The Law of the Looking Glass. Sheila Skaff
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Any study of cinema requires deep attention to the processes of inclusion and exclusion. How does one account for the fact that cinema is concurrently an international commodity and a national product? How does one account for regional differences in cinema production and exhibition? The tendency has long been to draw the line along the languages chosen for production and, within these boundaries, to consider the influences of the major world centers of production on filmmaking in the smaller centers and to trace the influence of immigrants from smaller centers on works from major ones. Cinema in Poland, then, has become Polish cinema, Yiddish cinema, Ukrainian cinema, and Lithuanian cinema. Because of the great care that scholars have shown to avoid ingesting the cultural products of neighboring countries, it has become Russian and German cinema to a lesser degree. As a result, certain cinematic events have disappeared entirely from the history books.
This book attempts to recapture the multilingualism and social diversity of cinema in the partitioned lands and independent Poland and to show that the establishment of a national identity through film is a complicated matter in which oppositional principles were only sometimes at play. To this end, it accepts all films, regardless of language, made in the regions of the three empires that later became an independent country and, thereafter, in that country. It avoids mention of the careers of filmmakers, actors, and others outside of this geographic area because of space constraints and the inevitable judgments concerning loyalty to the nation that such mention entails. Instead, this book is concerned with the activity that took place in a certain region at a certain time. As it challenges established models of the region’s national cinemas, it creates a new framework for the study of film production and exhibition in early, silent, and early sound cinema. At the same time, this project seeks to expose and analyze an enduring ambivalence to a language-based national cinema and a unique belief in the communicative properties of images in Poland. Using Irzykowski’s “law of the looking glass” as its starting point, it locates these characteristics in the privileging of visual imagery over dialogue by film directors, producers, distributors, critics, and audiences in every stage of the industry’s development during the first four decades of cinema.
1
The First Films, 1896–1908
Itinerant Exhibitors: Lumière in the Austro-Hungarian, Prussian, and Russian Empires
THE TRAVELING EXHIBITORS WHO INTRODUCED motion pictures to the area eventually brought their demonstrations to all the main cities of the partitioned lands and to many of the small towns as well. Various factors influenced their choice of routes and stopping places. Railway lines allowed the exhibitors to move among the small towns along the routes from Warsaw to other cities in the Russian Empire and the Kingdom of Prussia. Rail connections in the eastern part of the Russian partition were less substantial, however, and poorly maintained links to Kraków, L’viv, and other towns of the former commonwealth hindered travel. Electrification, too, came about only gradually. Inhabitants of cities in the Prussian partition were receiving limited benefits from electricity by the end of the nineteenth century, while the process took even longer in the cities of the Russian and Austro-Hungarian partitions. Lights came on slowly in the countryside of each region. Local variations in population and wealth likely influenced exhibitors’ opportunities, as well. Urbanization opened possibilities for exhibition to larger audiences. Warsaw and its suburbs, for example, experienced immense growth between 1890 and 1910, when their total population climbed to almost one million. Levels of wealth were lowest in Galicia and highest in Prussia.1 Moreover, although higher levels of education accompanied urbanization, literacy spread slowly. In 1897, Warsaw’s illiteracy rate of 41 percent among men and 51 percent among women was lower than the rates in other large cities (in Łódź, for example, 55 percent among men and 66 percent among women), and much lower than the 69.5 percent overall rate in the Russian Empire.2
An advertisement for an early demonstration of the Cinématographe. Biblioteka Narodowa
The first demonstrations of “a theater of live photography” took place in Warsaw at the end of 1895 and the beginning of 1896, when Thomas Alva Edison’s Kinetoscope (or, perhaps, a counterfeit version of it) appeared first on Niecała Street and next in the Panopticum on Krakowskie Przedmieście Street.3 In July of that year, exhibitors lured audiences to an enormous ballroom and meeting space on Krakowskie Przedmieście Street with a (presumably counterfeit) copy of Louis and Auguste Lumière’s patented Cinématographe, an apparatus constructed to record, print, and project films that had been demonstrated for the first time in Paris in 1895. They chose images of people walking along the street, a fire engine in operation, dancers, and cat pranks for this first demonstration. This makeshift cinematograph disappointed the Warsaw patrons, who complained that the presentation was of poor quality and that its exhibitors were not organized or competent in handling the new technology. The viewers also remarked that it was unoriginal in light of other inventions of the time. One commentator writing in Kurier warszawski (Warsaw Courier) in 1896 claims that the invention
would have been awe-inspiring, if in the age of telephones and phonographs there could be anything awe-inspiring. It is the cinematograph, a combination of photography and electricity. . . . The thing is unusual in itself, very interesting and worthy of admiration, but the apparatus, which is operated by a Warsaw entrepreneur, does not work properly. Because we are not able to compare, we cannot, of course, conclude whether this is the fault of the still imperfect idea, or the apparatus itself, which acquainted us yesterday with a solution to the problem of movement.4
In L’viv, Galicia, entrepreneurs presented the first program of short films in September 1896. It is not clear whether the equipment featured Edison’s Vitascope, Kinetoscope, or a counterfeit, although the last is most probable.5 According to historian Andrzej Urbańczyk, the first exhibition included a separate demonstration of a related invention, the phonograph. The performances took place in the Grand Hotel and at a hostel for workers located in the same section of the city. Underscoring the dubious aspects of this presentation, the program advertised an unlikely slate of films that combined, for example, the Edison Company’s Chinese Laundry Scene (1894) and Annabelle Serpentine Dance (1894) with the Lumière production L’Arrivée d’un train à La Ciotat (Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat, 1895).6 Accounts of the first screenings give the impression that audiences arrived pessimistic, skeptical, and certain that the presentation would be second-rate, and they received no surprises. Writing some thirty-four years later, novelist Juliusz Kadren-Bandrowski recalls one of the first demonstrations in the city: “Some people said during the intermission that in spite of everything, the show would probably not make it to the end because, eventually, something must go wrong. Still others were certain that it all had to be some kind of false imitation and, sooner or later, it would turn out to be a devilish hoax.”7
On November 14, 1896, the first demonstration of the patented Cinématographe took place in Kraków’s Community Theater. The Galician city of Kraków—home to fewer than a hundred thousand people at the turn of the twentieth century—supported one of the most active theatrical traditions, including traditional stage theater, magic lantern shows, and demonstrations of other cerebral curiosities, in the partitioned lands. Lumière exhibitor Eugène Joachim DuPont brought the Cinématographe to Kraków from Vienna and advertised the demonstration in a local newspaper, Czas (Time). He re-created the program of twelve short films that had been shown during the famous first demonstration of the apparatus at the Grand Café in Paris eleven months earlier. It included, among others, Repas de bébé (1895), L’Arrivée d’un train à La Ciotat, La Charcuterie