1890s, toward the end of the Positivist movement, that local activists began to form political organizations. The multiplicity of these organizations and of the schools of thought that separated them demonstrates the ideological chaos that accompanied the introduction of cinema. The Polish Socialist Party (PPS) came into being in 1892 to promote the reestablishment of the Polish state and the implementation of a socialist program. Józef Piłsudski soon became its leader. A year later, Rosa Luxemburg and other doctrinaire Marxists formed the Social Democratic Party (SDKP). Although the SDKP sought to bring socialism to the region, it did not seek Polish independence. A modern Polish nationalist party, the National Democratic Party, found a leader in Roman Dmowski, whose nationalist ideology was decidedly xenophobic, anti-Jewish, and anti-German. Dmowski demanded the full assimilation of non-Polish minorities to his view of Polish tradition, which did not include the custom of religious and linguistic tolerance known in the former Res Publica.
The actual role of language in daily life varied according to time and place, ranging from the liberal policies of the Austro-Hungarian Empire to the strict prohibitions on use of language in education and government that characterized the Congress Kingdom of Poland. In the hearts and imaginations of Polish speakers, Polish flourished. To speak Polish—for Jews and Lutherans, as well as for Catholics—was to be Polish, and to be Polish was, with little room for exception, to long for a homeland. One of the main arenas for the cultivation of this desire for national sovereignty was Polish-language theater production. In spite of its limitations with regard to language, early traveling cinema fulfilled at least one function that theater could not. As entrepreneurs traveled with their exhibits, moving constantly among the small towns in the empires, they were potential carriers of the kinds of information—national, educational, social, and cultural agendas—that supporters of Polish autonomy wanted to transmit.
The first two decades of cinema were also the last decades of the partition period, a chaotic time in those regions. Discrepancies among the empires in the levels of modernization, education, and wealth, as well as in the general feeling of community made the thought of reunifying Poland difficult. Piłsudski and the PPS supported the Russian Revolution of 1905 by organizing strikes and boycotts in the Russian partition. Reaction to the revolution varied among the many political groups vying for popular support, but this particular activity of the PPS drew attention to Poles’ possible willingness to engage in armed conflict to bring about independence. In this atmosphere of chaos, fear, determination, and pride, a new literary-cultural movement, Młoda Polska (Young Poland), was born. Young Poland was as disordered as the period in which it arose; decadent writers and artists stressed the ideals of aestheticism, pure form, and art as an absolute. Art, they felt, should be divorced from politics and created only for its own sake. Reconciling their approach to art with the political situation of the time, however, they also brought the Romantic nationalist poets back into vogue and supported the use of the Polish language.
Almost ten million people in the three territories considered themselves Polish in 1870. In spite of the emigration of more than three and a half million people of Polish descent (mainly to the United States and South America), this number had doubled by 1914. Thanks to the support of the Western Allies in the war, good timing, and a lot of luck, what had seemed impossible finally happened. In 1918, the empires fell apart, and Poland became an independent country. Released from captivity in Germany, military leader Piłsudski was named provisional head of the Rzeczpospolita Polska, or the Second Republic of Poland. His political party, the PPS, supported a democratic parliamentary system, a collective system of industrialization, agricultural reform, and labor unions. The new country had many social and economic issues to resolve, and both external hostilities and internal dissension marred the first years of independence.
First, the Polish-Soviet War of 1919–21 erupted over the issue of Poland’s eastern borders. In April 1919, the Polish army acquired Vilnius and, in July of the same year, secured the eastern part of Galicia from Ukrainian independence-seekers living there. One of the most decisive battles, called the “Miracle on the Vistula” by the Polish victors, became a popular subject for filmmakers in the years that followed. The war ended in March 1921 (one day after the country’s new constitution was passed) with the Treaty of Riga, which established the eastern borders almost exactly where they had been before the partitions (to the disappointment of Lithuania, which had wanted to keep Vilnius).
In the west, violent arguments over border issues became common in the mixed German- and Polish-populated area of Upper Silesia. Mutual resentment led to the migration of these groups away from each other, and several thousand people fled the country in the first years of independence. As the interwar period progressed, the lack of trust between Poles and Germans in the areas of the former German Empire hampered the development of good relations. This was particularly apparent in the regional film industry, where spats over film distribution and exhibition were commonplace until World War II.
The country was in a dire political and economic situation. The first elected president, Gabriel Narutowicz, was assassinated just one week after his election in 1921. It took several years to replace the interim currency with the new, permanent złoty. In the meantime, the government had to deal with both inflation and the demands of citizens, many of whom had expected immediate economic stability and good working conditions along with independence. Perhaps the most devastating government control on the film industry was put in place under the difficult economic conditions of the early 1920s. Strapped for funds, the government placed taxes on so-called luxury items. Tickets to the cinema were among the most heavily taxed of these items, putting moviegoing out of the reach of poorer citizens and subsequently leading to the closing of cinemas across the country.
According to census records, the population of Poland was just over twenty-seven million in 1921. Nearly one-third belonged to non-Polish minorities. When the final borders were drawn in 1923, Poland stretched from Poznań and Katowice in the west, Zakopane and Drohobych in the south, Białystok in the east, and Vilnius in the north. Present-day Gdańsk became the Free City of Danzig. Ukrainians (approximately four million people) and Belarusans (approximately one and a half million people) inhabited much of the eastern lands, speaking their own languages and aspiring to national independence. Among the Ukrainian lands, the desire for independence was so strong that violence between Poles and Ukrainians was commonplace. Ukrainians and Belarusans did not hold positions in the Polish government, universities, or other professional offices.
In May 1926, an armed coup led by Piłsudski replaced democratic institutions with authoritarianism. Piłsudski, who took the position of minister of war instead of president, was determined to rule with a heavy hand. He called his program of reform sanacja, or purification. His regime brought much-needed economic stability to the region in the late 1920s, which was reflected in the golden age of silent film production. However, the crash of the New York Stock Exchange and the ensuing Great Depression in the United States took their toll on the Polish economy in the early 1930s. The Polish economic depression and Piłsudski’s growing intolerance of opposition were obstacles to filmmaking, as they were to other social and cultural endeavors. To some, Piłsudski was Poland’s savior; to others, he was a dictator with no tolerance for political opposition. Adolf Hitler’s rise to power in Germany heightened tensions between the neighboring states, which the signing of the Polish-German Non-Aggression Pact in January 1934 did not altogether alleviate. More changes came with Piłsudski’s death in June 1935, when arguments and accusations broke out over the relevance of his regime. After an initial period of general reluctance to participate in elections and in public life, minorities, conservatives, socialists, and other groups engaged in fierce battles in the political arena. Even as the country regained economic stability in the late 1930s, it lacked social and political stability.
A lively café culture and literary movement known simply as “the twenty years between the wars” took shape (dwudziestolecie międzywojenne) as a refuge from this chaos. The enthusiastic, optimistic poets associated with the literary magazine Skamander inaugurated this era with their gatherings at Warsaw’s Café Ziemiańska. After them, in the capital and, to a lesser extent, in the country’s major cities, energetic writers and artists gathered in informal literary-artistic
