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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 mécanique (1895), Arroseur arrosé (1895), and Quarrelle enfantine (1896). So successful was the process this time that, after its solo premiere, the short films were added to the end of regular theater performances as a bonus for audiences. The program changed often, and projections were not regular; but in December 1896 and sporadically throughout 1897, around forty short films were shown in Kraków.⁸ Additions to the program included Partie d’écarté (1895), Photographe (1895), Dragons traversant la Saône à la nage (1896), Enfants pêchant des crevettes (1896), Démolition d’un mur (1896), and Les Bains de Diane à Milan (1896). The virtual itinerary of the Kraków audiences included Madrid, Paris, Milan, Tyrol, and London, but nowhere outside western Europe. Although the quality of the projections was poor, reviewers expressed the astonishment and intrigue that audiences felt when they saw moving images of trains, people, and, especially, ocean waves.

Demonstrations of the Cinématographe soon followed in other cities in the partitioned lands, including Poznań in the Kingdom of Prussia and Warsaw in the Russian Empire. In the Russian partition, demonstrations took place in storefronts and restaurants. The railway that connected Warsaw to smaller towns in the region connected it to western European cities, as well, making the city a rest stop for many traveling entrepreneurs. Because it was relatively large and easily accessible, Warsaw was the most logical place for the new industry to take root. Although urban theaters and cafés held exhibitions, many shows took place in outdoor venues, such as the circus, during the warm season. According to film historians Władysław Banaszkiewicz and Witold Witczak, projections were held at twilight during almost every summer event in Warsaw at the turn of the century.⁹

The history of cinema in the small city of Bydgoszcz in the Kingdom of Prussia offers an exceptional opportunity to reflect upon issues of film, language, politics, and cultural identity. Scholars know little about the first exhibitions in Bydgoszcz. Although it is clear that itinerant exhibitors appeared in the city in April 1897, the names of those first exhibitors and the titles of films shown in the first programs are unavailable—but information on traveling exhibitors in small cities and towns is always difficult to find. What makes Bydgoszcz interesting is its character as a meeting point for Polish and German cultures. The majority of people in Bydgoszcz at the turn of the twentieth century spoke German and identified with the cultures to the west rather than those to the east, even though Poles considered the city an inseparable part of Polish national identity. Not surprisingly, residents may have had a perspective on the subjects of itinerant exhibitors’ programs that differed from that of residents of other cities.

In Filmowa Bydgoszcz, 1896–1939 (Filmic Bydgoszcz, 1896–1939), Mariusz Guzek suggests that the beginnings of a local film culture can be found in the photographic exhibits at the Kaiser Panorama located on Fryderykowska Street (now Marszałka Focha Street). Guzek explains that through the subjects of these exhibits—he cites Constantinople, the Rhine Valley, Cyprus, and Syria as examples—the residents of Bydgoszcz grew accustomed to seeing photographic representations of different parts of the world on a regular basis. He writes, “Still images, just like the later live photographs, affected the imagination, satisfied the curiosity associated with the unattainable spheres of life, and supplied entertainment.”¹⁰ Guzek notes that the central location of the first projections of the Kinetoscope (or Vitascope) in a hall on Berlinerstrasse (now Świętej Trójcy Street) was chosen on purpose, as it was one of the few public places in Bydgoszcz visited by both Poles and Germans.

While the Lumière brothers’ films took center stage in the Russian Empire, American picture shows made their way through the partitioned lands in the Kingdom of Prussia. Zygmunt Pogorzelski, a Polish exhibitor, showed the Lumières’ L’Arrivée d’un train à La Ciotat for the first time only in 1902 at an outdoor festival on the outskirts of Bydgoszcz (where a majority of the town’s Polish inhabitants lived).¹¹ The reason for this division may lie with historical ties dating to the Romantic period between speakers of the Polish and French languages in the Russian Empire, which made French films attractive, and with a long-standing struggle for power between speakers of the Polish and German languages in the Prussian partition, which led Polish speakers to shun German films. Linguistic and cultural affinities—or antipathies—thus reflected political alliances and rivalries. That these political-linguistic relationships affected even the earliest exhibitions of silent films shows the extent to which early exhibitors regarded cinema as an international business venture based as much on established political practices as on creative entrepreneurship and a sense of adventure. From the outset, exhibitors found themselves—willingly or not—part of the political landscape.

During the five years that followed the debut of the Cinématographe in Kraków, entrepreneurs moved from town to town throughout the partitions to offer demonstrations of their short films. In this time of actualités (short nonfiction films, such as travelogues, sports films, and news event films), reenactments, short fictionalized historical films, and one-act comedies, programs inevitably varied from town to town. The first traveling exhibitors had much autonomy with regard to the order of the films shown in their programs. They added title cards in the languages that they saw fit as well as sound or music when they deemed it appropriate. Films often complemented theatrical or technological attractions. These traveling entrepreneurs (as well as those whom they employed as additional entertainment) were often circus managers or performers, illusionists, magicians, or mimes, though some ambitious early filmmakers such as Bolesław Matuszewski arranged projections of their own work. As film historian Stanisław Janicki claims, spaces for their demonstrations “started to sprout like mushrooms after the rain.”¹² Until 1903, most of the venues were temporary, but the few permanent optical entertainment centers hinted at the future shape of the industry. As in many of the first demonstrations in Kraków, the traveling exhibitions of “live pictures” were usually additions to other presentations such as live theater or magic lantern shows.¹³

Generally, exhibitors chose a venue, set up the equipment, collected a small entrance fee from spectators (or demanded a part of the fee collected for entrance into the other parts of the spectacle), projected short films for around twenty minutes, dismantled the equipment, and moved on. Permanent cinemas had yet to be established. However, audiences could count on seeing short films at a few regular venues throughout the region. In Łódź, brothers Władysław and Antoni Krzemiński projected Lumière films at their Gabinet Iluzji and offered a space, called the Bioscop, to traveling vendors in need of a storefront to rent. Also in Łódź, regular projections of the “Edison cinematograph” were held in Helenów, a once-private park that had been offering access to a waterfall, playground, restaurant, candy store, and theater to paying visitors since the late 1880s. In a large concert hall in the park, the first projection using a Lumière apparatus took place on June 11, 1897. Audiences saw half-hour programs consisting of eight Lumière short films featuring coronations, royal parades, and other events from western Europe.¹⁴ According to film historians Hanna Krajewska and Stanisław Janicki, a locale for motion picture demonstrations might have been opened in a former restaurant at 120 Piotrkowska Street in Łódź in 1899.¹⁵

In Poznań, exhibitors regularly held projections at a popular restaurant owned by Leon Mettler. A successful entrepreneur, Franciszek Józef Oeser, opened the first storefront cinema in L’viv, the Teatr Elektryczny. According to Urbańczyk, Kraków, too, had a Teatr Elektryczny that advertised the novelty of electricity along with cinema as late as the summer of 1905, long after electricity had ceased to be a revelation in many European cities. It announced, “Electric people and electric animals! Tigers, lions, elephants! Everything that lives fights on the electric canvas. People walk and dance. Director Oeser transforms into an electric person on the screen in front of the public’s eyes!”¹⁶

Władysław and Antoni Krzemiński ran a permanent cinema at 4 Nowy Rynek Street in Łódź, which held forty-minute projections of short film programs from 1901 until 1903. Teatr żywych fotografii, as they called it, was equipped with an imported projector from Paris. Krajewska describes it as a three-room space—with an entry room, viewing room, and projection room—on the first floor of a building next to a candy store. The entry room, adorned with stereoscopes, functioned as both ticket booth and waiting room. The viewing room held thirty seats (priced according to proximity to the screen) and standing room for sixty, though twice this number generally crowded into it.¹⁷

Within a decade, almost every major city in the region had a permanent motion picture theater. The extravagant, Secession-style Teatr Elizeum-Palais d’Illusion in Warsaw, with room for four hundred people, was one such venue. Its repertoire included films by the first local filmmaker, Kazimierz Prószyński, in 1902. According to film historians Małgorzata Hendrykowska and Marek Hendrykowski, restaurateur Mettler dedicated one of his properties in the so-called Promenade Park in Poznań to motion picture projections beginning in December 1903.¹⁸ Permanent motion picture theaters were opened in Kraków and L’viv in 1906; in Toruń and Vilnius in 1907; in Bydgoszcz, Częstochowa, and Lublin in 1908; in Przemyśl in 1910; and in Rzeszów and Tarnów in 1911, although cinema in the partitions remained a predominately outdoor event for several more years.¹⁹

Small, permanent theaters specialized not only in motion pictures but also in vaudeville, cabaret, and other popular forms of entertainment. Only the largest cities could support extravagant theaters; in most places, motion picture theaters were still located in storefronts or freestanding cabins, designated only by a generic sign, well into the twentieth century. Ticket prices and ambience ranged from inexpensive and informal to expensive and formal, depending on the venue, the number of acts in the repertoire, the anticipated spending power of the crowd, and the size of the town (as well as the general economic situation of the given empire). Krajewska notes that a ticket to the cinema in Łódź before 1906 cost between twenty and thirty kopecks, while a ticket to the symphony cost fifty kopecks, and a pound of sugar cost thirteen kopecks.²⁰ The failure of most attempts to create lavish, permanent places of entertainment on the model of the Elizeum is likely attributable to customers’ inability or unwillingness to pay higher ticket prices.

Between stints at these urban venues, traveling entrepreneurs visited small towns. They announced their shows with newspaper advertisements (concentrating on the novelty of the invention rather than the films themselves)²¹ and handbills, which they distributed to workers. The Krzemiński brothers, for example, handed out approximately fifty thousand handbills to inform people of upcoming shows each week.²² The smaller the venue, the more likely it was that the entrepreneurs would call their demonstrations “circuses” rather than the more urbane “theater.” Style and quality of facilities varied, as well. Traveling entrepreneurs often had to rent small stores, where they projected the short films and arranged the crowds in the best way that they could. Even in the more stable venues, such as the Krzemińskis’ Bioscop, building conditions could interrupt the flow of spectators. As one story goes, spectators at Bioscop had to leave the building through a window after the show. On another occasion, an exhibitor acted as both ticket seller and projectionist. When he was ready to project the films from his makeshift cubicle, he locked the door behind the spectators, trapping them inside the building.²³

From the beginning, exhibitors situated permanent motion picture theaters near other, similar establishments to form entertainment districts. In Warsaw, the main entertainment district was located in the city center, on and around Marszałkowska, Nowy Świat, and Krakowskie Przedmieście streets. A few cinemas opened outside this area, as well. Most notably, the Kak w Paryże was located in the center of a mainly Jewish residential district on Dzika Street. The name of the theater (As in Paris) was Russian, but it was advertised using the Latin alphabet,²⁴ and its patrons were most likely Yiddish speakers. How much did language matter to audiences? Apparently, it mattered less in Warsaw than in cities in the Kingdom of Prussia, such as Bydgoszcz and Poznań, where the choice of language used in exhibition, as in other aspects of cultural life, was a more politically charged issue.

In her study of cinema in the Polish lands before 1908, Hendrykowska finds that early cinema had become associated with fairs, magic shows, and low forms of entertainment. The word jarmark, which she associates with early cinema, literally means “trash” or “kitsch” but also refers to the fairgrounds where the exhibitions took place. As she points out, the idea that cinema offered entertainment only for a public that needed and liked kitsch corresponds with images of fairgrounds in the contemporary media. She writes, “The fundamental mistake made in this interpretation has several causes. One of them is the acceptance of exclusively aesthetic criteria of value (and these are contemporary criteria) and, at the same time, the omission of the elements of information and knowledge that motion pictures brought with them.” She claims that in the search for elements of kitsch in early cinema, its broader historical and social-cultural context is lost. Within this broader context, cinema before 1908 is “a new element in the spiritual life of the human being, which—although this may sound somewhat pompous—influences the character of human nature.”²⁵

Hendrykowska gives several reasons for the presence of motion pictures at the fair. She claims that live photography found itself in the circus as an extension of pantomime, an element of the traditional circus program that was being phased out because of its expense. She also points out its attractiveness as a new invention and notes that motion pictures disappeared from circus programs in 1905, as circus audiences began to tire of their novelty.²⁶ Jarmark and early cinema shared a tendency toward spectacle and shock rather than narrative. However, she differentiates film programs from other forms of entertainment presented at the fairgrounds. She writes, “Both the jarmark and the cinema offered spectators a certain product—but each of a somewhat different character. The jarmark always shocked with foreignness and exploited incomprehensible occurrences, which were inconceivable, strange, and horrible at the same time for the patron of its booths.” In jarmark entertainments, it was the content that produced astonishment; in cinema, it was the new medium itself that aroused wonder. The true product of the cinema, then, was to Hendrykowska the film rather than the cinematic apparatus, which, though not strange or horrible, was foreign and inconceivable at first. “From the very beginning,” however, “cinema moved in the direction of experiences that were shared by all people. Audiences were shown workers leaving a factory, a child’s breakfast, the Russo-Japanese War, a blacksmith at work, plazas in Paris, and the sea’s waves crashing on the shore. Unlike the jarmark, it was ‘truthful,’ timely, and understandable. Because of these characteristics, it fulfilled an integrating function on a scale that extended far beyond the walls of the first cinemas. Could the fairground’s entertainment capture the minds, hearts, and mass imagination of people to the same extent that cinema did?”²⁷

If early cinema performed an integrating function, which other such spectacles did it resemble? Did it gather audiences for entertainment, for education, for an alternative to legitimate theater, or for all of these? This is a question that no scholar of early cinema may avoid and one of the most difficult to answer, in no small part because the answer differs from region to region. At the root of the problem is the relationship of cinema to modernity, which swept over the continents at a pace less even than that of the Cinématographe. In partitioned Poland, consideration of cinema as entertainment or in comparison to the popular garden theater (or outdoor stage theater) allows scholars to speculate about the gender, class, and ethnicity of its spectators. There is evidence, for example, that the garden theater attracted a cross section of the population, and it may be the case that a similarly broad segment of the population attended the early cinema projections. Hendrykowska is concerned here with a different function of early cinema, however. She writes, “By illustrating the press, photography always created an impression of second-hand information. Film created the illusion that one was participating in the observed events oneself.”²⁸

Were viewers, then, participating in modernity? Hendrykowska continues, “In its first decade, cinema fulfilled viewers’ cognitive needs to a great extent. It provided much more intensive, deeper informational stimuli about the world than did the newspaper. And so film . . . was not only kitschy entertainment but also an inexpensive way to kill free time, an artificial paradise that served to deform the true colors of the everyday.” There are at least three aspects of modernity at stake here: the modern, technological apparatus that replaces the newspaper, the urban construct of leisure time, and the knowledge of the relationship between modernity and nationhood itself, which audiences perceive when they see the true colors of the everyday contrasted with the screen image. Hendrykowska concludes, “Today almost every child knows how the skyscrapers of New York, the canals of Venice, and the plazas of Paris look. At that time, viewers—most often those who had never stuck their noses beyond the borders of the local dive bar in their entire lives—saw these for the first time. I think that films were often the source of information about the world for them.”²⁹

A lack of sources prevents the researcher from determining positively what the first audiences took from the projections. However, it might be useful to consider Hendrykowska’s ideas in the context of the relationship between modernity and nationhood. What might people in a stateless nation of Europe have seen in the first foreign films? Would they have been awed by the skyscrapers of New York or by the possibility of finding work on the docks? Would they have been transfixed by the canals of Venice or by thoughts of the Polish Legion in Italy? Did they search the images of the plazas of Paris for their expatriate cousins?

If early cinema was a source of information about the world beyond the partitions, the lessons that it gave about that world may have been hard to swallow. One piece of evidence of audiences’ sophisticated viewing practices comes from Włodzimierz Perzyński’s 1908 correspondence from Paris, “The Triumph of the Cinematograph.” In it, Perzyński relates, “Just a week after the funeral of King Carlos, I was able to watch it in one of the little theaters on the Grand Boulevard. And as an aside, this living picture convinced me more than all of the articles and telegrams that the people of Lisbon were not all worried about the tragic death of their leader, who had insisted on their reputation as happy Portuguese citizens for his entire life only to find that they were not always happy.”³⁰ For Perzyński, cinema was a means of obtaining the truth, but less the truth of national symbols than the truth of what these symbols masked.

What is certain is that the short films presented by itinerant exhibitors in the partitioned lands influenced the political and cultural reality of the day. The most famous example comes from Stephen Bottomore’s 1984 article, “Dreyfus and Documentary.” Bottomore’s findings that itinerant exhibitor Francis Doublier was able to dupe Jewish patrons of motion picture exhibitions in the Russian partition in 1898 demonstrate that the emotional impact of motion pictures may have lasted much longer than their initial impressions. Through a montage of images, Doublier made it appear that Captain Alfred Dreyfus was landing on Devil’s Island. Doublier showed his films for several months, until one audience member pointed out that there had been no cinema in 1894 when the Dreyfus affair had occurred.³¹ It is possible, too, that the emotional effects of film were exaggerated by the accompanying music and sound effects or by the practice of hiring barkers (lecturers), who explained the plot and provided dialogue for the projected images. However, there is no evidence that barkers enjoyed significant popularity in the partitioned lands, and exhibitors added film music only gradually in the first decade.

Who were the first audiences? Records of the earliest traveling exhibitors state that they saw their audiences as workers and small business owners. What does this mean, though? Because of regional differences in the growth of working-class political movements, Polish nationals in the Russian Empire were more likely to identify with this description than were Polish nationals in the largely agrarian domains of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, but even within the eastern lands a sense of a working class was not ubiquitous before the 1905 Russian Revolution. Where did the traveling exhibitors imagine that their rural customers worked? Did “small business” indicate farms, shops, or both? In their respective accounts of the period, scholar Stanisław Janicki and cinema owner Antoni Krzemiński give different answers. Janicki writes, “Cinema was entertainment for the masses, while intellectuals and the bourgeoisie rather avoided this refuge.”³² Krzemiński, on the other hand, recalls that “90 percent of the audience was from the working or skilled-trade class and the other 10 percent from the theater-going public, who went to the newly opened Bioscop in disguise, embarrassed, and under the impression that it was not a suitable place for their entertainment.”³³

Stefania Beylin writes, “Crowds, mainly juvenile boys curious about the moving images, who saw in them some kind of magic, gathered at the first short films. That same audience had come there before in order to watch the so-called disappearing pictures—the magic lantern that showed scenes from Paris, Rome, the seaside, and a waterfall—in a large hall (in which there had once been a riding school). Compared to the new invention, what not long before had seemed so attractive now lost its charm. Those images were immobile, and the public, particularly school-age youth, demanded movement.”³⁴

In other sections, describing the social makeup of the first cinema crowds, both Krzemiński and Beylin mention the presence of people with a connection to the theater; but for the former, these people were theater audiences, while for the latter, they were actors. Where Krzemiński saw workers and skilled tradespeople, Beylin saw schoolboys. Moreover, who were the intellectuals? Were they the actors or regular theater attendees? Did agriculturalists attend the cinema at a different time of day than tradespeople?

The few mentions of audience demographics attest to the presence of certain social groups, but there is little evidence that only certain social groups attended the cinema. There is not enough information available for it to be stated with any degree of certainty that the working class enjoyed cinema more than the intellectual class. First, in the relatively less industrialized cities of the partitions, the working class may have been little more than an invention of ideologues or mistaken traveling entrepreneurs, who associated certain dress and mannerisms with the working classes in their native cities. Second, in a society in which only 2 percent of the population completed higher education and in which the inteligencja remained relatively small, intellectuals in all of the partitioned lands necessarily constituted a minority.

Could it be the case that people of all ages and classes attended the cinema? Perhaps Józef Jedlicz (Kopuściński) gives the most accurate assessment in 1924, when he writes, “Everyone—well-wishers and naysayers, the bothered and the indifferent—gave in to irresistible temptation and went to the cinema. Some went more often, others less often, but we can say with certainty that almost everyone went. The elderly went, and the young went; the masses and the spiritual aristocracy went; the intellectuals, the illiterate, and the semiliterate; the refined dame, the chambermaid, and the servant; the landowner, the worker, the university professor, and the priest.”³⁵ In the first years of traveling cinema, many people went whenever and wherever they could. They slipped into the rented storefronts or gathered at outdoor festivals to relish the novelty. Cinema might have been a social event for the working youth, an art form for the inteligencja, and a curiosity for everyone. By all accounts, people congregated at the sole theater established (sometimes with government support) in each small town or shtetl, or in the theaters of each large city in order to watch silent films. At this time, audiences were not as segregated by language as they would be several years later. Projection of Polish-language intertitles onto foreign films did not begin until 1908.

Perhaps because of the paucity of sources, little research has been done on spectatorship or audience awareness—how audiences comprehended what they saw on the screen—in Poland. The types of features produced and the recorded responses of nonprofessionals to them suggest that people looked to the cinema for entertainment as well as advances in technology. They also celebrated newcomers to the industry, particularly movie stars. To a certain extent, they supported the nation-building process through attendance at patriotic historical films and by championing the cause of domestic film production. However, they also may have gone to the cinema as an escape, as demonstrated in the excitement that nonprofessional critics—mainly poets, both distinguished and amateur—expressed about the darkened rooms in which audience members became anonymous. Many people, regardless of social class, gender, and education, probably appreciated the accessibility and lack of pretension of the cinema. As philosopher Marian Stępowski writes in 1914, “The secret to cinema’s success really lies in this: it is easily and inexpensively available, and you can enter and exit the auditorium at any moment without even the obligation of taking off your overcoat.”³⁶ For early audience members, cinema was relatively inexpensive, pleasant, and hassle-free. Audiences also may have found it an entertaining way of learning about themselves, distant lands, and exciting cultures. Still, because these generalizations do not take into account the broad range of professional, social, and religious backgrounds that people brought with them to the cinema in Poland, they are not sufficient to constitute a serious study of changes in audience composition over time in the different cities and regions of the nation.

Early Film Production and Distribution

During the first ten years of moving picture exhibition in partitioned Poland, repertoires originated mainly in other countries. Only a few creative individuals were interested in doing more than simply importing the new medium. Among the first inventors of film equipment in Poland were Piotr Lebiedziński, Jan and Józef Popławski, and Kazimierz Prószyński. Among the first producers were Bolesław Matuszewski and Prószyński, whose Pleograf is synonymous with both a camera-projector of his invention and Warsaw’s first film production company. The number of people involved in turn-of-the-century film production was limited—so much so that these five pioneers of early cinema constituted the film industry in Poland through 1905. They imitated and attempted to improve upon the apparatuses built by others, with the ultimate goal of marketing their own equipment regionally. The sense of “too little, too late” that surrounded their work lingered throughout most of the era with regard to technological developments in filmmaking and projection equipment.

The five film pioneers in the partitioned lands achieved some remarkable accomplishments. The Popławski brothers, working with Lebiedziński, built a Zooskop Uniwersalny, with which they recorded scenes on glass plates in the mid-1890s. The individual contributions of Lebiedziński include the construction of prototypes for motion picture cameras and the manufacture of paper for photographic purposes. Supporting himself with a camera store and photochemical laboratory in Warsaw, Lebiedziński also developed a bulky two-camera system to take and project motion pictures, which he used to make very short films in 1895 or 1896. Documentary and comedy, these short films featured actors from popular garden theater productions. Lebiedziński continued to serve as adviser and vendor to filmmakers until the end of his life.

Kazimierz Prószyński, the son of a successful Warsaw photographer, was educated as an engineer in Belgium but began working on the development of live photography in his mid-twenties. He created the first model of his camera-projector—first called the Kinematograf Uniwersalny, then the Pleograf, and then the BioPleograf before it came to be known permanently by its second name—between 1894 and 1896 in Warsaw. In 1898 and 1899, he began offering public demonstrations of his invention.

The Pleograf was considered more than a new form of entertainment; reviewers hailed it as a victory for the educational, public, and private life of the nation. Tygodnik ilustrowany (Illustrated Weekly) called it less an object for play than a device for scientific education.³⁷ An anonymous reporter for a small Polish-language periodical published in the Prussian partition, Gazeta toruńska (Toruń Gazette) describes a demonstration of the Pleograf: “The camera functioned very lightly and exactly. In general, one may decide that this invention is a finished thing that does not need improvement. Because of its low cost, the camera is very well suited to use by amateurs. It will not be long before every family will be able to own a similar camera and to make enduring live portraits of their loved ones together with their various facial expressions.”³⁸ The editors of Kurier warszawski found that the Pleograf was simpler and quieter, functioned more easily, and allowed more exact movement of the film through the camera than did the Cinématographe.³⁹

Prószyński put the Pleograf to use in Warsaw’s first production company, also called Pleograf, which he founded in late 1901 or early 1902. Between then and its closing in 1903, the company managed to complete and exhibit at least thirteen productions averaging two hundred to three hundred meters in length. These included actualités documenting ambulance runs, horse races, sledding in Warsaw parks, and a summer concert of the philharmonic, as well as the one-shot fiction film Powrót birbanta (The Return of the Merry Fellow, 1902) and Walkirie (The Valkyries, 1903), part of a live performance of Richard Wagner’s opera. A comedy, The Return of the Merry Fellow, featured actor Kazimierz Junosza-Stępowski as a young man attempting to walk home after an evening of heavy drinking. Prószyński took advantage of every opportunity to project his films, appearing at such events as a Festival of the Association for the Care of the Terminally Ill in Warsaw and an agricultural exhibition in Vilnius. Audiences could watch all of his films at the Teatr Elizeum-Palais d’Illusion on Karowa Street and his short documentaries in a theater in the Ogród Saski in spring 1902. Eventually, the difficulty of obtaining high-quality celluloid and the camera’s constant malfunctioning turned entrepreneurs away from the Pleograf. In spite of its lower cost, Prószyński’s Pleograf was never able to replace the imported systems. Prószyński’s status as a Warsaw intellectual helped him little when it came to finding support for his inventions, which most people in his community ignored or belittled because they saw them as less technologically advanced than foreign inventions. More importantly, audiences soon grew bored with Pleograf films. Uninterested in short films about daily life in their own city and unwilling to support Prószyński in his creative endeavors, they rejected his work and, eventually, convinced him to leave the partitioned lands. Potential business partners may have avoided him because of his reputation for lax management of finances and unwillingness to consider the prospect of material gain. Most likely, though, his failures had a lot to do with his attitude toward serving his nation. In writing Prószyński’s biography, Władysław Jewsiewicki found that he was known for his aversion to what he considered lofty nationalist slogans.⁴⁰ Pleograf folded in 1903, but Prószyński continued to work on his inventions in Belgium, England, and France. For example, he attempted to make and exhibit sound film through use of the gramophone. His experiments took place in London between 1908 and 1912, during the period when Léon Gaumont and Thomas Edison were developing their own picture-sound synchronization techniques, and resulted in the invention of the Photophone.

There is little evidence of filmmaking outside of Warsaw. Most likely, the first film with a Polish title made in L’viv was W kawiarni lwowskiej (In a L’viv Café), which premiered in that city in June 1897. According to Dobrochna Dabert, a second film titled Odsłonięcie pomnika Adama Mickiewicza we Lwowie (Unveiling the Adam Mickiewicz Statue in L’viv) was also registered; Władysław Mickiewicz (the bard’s son) took part in the October 30, 1904, celebration.⁴¹ Like Warsaw in the scenes captured by Prószyński’s Pleograf, the city of L’viv featured prominently in these films. By choosing to film the unveiling of a statue of Mickiewicz, the filmmakers were reflecting and celebrating the place of Polish literature in the Austro-Hungarian city.

By 1902, filmmakers already had sketched a range of uses for the medium based on permitting audience members to recognize, empathize, and laugh with the figure on the screen. Establishing a national industry took some time, however. Although the reason for this may have been the economic impossibility of establishing in the partitioned lands a national film industry on a level with that of France or the United States, it also may have had as much to do with audiences’ general distrust of Prószyński and local filmmaking in this period. According to Irzykowski’s law of the looking glass, viewers wanted to see the events that they had experienced, but in abstraction from reality. Unfortunately for Prószyński, his first films offered the audience identification with a myriad of inconsistencies in their daily and long-term existences. They wanted something else. The law of the looking glass, even more than infrastructure, was at the core of a national industry. Poet Anatol Stern’s recollection of Prószyński speaks volumes in this regard. He writes, “I still remember well a meeting and conversation with Kazimierz Prószyński, a pale, thin man of somewhat diabolic appearance, who contested with the Lumière brothers for the victor’s palm in the invention of the motion picture apparatus. What’s more, I have been always deeply convinced that if Prószyński had been born under a lucky star, then the name of his Pleograf would have replaced ‘cinematograph,’ and today, along with millions of people, we would be talking about world ‘pleography’ and not ‘cinematography.’”⁴²

For the first decade of cinema in the partitioned lands, companies in the large cities of the empires or locals doing business with them handled film distribution. While Berlin and Vienna presumably supplied films for the German and Austro-Hungarian empires, the companies of Jadwiga Golcz (called Golcz i Szalay, though Szalay’s identity is not clear), Piotr Lebiedziński, and Julian Dreher established the first distribution networks in Warsaw and Łódź in 1899 to buy and sell foreign films. Golcz even organized the first exhibition of film and cinematic equipment in Warsaw in 1901.⁴³ For the most part, however, the early entrepreneurs were not dependent on their services. They preferred to travel to larger cities such as Paris and Berlin in order to buy their films directly. In 1905, representatives of major foreign companies began to come to smaller cities to sell films and equipment, making the process easier. The relative abundance of foreign production and dissatisfaction with local production meant that foreign films dominated the screen at the turn of the century. Consequently, so did images of foreign cities and cultures.

Polish-speaking residents of Poznań, as Hendrykowska has explained, understood the first film camera as an import from Germany. According to Hendrykowska, they associated it with claims of German technical proficiency and believed that it symbolized the “genius” that German nationalist movements in the area were promulgating. In the Prussian partition, where Polish speakers were on the whole considerably poorer than their German-speaking neighbors, this stereotype provoked anger and resentment. Seeing them as a form of German propaganda, Polish speakers kept a certain distance from German films.⁴⁴ This situation was an early example of a problem that recurred throughout the pre-1939 period: popular reception of films and technology from “foreigners”—a category that sometimes included the ethnic majority and sometimes ethnic minorities—depended more on contemporary politics than on quality. German and English films fared the worst in the patriotism disputes, even when they fared the best in terms of critical acclaim and financial success. For much of the period, a general rule may have been that the farther the setting from the Polish lands and from areas with a high concentration of Polish immigrants, the better. Scenes of life in Paris, Indochina, and Siam found far more acceptance than scenes of life in Berlin or Moscow, for example. Films from distant lands fulfilled the public’s desire for information about geography, cultures, and customs; they did not mirror a known external reality, but appealed to audiences’ desire for abstraction from the complexity of external reality. Scenes of daily life in other parts of the world offered an opportunity to find commonalities (everywhere, people wash clothes, feed children, attend funerals) and avoid differences (such as access to water, quality and quantity of food, life expectancy). At the same time, audiences perceived less threat of cultural or political manipulation from these films than from films made in neighboring countries.

There were many German-language newspapers in Prussian Bydgoszcz. As unexceptional as it was, then, that the German-language publication Bromberger Tageblatt (Bromberg Daily) first brought the news of moving pictures to the residents of Bydgoszcz, the implications were far-reaching. As both Hendrykowska and Guzek have pointed out repeatedly, Polish-speaking residents of the area learned of the phenomenon of cinema in the German language. The resulting association that many Polish-speaking residents drew between cinema and the German Empire is rooted in the period just before the traveling exhibitors appeared. Cinema was, from the outset, western, inorganic, and an obstacle to self-expression partially because of the language in which it was first introduced to the Polish minority and because of the rural population’s reliance on itinerant exhibitors to bring it to them. There were, of course, other reasons that do not relate directly to cinema. A wave of political events began in the Prussian partition in 1896, when, under pressure from Prussia, the local administration changed Poznań’s city colors from the red and white of the former Polish flag. The next few years saw the names of towns and villages throughout the Prussian partition changed from Polish to German, and the Polish language eliminated from church services. At the same time, the Prussian government invested heavily in the area’s infrastructure, effectively setting in motion an ongoing debate over the benefits and drawbacks of colonialism.⁴⁵

This debate was not limited to the Prussian partition, however. A similar situation arose in the Russian and Austro-Hungarian empires in areas with high concentrations of Lithuanians and Ukrainians. Piotr Wandycz writes that the government of Vilnius “was successful in exploiting and fanning Lithuanian antagonism to the Poles. The average Lithuanian thought of a Pole as a lord and class enemy, but Russian schools propagated hatred of everything Polish. Virtually no political counterpropaganda came from the loyalist Polish aristocracy or from the gentry isolated in their old-type historic patriotism. Within the church, linguistic Polish-Lithuanian friction multiplied as the younger clergy promoted Lithuanian national ideals.”⁴⁶ A small Belarusan national movement was a perceived threat to the Russian government, while in eastern Galicia, “[t]he political picture was changing. The Polish administration was willing to make cultural concessions and assumed that it would thereby gain the Ukrainians’ gratitude. The latter viewed such concessions as a token of more to come. Consequently, they felt deceived, and the Poles became irritated.”⁴⁷ All the ethnicities in the region, including Belarusans, Germans, Jews, Lithuanians, Poles, and Ukrainians, who identified with at least one of the former countries saw the need to establish paradigms for dealing with escalating tension in all of the empires. Throughout the partitions and in certain other parts of the empires, mass movements of all sizes were emerging to challenge the dominant cultural and economic priorities. Inevitably, the language in which news of the advent of cinema was presented played a role in the development of film in the region.

Film Theory and Practice: The Contributions of Bolesław Matuszewski

In 1898, the editors of Tygodnik ilustrowany delighted in a “nice surprise for our ethnographers: Bolesław Matuszewski has sent his specialists around our country to take cinematographic pictures of the diversions, traditions, and such of our people. We can only applaud, as humanity will gain a lot from this.” The task before Matuszewski and the motion picture apparatus was enormous. With regard to the filmmaker’s proposal to employ film as a source of history, the Tygodnik’s editors write, “As a work of the human mind, every literary or printed source must, from the very nature of things, be more or less reticent. Because of this, historical truth is relative. However, the cinematograph—unmistakably a source of, as they say, mechanical history—is an absolutely truthful document: the cinematograph never lies.”⁴⁸

Although Matuszewski received recognition mainly for his work in Paris, he came closer than his colleague Prószyński did to earning the title of Polish national filmmaker. A theorist and itinerant cameraman, Matuszewski had an interest in the medium that reflected his concern with documentation and education. Film, he felt, was a tool for scientific discovery and advances in medical research, as well as a means of accurately depicting historical events. His ideas moved between France and the partitioned lands with greater ease than did those of Prószyński, perhaps because his writings refer to an undefined, warmly welcomed “truth” that he saw film portraying. Just as DuPont’s “truth” leaped from a patent on an apparatus to a state of affairs, Matuszewski’s “truth” traveled between surgical procedures and national history. His writings encouraged critics to describe the cinematograph in evocative phrases such as “mechanical history,” a history in which, because all misunderstandings and deceits would be revealed, wrongs relating to the nation would have to be made right. Unlike his colleague, Matuszewski delivered his ideas in just the right places, at just the right time.

With his brother, Zygmunt, Matuszewski came to Warsaw from France in 1895 to open a photography studio on Marszałkowska Street. The studio, called Lux-Sigismond et Comp., lasted at least until 1908. Meanwhile, Matuszewski was traveling throughout eastern and western Europe with his motion picture camera; he even may have worked for the Lumière brothers in France between 1896 and 1898.⁴⁹ From May to November 1897, he probably served as cinematographer for the Russian tsar. Of Tygodnik ilustrowany’s claim that he had begun making ethnographic films about the customs and culture of Poland in 1898, only one bit of evidence remains: Matuszewski’s Sceny ludowe w Polsce (Folk Scenes in Poland), projected in July 1898, is likely the first ethnographic film made in the partitioned lands.⁵⁰ His most notable achievement in film production was in the field of medical documentation. While working in the Russian Empire, he filmed several medical procedures in Saint Petersburg and Warsaw, including leg amputations, surgically assisted births, and therapeutic treatments for involuntary movements associated with diseases of the nervous system. He showed these and other images publicly in Warsaw in the late 1890s. These films make Matuszewski an early—if not the earliest—medical and scientific filmmaker as well as a prominent contributor to early nonfiction film in the partitioned lands.

Because Polish film thought is heavily invested in the notion of collective memory, it generally traces its own origins to Matuszewski. In his theoretical writings, Matuszewski saw the significance of documentary film to the project of bringing the nation together culturally and in historical remembrance. Two of his pamphlets, A New Source of History: The Creation of a Depository for Historical Cinematography and Live Photography: What It Is; What It Should Be were published in France in 1898 and generated excitement as soon as they were translated from their original French into Polish. In the partitioned lands, short articles on the pamphlets appeared immediately following their publication in local newspapers and magazines, claiming, for example, “The humanities will profit greatly”⁵¹ from his ideas. His work was associated with progress in the sciences, medicine, and history, and was a source of pride for Polish speakers, who expressed satisfaction with the positive reception of his efforts abroad. In a third pamphlet, An Innovation in Graphology and in Expertise in Writing (1899), Matuszewski expresses his views on the use of cinema in distinguishing truth from fiction, while in a fourth, Portraits on Vitrified Enamel (1901), he explains his technique of fixing photographic images.⁵² In Live Photography and A New Source of History, Matuszewski articulates his interest in film as a potential tool for the advancement of educational and social goals and he argues for the creation of a periodical devoted to the technical and cultural aspects of film and cinema.

In A New Source of History, Matuszewski proposes the creation of a depository for filmed images documenting historical moments. Film, according to Matuszewski, is a means for historical documentation, but not only that: It comprises history, bits of life that, though past, may be revived through a gesture as simple as projecting a stream of light onto a makeshift screen. Matuszewski writes, “No doubt the effects of history are always easier to seize than the causes. But one thing makes another clearer; these effects, fully brought to light by the cinema, will provide clear insights into causes which heretofore have remained in semi-obscurity. And to lay hands not on everything that exists but on everything that can be grasped is already an excellent achievement for any source of information, scientific or historic.”⁵³

Matuszewski privileges visual communication over verbal in much the same way that Irzykowski does years later. Yet he does not mask the political dimensions of his interest in filmmaking as a path for discovery of the nation’s errors. “Even oral accounts and written documents do not give us the complete course of the events they describe, but nevertheless History exists, true after all, in the larger spectrum even if its details are often distorted,” he writes. “If only for the First Empire and the Revolution, to choose examples, we could reproduce the scenes which animated photography easily brings back to life, we could have resolved some perhaps minor but nonetheless perplexing questions, and saved floods of useless ink!”⁵⁴ Visual documentation is proof of actions and of the motives behind those actions, according to Matuszewski. The general political situation in the partitioned lands makes apparent the potential impact of such a visual record. To reproduce scenes from the French Revolution or any of the major events that shaped the Europe from which Poland had disappeared must have seemed an astounding proposal. Matuszewski also attempts to define the specificity of cinema against other forms of historical documentation in these early writings. He contemplates the nature of the filmmaking apparatus, ultimately defining it as a medium, a conduit for achieving the goal that he proposes. He considers film’s limitations, as well, ultimately deciding that even these limitations further this goal of documenting reality by new means. He writes, “The cinematographer does not record the whole of history perhaps, but at least that part he gives us is uncontestable and of absolute truth. Ordinary photography can be retouched, even to the point of transformation. But just try to make identical changes on a thousand or twelve-hundred microscopic images!”⁵⁵

Why was Matuszewski so interested in truth? Part of the reason was his experiences as an inhabitant of France and partitioned Poland; members of different ethnic groups within the Russian Empire sometimes explained historical events that had taken place in Warsaw differently, and, again, statements relating authenticity to moving images had been a part of cinematic foreignness since DuPont. There was less a desire to prove one’s interpretation than a need. He writes, “It can be said that intrinsic to animated photography is an authenticity, exactitude and precision which belong to it alone. It is the epitome of the truthful and infallible eye-witness. It can verify verbal testimony, and if human witnesses contradict each other about an event, it can resolve the disagreement by silencing the one it belies.”⁵⁶

His basis for evaluating the accuracy of motion pictures is, of course, mistaken. His elaboration, however, points to his desire for resurgence in historical remembrance. His writing is heavily informed by the nineteenth-century Polish Romantic nationalist literary tradition and its sense of longing for a forgotten identity, which has fallen into a slumber and must be reawakened. He continues, “Thus this cinematographic print in which a scene is made up of a thousand images, and which, unreeled between a focused light source and a white sheet makes the dead and the absent stand up and walk, this simple band of printed celluloid constitutes not only a proof of history but a fragment of history itself, and a history which has not grown faint, which does not need a genius to resuscitate it. It is there, barely asleep, and like those elementary organisms which after years of dormancy are revitalized by a bit of warmth and humidity, in order to reawaken and relive the hours of the past, it only needs a little light projected through a lens into the heart of darkness!”⁵⁷

Matuszewski saw in film an eyewitness to history, an unchangeable and truthful portrayal of the events that shaped the lives of nations and their people. A New Source of History is one of the first European attempts at theorizing about the new invention as well as a practical guide to the creation of a storehouse or museum for depositing pieces of film that held historical significance. Matuszewski’s arguments concern the impact of cinema on historical remembrance and objectivity. He insists on the infallibility of the truth documented in motion pictures and on the absolute necessity of creating a film depository. For Matuszewski, film develops humans’ understanding of each other as well as national histories and cultures. Because it records images in a quick, almost automatic way, film exposes truths about the immediate and distant past. Film is, according to Matuszewski, evidence of life, evocative and directly communicative, able to shape intercultural relations through truth telling.