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The Emergence of a Competitive Industry, 1908–18

Film Production under the Empires

FILM PRODUCTION IN THE PARTITIONS increased steadily from 1908 until the outbreak of World War I, particularly with regard to the number of adaptations of Polish and Yiddish literary works. As elsewhere in Europe, distributors altered their practices to allow films to be rented rather than sold, a development that led to the regulation of licensing and concessions. Permanent cinemas slowly replaced temporary venues, reducing the practice of traveling exhibitions and making room for better distribution of domestic films. Entrepreneurs opened film production companies in Warsaw, where a cottage industry slowly began to take root.

Even as the appeal and reach of films documenting daily life and social events expanded to include funerals of famous people, travelogues, and news from other parts of the Polish-speaking partitioned lands, fiction filmmaking laid the foundation for the silent films of the next two decades. Fiction films included comedies, patriotic films, and adaptations of novels and stage plays. Several major producers of feature films began their careers between 1908 and 1914, including Henryk Finkelstein, Marian Fuks, Samuel Ginzburg, Aleksander Hertz, and Mordechaj Towbin. Likewise, a small cadre of other film professionals was established, among the most successful of whom were camera operators Konstanty Jastrzębski and Stanisław Sebel, directors Wiktor Biegański and Andrzej Marek (Marek Arnsztejn), and actors Antoni Fertner, Ester Rachel Kamińska, Samuel Landau, and Maria Mirska. Their specialties were apparent from the beginning: the diligent Sebel, for example, nourished a talent for filming adaptations of Yiddish texts, while Jastrzębski specialized in adaptations of Polish literary classics, as demonstrated in his work as Antoni Bednarczyk’s camera operator on Dzieje grzechu (The Story of Sin, 1911), based on the novel by Stefan Żeromski.

New production companies formed after Pleograf folded. Towbin founded Kantor Zjednoczonych Kinematografów “Siła” (widely known as Siła) around 1908. Towbin also owned one of the first permanent cinemas in Warsaw, Iluzjon, which opened in 1908, and in 1910, he established the first film rental office. In that same year, with camera operator Joseph Meyer (stopping in Warsaw on his way from Moscow to Paris) and stage comedian Fertner, Towbin produced a short (120 meter) comedy, Antoś pierwszy raz w Warszawie (Antoś in Warsaw for the First Time), in which Fertner plays a cheerful naïf from the provinces who stumbles helplessly around the streets of Warsaw. Fertner, joint owner of the Oaza cinema, had a great deal of control over the film. Not only did he star in it, but he also commissioned it and projected it for the first time (after Meyer had developed the negative in Paris) to a full house of 180 people at Oaza on October 22, 1908.

Soon Towbin hired Sebel as his camera operator and Marek as screenwriter and director, and began to produce multiple-reel films based predominantly on classic works of Yiddish literature. Breaking from the prevalence of comedy in earlier domestic productions as well as from Yiddish comedic traditions, Siła productions were melodramas, either sensational or domestic. The company’s first film was Der vilder foter (The Cruel Father, 1911), based on the play by Jacob Gordin (Zalmen Libin) about a father’s murder of his daughter’s illegitimate child. Next, it made Hasa die yesome (Chasydka i odstępca; Hasa the Orphan or The Hasidic Woman and the Apostate, 1911), and Mirele Efros (1912), based on another popular play by Gordin about a respected widow in a difficult relationship with her daughter-in-law. Finally, Towbin made Abraham Izaak Kamiński’s adaptation of Gordin’s Bóg, człowiek i szatan (God, Man, and Devil, 1912). These films varied in length from 550 to 1250 meters, lasted approximately thirty to sixty minutes, and, unlike films from just a decade earlier, were the main attraction, no longer just the accompaniment to live theater.

Towbin also took on the somewhat taboo subject of politically motivated violence in the Kingdom of Prussia. The circumstances surrounding the making of his first feature film, Pruska kultura (Prussian Culture), are not clear. Małgorzata Hendrykowska and Marek Hendrykowski claim that the film was probably not made in Poznań, although its title does advert to the region surrounding the city.¹ Regardless of its origin, it is likely that authorities censored the film. In May 1908, Kurier warszawski announced that a motion picture that depicting scenes of battle between the Polish inhabitants of Poznań and Germans had been advertised in a Moscow newspaper. According to Kurier warszawski, Towbin commissioned the picture from a Parisian firm after the local administration had prohibited him from producing it in Warsaw. The newspaper claimed that the film had been shown successfully in Italy. Most likely, this same Prussian Culture was shown at a Marszałkowska Street theater in Warsaw under different political circumstances in September 1914.²

The largest and most enduring production company in pre–World War II Warsaw was unmistakably Hertz’s Sfinks, established in 1909. Active, competitive, and undeterred by the political instability of World War I and the burdens of economic and cultural transformation, its founder was responsible for the success of Sfinks’s twenty-seven-year stretch of film production. A banker and, beginning in 1905, an activist in the Polish Socialist Party (PPS), Hertz established personal contacts with such future government leaders as Józef Piłsudski. The socialist platform of the PPS consisted of an eight-hour working day, a minimum wage, social insurance, and the gradual socialization of land, as well as universal suffrage, freedom of speech, compulsory education, and equal rights for national, racial, and religious minorities. Most significantly, the PPS placed first priority on the restoration, against Russian political interests, of an independent Poland. Authorities arrested Hertz in 1908 on unspecified charges but released him for lack of evidence a year later, at which time he returned to Warsaw and ostensibly resigned from political activism. (As subsequent chapters will show, his filmmaking was highly political.) In need of a new career, and noticing the growing number of permanent cinemas and the swelling public interest in moviegoing, Hertz gathered three of his friends—Józef Koerner, Alfred Niemirski (Silberlast), and M. Zuker—and established Sfinks with himself as its head.

Sfinks contributed to the domestic film industry the addition of Polish intertitles to foreign films, which Sebel designed for Pathé Frères in Sfinks’s Marszałkowska Street laboratory beginning in 1908. Sebel and his colleagues at Sfinks also developed their own film prints, a practice that saved the company money and gave them complete control over their productions. In its first years in business, Sfinks made actualités and news event films, beginning probably with Wzlot aeroplanu w Warszawie (An Airplane’s Ascent in Warsaw, 1909). The company covered many of the major events of the day, including court proceedings, outdoor sporting events, medical procedures, horse races, and funerals. Sfinks also attempted to create a weekly newsreel in 1912, which it named Dziennik (Daily). The newsreel format did not enjoy much success, which drew Hertz’s attention to the ongoing discourse about the differences between documentary and fiction in the stateless nation.

Hertz remained director of Sfinks until his early death in 1928. Over this long career, he took the political changes in the lands in stride. In 1912, for example, he allowed the owners of one of the largest Russian production companies to collaborate with Sfinks, then ended this arrangement in order to align himself with German producers in 1915. Hertz’s character, connections, and financial shrewdness ensured the success of his company at a time when many other companies failed. He demonstrated a successful mix of love for the cinema, which he called by a term of his own invention, ruchosłońcopis (moving luminous record), and contempt for cinema enthusiasts, whom he regarded as hopeless fanatics. He approached producing films as others approached producing alcohol or other legal but addictive drugs. In short, he recognized that, if given the chance, people would use the cinema as a means of escape from the daily grind, and he disdained them for it. Regardless of the reasons for Hertz’s ambivalent relationship with his customers, his attitude seems to have taken a heavy toll on the film industry. Hertz shaped his spectators’ viewing practices by offering certain types of films in particular, those that would cater to audiences’ need for escape and their willingness to suspend disbelief. He offered them films that portrayed the vision of national history and culture that he wanted to perpetuate at any given moment. Because of this determination to shape the industry according to his own wishes, Hertz counts among the most complex of early film producers.

Like earlier producers, Hertz saw potential in adapting literary texts for the screen. He usually chose popular melodramas that the largest number of viewers would instantly recognize. He usually did not adapt from Yiddish texts, but Sfinks’s first feature-length adaptations did include Meir Ezofowicz (1911), based on the novel by Eliza Orzeszkowa. The ambiguous aspects of this film’s production cause one to wonder whether Hertz’s disdain for filmgoers had something to do with a long-standing ambivalence in the attitudes of the nation’s minority and majority groups toward one another as he may have inadvertently or purposely encouraged animosity in hiring people to make the film. The plot concerns a Jewish family whose ancestors had lived in the area of the Russian partition for hundreds of years and who, like the area’s Catholic inhabitants, carried hopes for the restoration of Polish independence. The title of this Polish novel is a Yiddish personal name—a detail that helped draw the attention of speakers of both languages to it. The film used quotations from the novel in its intertitles, lending it authenticity in the minds of some critics.³

Hertz made a strange decision, however, when he chose a well-known anti-Semite, Józef Ostoja-Sulnicki, to write and direct the film. A review of Meir Ezofowicz in Kurier warszawski criticizes the film and comments on the difficulties faced by its creators, including lack of “suitable, proper terrain for filming”—presumably because of their anti-Semitic behavior, they were not permitted to film on location.⁴ Władysław Banaszkiewicz and Witold Witczak claim that Ostoja-Sulnicki was chosen for the role of director of Meir Ezofowicz because, as a “radical anti-Semite,” he depicted Jews as xenophobic in a way that reflected growing xenophobia in the population at large.⁵ However, criticism of the film, such as that in Kurier warszawski, hinted that Jewish communities probably shunned him because of his social views, which, ironically, were why he received the job. The situation sheds light on the complex, sometimes contradictory relationship that Hertz fostered between Catholics and Jews in his films. The seemingly bizarre choices made in filming Meir Ezofowicz may have arisen from Hertz’s insistence on offering a little something for everyone—for Polish speakers, a Polish novel; for Yiddish speakers, a Yiddish title; for multiculturalists, a story of positive intercultural relations; and for anti-Semites, an anti-Semitic director. Finally, scandal-seekers chitchatted about the fact that a prominent Jewish producer had hired the enemy to direct his films.

The outrage over this film was surprisingly short-lived. For example, Natan Gross claims in Film żydowski w Polsce (Jewish Film in Poland), “The fact that Ostoja-Sulnicki wrote anti-Semitic texts may not be a foregone answer to questions about the meaning of the film. In addition, he was probably only nominally the director, and in reality the film was probably made by the head of Sfinks himself, Aleksander Hertz.”⁶ Gross defends Hertz’s decision without explaining why Hertz continued to hire Ostoja-Sulnicki to direct other films, even after the minor scandal over Meir Ezofowicz, or why he chose him in the first place. Władysław Jewsiewicki offers a similar explanation: “Hertz, a patriot and PPS sympathizer, was not only a good businessperson. He also understood the touchiness of Polish public opinion, which manifested itself in more than just artistic matters. For this reason, he always chose directors for his films from the journalistic-literary or theatrical milieu with names that sounded Polish (Ostoja-Sulnicki, Sulimierski, Pawłowski, and Puchalski). However, once they were in the studio, these directors did not always have a say; the esteemed director Hertz, who ran his company with an iron fist, made the decisions. In the Sfinks studio, he took care that the last names of even the camera operators and technicians sounded Polish. This phenomenon is even more characteristic considering that Hertz came from a Jewish family.”⁷

Improbable as it may seem, the decision did amount to little more than trite conversation for a few gossipers. Hertz knew that hiring Ostoja-Sulnicki would enhance, rather than hinder, the film’s financial prospects and its place in cinema history. In the Meir Ezofowicz scandal, Hertz proved that he could be successful by choosing a name that would ignite a fire and that once he dismissed the decision as insignificant, audiences and historians would excuse him. He knew that audiences would want to believe in the image presented on screen and that intellectuals in Poland often preferred to remain silent rather than become trapped in the impropriety of name-calling. His way of doing business was more than a media ploy or a means of satisfying people of all political ideologies: In this and similar endeavors, Hertz exploited practices of spectatorship that had been established in the first years of cinema in order to condition his audiences to accept the filmic image as the ultimate truth.

Hertz’s other adaptations were less controversial but equally demonstrative of his strategies. Early examples include Wykolejeni (Aszantka; Human Wrecks, 1913), based on the popular novel by Włodzimierz Perzyński, and Edukacja Bronki (Educating Bronka) by Stefan Krzywoszewski. Hertz also wrote original scripts for Przesądy (Prejudices, 1912), a story of the love of a count’s daughter for a servant’s son, and Niewolnica zmysłów (The Slave of Sin, 1914), a film about a young woman’s self-destruction in the name of love and the debut of actress Pola Negri (Apolonia Chałupiec). In the years leading up to the First World War, Hertz began to collaborate with a small company called Sokół and to buy out other companies, until he eventually held a monopoly on film production.

Finkelstein and Samuel Ginzburg established the Kosmofilm production company in 1913, though Ginzburg (who had helped establish Siła just a few months earlier) soon left it. Run by Finkelstein, Kosmofilm had its own studio and laboratory in Warsaw. Its interests resembled those of Towbin’s Siła in that the company produced films mainly on Jewish subjects with actors from the eminent Warsaw Jewish Theater, including the Kamiński family: Abraham Izaak Kamiński, Regina Kamińska, Kazimierz Kamiński, Ester Rachel Kamińska, Ida Kamińska, Samuel Landau, Herman Wajsman, and Helena Gotlib. Kosmofilm’s productions included many adaptations from plays—a sensible decision, considering the talent that the company brought from the local theater. It made Dem khazons tokhter (The Cantor’s Daughter, 1913), Der unbekanter (The Stranger, 1913), Di shikhte (The Slaughter, 1913), Gots shtrof (God’s Punishment, 1913), and Di shtifmuter (The Stepmother, 1914), all based on the plays of Jacob Gordin and premiering, presumably to the theatergoing crowd, in a small cinema in Warsaw. With actors from the Polish-language stage theater, in 1913 Kosmofilm produced a popular three-act adaptation of Halka, the Polish national opera written by Stanisław Moniuszko and in 1914 brought out Karpaccy górale (Carpathian Mountaineers), based on Józef Korzeniowski’s play. In the same year, Sebel filmed a documentary, Ziemia święta, Egipt (Palestyna) (The Holy Land: Egypt [Palestine]), for Finkelstein that was shown in 1915. In its two years of existence, the company produced nearly twenty feature films and documentaries, becoming one of Poland’s main producers.

In addition to Kosmofilm, Sfinks, and Siła, independent producers and groups of friends made films. Fertner joined three other popular actors—Julian Krzewiński, Wincenty Rapacki, and Juliusz Zagrodzki—to form their own production company. With Sebel as their main cameraman, the company specialized in comedy, specifically in films starring Fertner as the cheery, absentminded character that he had created in Antoś in Warsaw for the First Time. One such film, Zaręczyny Antosia w dzień kwiatka (Antoś’s Wedding Engagement on Flower Day, 1911), satirized philanthropy among Warsaw elites: Fertner’s character, not having enough money to buy flowers for the attention-seeking women surrounding him on the streets of Warsaw, gives away his articles of clothing, one by one.

In L’viv, there sprang up small production companies that specialized in documenting local news events. According to scholar Irena Nowak-Zaorska, a member of the Polish Teachers’ Union organized the first educational films—featuring scenes from nature, historical monuments, inventions, and other documentary-type films—beginning in late 1909. In 1913, a theater devoted to educational films opened to the dismay of many who felt that motion pictures were demoralizing and harmful to children.⁸

Marek Münz opened a small production center in his photography studio in 1912, and the firm known as Kinofilm opened soon after. Together, these companies made ethnographic documentaries (presumably registered in official legal documents in the Polish language) such as Wzloty hr. Scipio (The Flights of Count Scipio), Uroczystość Bożego Ciała we Lwowie (Corpus Christi Celebrations in L’viv), and Wiec chełmski we Lwowie (A Rally from Chelm in L’viv).⁹ Other films include Uroczystości ślubne ks. Czetwertyńskiej (Princess Czetwertyńska’s Wedding), Pożar odbenzyniarni w Drohobyczu 21 III 1912 roku (A Gasoline Fire in Drohobycz on March 21, 1912), and Galicja w kinematografie (Galicia in Film), all made in 1912. Completed by Pathé Frères at the request of the Galician Tourism Association, Galicia in Film’s Vienna premiere “drew the court and cream of the capital’s society” and was meant to display L’viv’s significance to the empire’s military strategies, according to Banaszkiewicz and Witczak.¹⁰ Other travelogues made for the Galician Tourism Association include the sights of L’viv, a Hucul funeral, a wedding, and the travel of “hoodlums” on the Czeremosz River.¹¹

The fiction film Powrót taty (Ballada w 15 odsłonach) (Papa’s Return [A Ballad in 15 Acts]) premiered in L’viv in January 1910.¹² Among other fiction films made in L’viv were Zygmunt Wesołowski’s Miłosne przygody panów Z. i J.—Znanych osobistości w L. (The Amorous Adventures of Messrs. Z. and J.—Well-Known Personalities in L’viv, 1912) and Pomszczona krzywda (An Avenged Injustice, 1912). In all likelihood, Wesołowski wrote the screenplay for the latter. However, promotional materials for the film stated (probably incorrectly but true to “the looking glass” in its privileging of western Europe) that its director was “brought all the way from London.”¹³ New companies, including Muza, Leopolia, and Polonia, attempted to make films. Both of Polonia’s productions—a fiction film about a rich man’s love for a poor flower seller and another featuring American actors—remain unfinished because of the outbreak of the war. Leopolia’s Kościuszko pod Racławicami (Kościuszko at Racławice, 1913) fared poorly in spite of promotion by the company’s mouthpiece, Ekran i scena (Screen and Stage). However, the owners, brothers A. and L. Krogulski, would bring the expertise they had gained in the making of it to a smaller town, Krosno, after the war.¹⁴

Wiktor Biegański, who became one of the most successful actors and directors of the interwar period, made his first film in Kraków and L’viv in 1913. Parts of his Dramat wieży mariackiej (The Story of the Mariacki Church Tower) have survived. Most likely, this film and his Przygody pana Antoniego (The Adventures of Anton) were never exhibited.

The Vienna exhibition of a 1500-meter-long film made in 1913 by the Berlin-based Projektions A.G. Union company and directed by Carl Wilhelm, Shylock von Krakau (Shylock from Kraków), caused an uproar in newspapers such as Kronika powszechna (Popular Chronicle). It claimed that the film’s display of Jewish life amid the relics of Poland’s former statehood promulgated “the humiliation of Christian and, in turn, the superiority and triumph of Semitic culture.”¹⁵

In 1907, Kraków w kinematografie (Kraków in Motion Pictures), Pochód robotniczy i zabawa w Parku Jordana (A Workers’ Parade and Party in Jordan Park), and Pogrzeb Stanisława Wyspiańskiego (The Funeral of Stanisław Wyspiański) were made in Kraków. Other Kraków films of the period include Sport Saneczkowy w Krakowie (Sledding in Kraków, 1909), Rewia automobiłów i wyścigi na Górze Mogilańskiej (An Automobile Show and Race on Mogilańska Hill, 1909), Straż pożarna w Krakowie (The Fire Station in Kraków, 1911), and Pogrzeb Kardynała Puzyny (The Funeral of Cardinal Puzyna, 1911). It is not clear whether all of these films were completed and exhibited.

Two cities dominated film production and exhibition in the Russian partition during the last years of the tsarist empire. Warsaw, the erstwhile capital, and Łódź, where the Krzemiński brothers advertised the medium diligently, stand in startling contrast to other cities, like Vilnius. At least two films were made in Vilnius in the era before independence: Bez ozdoby: Z nędzy do pieniędzy (Without Adornment: From Poverty to Wealth) and Bóg zemsty (God of Vengeance), based on the Yiddish play by Sholem Asch. The first temporary cinema, Iluzja, opened in 1905, a full four years after the first one in Łódź, and the first permanent cinema opened in 1907, at the tail end of the era of early cinema. Five cinemas were in operation in various parts of the city until the outbreak of World War I. During this period in Kaunas, Władysław Starewicz (Ladislas Starevich) began to experiment with stop-motion animation while working as a documentary filmmaker for a museum of natural history. Wishing to record a fight between two beetles, he grew frustrated by the fact that they slept in the daylight. Fatigued with trying to keep them awake, he killed and dismembered them, reassembled them as puppets, dressed them as soldiers, and shot an early stop-motion animation film, Walka żuków (The Battle of the Beetles, 1910).¹⁶

Audiences cheered when the Italian film Quo vadis?, directed by Enrico Guazzoni, appeared in Kraków cinemas in 1913. Based on the novel of the same name by Nobel Prize–winning Polish writer Henryk Sienkiewicz, Quo vadis? was so popular among Polish-speaking audiences that in Bydgoszcz, the price of a ticket to the film was the highest audiences had ever seen; the Dziennik bydgoski (Bydgoszcz Daily) proclaimed it “full of poetry, passion, dramatic life, and color.”¹⁷ In Racibórz, tickets were priced at 20 and 30 pfennigs higher than usual, ranging from box seats at 2.6 marks to the gallery at 50 pfennigs.¹⁸ Hertz quickly decided to film adaptations of the Polish writer’s other major works, and in fall 1913, Hertz and Niemirski collaborated to create a production company, Sokół, to make these adaptations, which would require elaborate sets and enormous crowds of extras. Because the rights to Sienkiewicz’s other works, Krzyżacy (The Teutonic Knights) and the epic Trylogia (The Trilogy), already had been bought by a young filmmaker, Edward Puchalski, the company hired him to direct. Sokół, however, did not succeed in its attempts to create a film on the scale of Quo vadis? First, Hertz and Niemirski put the adaptations of Sienkiewicz’s novels aside while they made other films instead of devoting themselves entirely to them. One of the films, Obrona Częstochowy (The Defense of Częstochowa), was supposed to have been another enormous production with as many as six hundred extras in one scene. Hertz claimed that Sfinks did not finish the film because the government refused to allow them to use Russian soldiers as extras,¹⁹ though it is also likely that the company ran out of money in the middle of this project and had nothing left with which to make the Sienkiewicz dramas. At any rate, Puchalski soon moved to Moscow, and Hertz shelved the idea. In order to recoup part of its losses from the failed endeavor, the company made several small films, which were relatively unsuccessful.

The situation provides, yet again, an example befitting Karol Irzykowski’s law of the looking glass. Audiences were thrilled to see an adaptation of a Polish novel made in Italy and clamored for a domestic equivalent. Its execution, however, proved impossible because of the weakness of the film industry in the occupied territories. Enthusiasm for national culture was greatest when inhabitants of another nation presented it in a positive light. The desire to see events in abstraction was strong. When they expressed national pride when they watched Quo vadis? in a glorious, extravagant, and foreign form, audiences were envisioning themselves within a global picture—a modern picture of abundance—that they had long been told excluded them.

Zagrodzki and a group of actors formed a production company known as Kooperatywa Artystyczna in the years before World War I. Their major films included Sąd Boży (God’s Trial, 1911), based on Stanisław Wyspiański’s drama Sędziowie (Judges), and Ofiara namiętności (A Victim of Passion, 1912). Much was made of the cooperative’s choice to adapt ambitious literary works, yet critics disparaged it for its reliance on theatrical techniques and its focus on acting. By contrast, the newsreels and short documentaries that were the domain of photojournalist and filmmaker Fuks fared better. His depictions of the funerals of famous people and court proceedings were shown at the Olympia cinema in Warsaw’s emerging entertainment district.

Competition between the major companies was fierce, even if the stakes were low. As one story goes, Towbin attempted to sabotage Sfinks’s premiere of Quo Vadis? by projecting a secretly borrowed copy of it in his theater a day earlier. In revenge, Hertz used his political connections to have the theater closed in the middle of the screening. In another, Towbin kidnapped and held for ransom French actor Max Linder, who was traveling to Warsaw at Hertz’s invitation, in 1914.²⁰ No amount of pressure from other companies could stifle Hertz, however. Within five years of its formation, Sfinks had managed to swallow almost every one of its competitors. This is not to imply that competitors necessarily fought against their incorporation into Sfinks or that its owner, Hertz, had to fight for friends. He had friends and respect. He had money, a vision, and the willingness to incorporate other companies into his own rather than to destroy them. However, he refused to make certain types of films. What was lost in his dealings, for the first time but not the last, was the production of silent films based on Yiddish texts.

“Everybody’s” Secret Pastime: The Inteligencja and the Issue of Intertitles

The history of cinema in Poland is, in large part, a history of people alternately participating in and negotiating ways to avoid the linguistic and class tensions with which they lived on a daily basis. From the outset, audiences connected cinema inexorably with national language, and national language with religion, ethnicity, wealth, power, a general sense of belonging, and entitlement. Although cinema could have been—and at times was—used to advance the ideologies 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 economic differences and cultural domination that forced residential segregation.

Intertitles in Polish appeared on imported films for the first time in 1908. (It is not clear when they first appeared in Yiddish.) Other significant changes took 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