lithuanians, Poles, and Ukrainians, who identified with at least one of the former countries saw the need to establish paradigms for dealing with escalating tension in all of the empires. Throughout the partitions and in certain other parts of the empires, mass movements of all sizes were emerging to challenge the dominant cultural and economic priorities. Inevitably, the language in which news of the advent of cinema was presented played a role in the development of film in the region.
Film Theory and Practice: The Contributions of Bolesław Matuszewski
In 1898, the editors of Tygodnik ilustrowany delighted in a “nice surprise for our ethnographers: Bolesław Matuszewski has sent his specialists around our country to take cinematographic pictures of the diversions, traditions, and such of our people. We can only applaud, as humanity will gain a lot from this.” The task before Matuszewski and the motion picture apparatus was enormous. With regard to the filmmaker’s proposal to employ film as a source of history, the Tygodnik’s editors write, “As a work of the human mind, every literary or printed source must, from the very nature of things, be more or less reticent. Because of this, historical truth is relative. However, the cinematograph—unmistakably a source of, as they say, mechanical history—is an absolutely truthful document: the cinematograph never lies.”48
Although Matuszewski received recognition mainly for his work in Paris, he came closer than his colleague Prószyński did to earning the title of Polish national filmmaker. A theorist and itinerant cameraman, Matuszewski had an interest in the medium that reflected his concern with documentation and education. Film, he felt, was a tool for scientific discovery and advances in medical research, as well as a means of accurately depicting historical events. His ideas moved between France and the partitioned lands with greater ease than did those of Prószyński, perhaps because his writings refer to an undefined, warmly welcomed “truth” that he saw film portraying. Just as DuPont’s “truth” leaped from a patent on an apparatus to a state of affairs, Matuszewski’s “truth” traveled between surgical procedures and national history. His writings encouraged critics to describe the cinematograph in evocative phrases such as “mechanical history,” a history in which, because all misunderstandings and deceits would be revealed, wrongs relating to the nation would have to be made right. Unlike his colleague, Matuszewski delivered his ideas in just the right places, at just the right time.
With his brother, Zygmunt, Matuszewski came to Warsaw from France in 1895 to open a photography studio on Marszałkowska Street. The studio, called Lux-Sigismond et Comp., lasted at least until 1908. Meanwhile, Matuszewski was traveling throughout eastern and western Europe with his motion picture camera; he even may have worked for the Lumière brothers in France between 1896 and 1898.49 From May to November 1897, he probably served as cinematographer for the Russian tsar. Of Tygodnik ilustrowany’s claim that he had begun making ethnographic films about the customs and culture of Poland in 1898, only one bit of evidence remains: Matuszewski’s Sceny ludowe w Polsce (Folk Scenes in Poland), projected in July 1898, is likely the first ethnographic film made in the partitioned lands.50 His most notable achievement in
