place in film exhibition during this period, as well. The average film’s length increased dramatically, and exhibitors were able to eliminate the practice of including live entertainment and, at least in part, the burden of constantly having to find new films to show audiences. Exhibitors gained the option of renting rather than buying films. Finally, the system by which cinema owners later influenced production began in this period. Sfinks, for example, began to earn money in distribution almost immediately after its establishment. Hertz of Sfinks, Towbin of Siła, and G. Kemmler, who represented foreign distribution companies, invested money earned from the distribution of rented foreign films in the production of domestic ones. Challenging them were new distribution companies, of which there were at least six in 1911.
As exhibitors drew audiences to indoor screenings in permanent motion picture theaters, the spaces used for exhibition became less and less public. One significant consequence of this change was the escalating involvement of cinema in political issues. Increasingly, cinema owners’ choices fostered audiences’ antipathy toward majority or minority groups in each empire. To project German or Russian films was to make a political statement, if a sometimes inadvertent one. In the Kingdom of Prussia, intertitles, too, became a sensitive subject. Hendrykowska explains, “Even though laboratories for making Polish intertitles had existed in Warsaw since 1908, the majority of pictures that were shown were still written in German and Russian and, therefore, in the languages of the empires. In addition, Polish translations left a lot to be desired [as they employed Russified Polish]. The situation did not improve, but only worsened when the first ‘sound’ films (mainly German) came to the screens.”29 She continues, “The closer it came to World War I, the more often pictures of a propagandist character appeared within cinema programs that were, on the surface, completely neutral and entertaining. We should add to this the fact that popular films were oftentimes the source of social antagonism. This was not difficult, considering that the majority of motion picture theaters in Pomerania and Silesia found themselves in German hands.”30 It is not clear whether intertitles actually caused this much of a stir or not. As Hendrykowska also mentions, they may have served to displace tension over changing cinema ownership.
An editorial in Dziennik bydgoski, the sole Polish-language periodical in the city in 1908, claimed that cinema should be used in the project of Polish nation building. At this time, the German Empire had passed a law prohibiting the use of the Polish language at public gatherings. Fearful that the language would fall into disuse, the writers proposed cinema as a subversive tool for keeping their language alive. The combination of visual images and intertitles was to be a pedagogical instrument, a way of teaching Poles to speak and write in Polish. As Guzek writes, cinema “took on not only a political dimension but also an educational one, even a didactic one, directed toward the least-educated social groups. The cinematograph was to be a vessel for the Polish word, and not an image of universal meaning. It was to be the ally not of a circus shed, but rather of a folk library or a self-educating circle of workers.”31
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