a small cadre of other film professionals was established, among the most successful of whom were camera operators Konstanty Jastrzębski and Stanisław Sebel, directors Wiktor Biegański and Andrzej Marek (Marek Arnsztejn), and actors Antoni Fertner, Ester Rachel Kamińska, Samuel Landau, and Maria Mirska. Their specialties were apparent from the beginning: the diligent Sebel, for example, nourished a talent for filming adaptations of Yiddish texts, while Jastrzębski specialized in adaptations of Polish literary classics, as demonstrated in his work as Antoni Bednarczyk’s camera operator on Dzieje grzechu (The Story of Sin, 1911), based on the novel by Stefan Żeromski.
New production companies formed after Pleograf folded. Towbin founded Kantor Zjednoczonych Kinematografów “Siła” (widely known as Siła) around 1908. Towbin also owned one of the first permanent cinemas in Warsaw, Iluzjon, which opened in 1908, and in 1910, he established the first film rental office. In that same year, with camera operator Joseph Meyer (stopping in Warsaw on his way from Moscow to Paris) and stage comedian Fertner, Towbin produced a short (120 meter) comedy, Antoś pierwszy raz w Warszawie (Antoś in Warsaw for the First Time), in which Fertner plays a cheerful naïf from the provinces who stumbles helplessly around the streets of Warsaw. Fertner, joint owner of the Oaza cinema, had a great deal of control over the film. Not only did he star in it, but he also commissioned it and projected it for the first time (after Meyer had developed the negative in Paris) to a full house of 180 people at Oaza on October 22, 1908.
Soon Towbin hired Sebel as his camera operator and Marek as screenwriter and director, and began to produce multiple-reel films based predominantly on classic works of Yiddish literature. Breaking from the prevalence of comedy in earlier domestic productions as well as from Yiddish comedic traditions, Siła productions were melodramas, either sensational or domestic. The company’s first film was Der vilder foter (The Cruel Father, 1911), based on the play by Jacob Gordin (Zalmen Libin) about a father’s murder of his daughter’s illegitimate child. Next, it made Hasa die yesome (Chasydka i odstępca; Hasa the Orphan or The Hasidic Woman and the Apostate, 1911), and Mirele Efros (1912), based on another popular play by Gordin about a respected widow in a difficult relationship with her daughter-in-law. Finally, Towbin made Abraham Izaak Kamiński’s adaptation of Gordin’s Bóg, człowiek i szatan (God, Man, and Devil, 1912). These films varied in length from 550 to 1250 meters, lasted approximately thirty to sixty minutes, and, unlike films from just a decade earlier, were the main attraction, no longer just the accompaniment to live theater.
Towbin also took on the somewhat taboo subject of politically motivated violence in the Kingdom of Prussia. The circumstances surrounding the making of his first feature film, Pruska kultura (Prussian Culture), are not clear. Małgorzata Hendrykowska and Marek Hendrykowski claim that the film was probably not made in Poznań, although its title does advert to the region surrounding the city.1 Regardless of its origin, it is likely that authorities censored the film. In May 1908, Kurier warszawski announced that a motion picture that depicting scenes of battle between the Polish inhabitants of Poznań and Germans had been advertised in a Moscow newspaper. According to Kurier warszawski, Towbin commissioned the picture from a Parisian firm after the local administration had prohibited him from producing it in Warsaw. The newspaper claimed that the film had been shown successfully in Italy. Most likely, this same Prussian Culture was shown at a Marszałkowska Street theater in Warsaw under different political circumstances in September 1914.2
The largest and most enduring production company in pre–World War II Warsaw was unmistakably Hertz’s Sfinks, established in 1909. Active, competitive, and undeterred by the political instability of World War I and the burdens of economic and cultural transformation, its founder was responsible for the success of Sfinks’s twenty-seven-year stretch of film production. A banker and, beginning in 1905, an activist in the Polish Socialist Party (PPS), Hertz established personal contacts with such future government leaders as Józef Piłsudski. The socialist platform of the PPS consisted of an eight-hour working day, a minimum wage, social insurance, and the gradual socialization of land, as well as universal suffrage, freedom of speech, compulsory education, and equal rights for national, racial, and religious minorities. Most significantly, the PPS placed first priority on the restoration, against Russian political interests, of an independent Poland. Authorities arrested Hertz in 1908 on unspecified charges but released him for lack of evidence a year later, at which time he returned to Warsaw and ostensibly resigned from political activism. (As subsequent chapters will show, his filmmaking was highly political.) In need of a new career, and noticing the growing number of permanent cinemas and the swelling public interest in moviegoing, Hertz gathered three of his friends—Józef Koerner, Alfred Niemirski (Silberlast), and M. Zuker—and established Sfinks with himself as its head.
Sfinks contributed to the domestic film industry the addition of Polish intertitles to foreign films, which Sebel designed for Pathé Frères in Sfinks’s Marszałkowska Street laboratory beginning in 1908. Sebel and his colleagues at Sfinks also developed their own film prints, a practice that saved the company money and gave them complete control over their productions. In its first years in business, Sfinks made actualités and news event films, beginning probably with Wzlot aeroplanu w Warszawie (An Airplane’s Ascent in Warsaw, 1909). The company covered many of the major events of the day, including court proceedings, outdoor sporting events, medical procedures, horse races, and funerals. Sfinks also attempted to create a weekly newsreel in 1912, which it named Dziennik (Daily). The newsreel format did not enjoy much success, which drew Hertz’s attention to the ongoing discourse about the differences between documentary and fiction in the stateless nation.
Hertz remained director of Sfinks until his early death in 1928. Over this long career, he took the political changes in the lands in stride. In 1912, for example, he allowed the owners of one of the largest Russian production companies to collaborate with Sfinks, then ended this arrangement in order to align himself with German producers in 1915. Hertz’s character, connections, and financial shrewdness ensured the success of his company at a time when many other companies failed. He demonstrated a successful mix of love for the cinema, which he called by a term of his own invention, ruchosłońcopis (moving luminous record), and contempt for cinema enthusiasts, whom he regarded as hopeless fanatics. He approached producing films as others approached producing alcohol or other legal but addictive drugs. In short, he recognized that, if given the chance, people would use the cinema as a means of escape from the daily grind, and he disdained them for it. Regardless of the reasons for Hertz’s ambivalent relationship with his customers, his attitude seems to have taken a heavy toll on the film industry. Hertz shaped his spectators’ viewing practices by offering certain types of films in particular, those that would cater to audiences’ need for escape and their willingness to suspend disbelief. He offered them films that portrayed the vision of national history and culture that he wanted to perpetuate at any given moment. Because of this determination to shape the industry according to his own wishes, Hertz counts among the most complex of early film producers.
Like earlier producers, Hertz saw potential in adapting literary texts for the screen. He usually chose popular melodramas that the largest number of viewers would instantly recognize. He usually did not adapt from Yiddish texts, but Sfinks’s first feature-length adaptations did include Meir Ezofowicz (1911), based on the novel by Eliza Orzeszkowa. The ambiguous aspects of this film’s production cause one to wonder whether Hertz’s disdain for filmgoers had something to do with a long-standing ambivalence in the attitudes of the nation’s minority and majority groups toward one another as he may have inadvertently or purposely encouraged animosity in hiring people to make the film. The plot concerns a Jewish family whose ancestors had lived in the area of the Russian partition for hundreds of years and who, like the area’s Catholic inhabitants, carried hopes for the restoration of Polish independence. The title of this Polish novel is a Yiddish personal name—a detail that helped draw the attention of speakers of both languages to it. The film used quotations from the novel in its intertitles, lending it authenticity in the minds of some critics.3
Hertz made a strange decision, however, when he chose a well-known anti-Semite, Józef
