The Law of the Looking Glass. Sheila Skaff

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 СКАЧАТЬ