of various branches of the Polish nationalist movement, it also exacerbated existing conflicts between speakers of different languages under the partitions. As cinema attendance grew between 1908 and 1914, two major exhibition issues arose: First, many intellectuals struggled to reconcile a traditional commitment to distinguishing between high and low culture with their budding interest in motion pictures; second, as distributors began placing intertitles in domestic languages on their imported films, concerns over national languages surfaced. In both cases, filmgoing evolved into a more or less explicit political act.
It is difficult to know where motion picture projection took place between 1907 and 1914. Information on the number and size of theaters is hard to obtain and often contradictory, with the exception of certain theaters in a few cities. At the end of 1907, there were three permanent cinemas in Poznań, a city of 148,000: Mettler’s, Pałacowe, and Residenz. This number tripled in the next two years.21 In 1908, there were between twenty and thirty motion picture theaters in Warsaw. As in Poznań, the number of cinemas and their seating capacities grew rapidly. As of fall 1911, the largest of the sixty-odd motion picture theaters in Warsaw advertised seating for two hundred people;22 by 1913, the Apollo, with room for 750 people, was in operation. In Łódź, there were ten cinemas in 1912. In Lublin, the Oaza held one thousand people and was the fourth cinema in the city by 1911. In the entire area of Galicia, there were at least seventy cinemas in 1913. In Bydgoszcz, the Kristal had room for 750 people by 1914.23 According to Jewsiewicki, on the eve of the World War I, there were approximately three hundred permanent theaters in the partitioned lands. They accommodated thousands of spectators each day. By all accounts, there was a relaxed, liberated atmosphere in the cinemas, where people could clap, comment on the action on the screen, and enjoy the reactions of their neighbors in the crowd. Fires, however, were a major problem before World War II. For example, a fire partially destroyed one of the oldest motion picture theaters in Warsaw, Oaza.
The location and architecture of cinemas facilitated their appeal. In large cities, the city center, with its trendy restaurants and bars, supported the most cinemas. In Warsaw, many of these were located in the area that was by then the motion picture theater district along the busy commercial sections of Marszałkowska and Nowy Świat streets. The cinemas were open from 3:00 PM until 10:00 PM or midnight (including special showings “for men only” at 10:00 PM) and by all accounts had a constant clientele that overflowed into neighboring cafés. Banaszkiewicz and Witczak note that Warsaw’s working-class neighborhoods, too, housed a large number of cinemas. They quote an editorial in Goniec wieczorny (Evening Dispatch) about a motion picture theater in the working-class neighborhood of Wola, which alleges that the cinema was profiting immensely from a regular audience of workers paying an average of twenty kopecks per ticket.
Once such entertainment districts were established, they became the usual venues for film premieres. Exhibitors learned very quickly that building an entertainment district in a central location encouraged competition and attracted a certain type of clientele, in particular, people who were willing to pay higher ticket prices than those in residential districts. The experience of attending a motion picture program quickly became intertwined with other urban experiences. With its lively café culture, Warsaw became the center of film exhibition just as it had become the center of film production. The entertainment district was important to other cities and towns, as well. From Vilnius to L’viv, it became a symbol of progress and politics. In the small, unindustrialized city of Kraków, the popularity of Cyrk Edison beginning in 1906 meant that later cinemas were more likely to succeed if they were located in the same part of town, near other symbols of modernity.24
The first Warsaw motion picture theaters outside the central entertainment district opened in neighborhoods that were centers of Jewish culture. On Targowa Street in the Praga section of the city (across the river from the city center) was the Praski Iluzjon, while the Arkadia and Feniks were located on Dzika Street in Nalewki. In smaller cities, such as Łódź and Poznań, only a few exhibition sites were not located on or just off the main streets, which were Piotrkowska Street in the former and the intersection of Świętego Marcina and Berlińska streets in the latter. The availability of choices slowly shaped exhibition practices, as people belonging to a particular social, economic, or religious class chose to frequent specific cinemas based on the size of the cinema district, the number of residential areas, and the degree of segregation in each city. For the most part, though, exhibitors placed large cinemas that catered to a diverse crowd in key parts of each city.
Small-town cinemas were different. According to Stanisław Janicki, the first cinema exhibitions in the small Silesian town of Skoczów took place in the Teatr Elektryczny on Saturday, June 28, 1913, at 4:00 PM and 8:00 PM. The advertisements claimed that the films, which included beloved French features and some documentaries, would be projected using French equipment. Tickets cost between forty and eighty hellers; children were admitted at half price but were allowed only in the afternoon. Janicki writes of the projections, “Our fathers, grandfathers, and great-grandfathers could find out how beef is spiced in Sudan, which animals living in the English Channel are edible, what kinds of ‘life-saving devices used for shipwrecks’ exist, what the ‘habits and customs of “highlanders”’ are, what has happened in sports, what the latest fashions are, etc.”25 He continues, “On the basis of the available materials, one can risk the assertion that audiences had the opportunity to see a broad, diverse, and interesting range of films. The program was limited to French cinema almost entirely, though, modestly enriched with Italian and German pictures. It is easy to notice that the very popular Danish films (Asta Nielsen!) but, most of all, American films were not shown.”26
As one indicator of exhibition practices, the terms used to describe audiences may reveal the priorities of certain distributors and exhibitors. Warsaw newspapers, for example, used the term “wszyscy,” or “everybody,” to describe audiences. There was everybody—as in a broad range of social, linguistic, and economic groups—and there was “everybody”—in a different sense. In Warsaw, this “everybody,” like “tout Paris” in France, was the inteligencja, a cultural elite composed of artists, writers, businesspeople, and public trendsetters. Beginning in this period, the inteligencja forged a very specific relationship with cinema that vacillated between love and hate. For example, critic Leo Belmont describes learning in 1909 that two eminent intellectuals regularly attended the cinema: “Once, when I had finished giving a lecture in Lublin, the respectable Dr. Biernacki, one of the editors of Kurier lubelski (Lublin Courier), gave me the honor of presenting me with a slightly timid proposition to go for relaxation with him to the cinema. He said, ‘Perhaps you don’t like it?’ I cried, clasping my hands, ‘But sir! How can one not like the cinema? I am in love with the cinema . . .’ He said, ‘You are not alone. We hosted two men from Zakopane who run off to the cinema every week . . .’ And, to my greatest surprise, he related two famous names that carry with them that sinfulness [Stefan Żeromski and Jan Lemański]. He said, ‘Just please do not tell anyone.’”27
Perhaps in order to distinguish the viewing practices of the inteligencja and the rest of society, Warsaw exhibitors raised the price of tickets in some parts of the city. The inteligencja was willing to buy expensive tickets and to support extravagant theaters in the fashionable, exclusive café district of the city. According to set designer Józef Galewski, Warsaw was an exception to the rule that people from all social groups came together to watch films (whether or not they actually mingled). Galewski claims that in Warsaw, only businesspersons and landowners, government and (Russian) military officials, and other wealthier people attended, as it was too expensive for workers.28 Galewski probably has in mind the large, permanent theaters in the main Warsaw entertainment district, as the inexpensive, temporary theaters (for example, those at circuses), and smaller permanent theaters located in other areas presumably catered to a more diverse audience. Because of this, and particularly because of the way in which this influenced the building of motion picture theaters in smaller cities and towns, cinema became its own type of institution, both culturally unique and linguistically integrated. Segregation did not result strictly from linguistic or religious differences, though these were important, but also from
