The Law of the Looking Glass. Sheila Skaff

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СКАЧАТЬ (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 СКАЧАТЬ