The Law of the Looking Glass. Sheila Skaff

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СКАЧАТЬ 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.

      2

      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, СКАЧАТЬ