The Law of the Looking Glass. Sheila Skaff

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 СКАЧАТЬ