The Law of the Looking Glass. Sheila Skaff

the Prussian partition, however. A similar situation arose in the Russian and Austro-Hungarian empires in areas with high concentrations of Lithuanians and Ukrainians. Piotr Wandycz writes that the government of Vilnius “was successful in exploiting and fanning Lithuanian antagonism to the Poles. The average Lithuanian thought of a Pole as a lord and class enemy, but Russian schools propagated hatred of everything Polish. Virtually no political counterpropaganda came from the loyalist Polish aristocracy or from the gentry isolated in their old-type historic patriotism. Within the church, linguistic Polish-Lithuanian friction multiplied as the younger clergy promoted Lithuanian national ideals.”⁴⁶ A small Belarusan national movement was a perceived threat to the Russian government, while in eastern Galicia, “[t]he political picture was changing. The Polish administration was willing to make cultural concessions and assumed that it would thereby gain the Ukrainians’ gratitude. The latter viewed such concessions as a token of more to come. Consequently, they felt deceived, and the Poles became irritated.”⁴⁷ All the ethnicities in the region, including Belarusans, Germans, Jews, Lithuanians, Poles, and Ukrainians, who identified with at least one of the former countries saw the need to establish paradigms for dealing with escalating tension in all of the empires. Throughout the partitions and in certain other parts of the empires, mass movements of all sizes were emerging to challenge the dominant cultural and economic priorities. Inevitably, the language in which news of the advent of cinema was presented played a role in the development of film in the region.

      Film Theory and Practice: The Contributions of Bolesław Matuszewski

      In 1898, the editors of Tygodnik ilustrowany delighted in a “nice surprise for our ethnographers: Bolesław Matuszewski has sent his specialists around our country to take cinematographic pictures of the diversions, traditions, and such of our people. We can only applaud, as humanity will gain a lot from this.” The task before Matuszewski and the motion picture apparatus was enormous. With regard to the filmmaker’s proposal to employ film as a source of history, the Tygodnik’s editors write, “As a work of the human mind, every literary or printed source must, from the very nature of things, be more or less reticent. Because of this, historical truth is relative. However, the cinematograph—unmistakably a source of, as they say, mechanical history—is an absolutely truthful document: the cinematograph never lies.”⁴⁸

      Although Matuszewski received recognition mainly for his work in Paris, he came closer than his colleague Prószyński did to earning the title of Polish national filmmaker. A theorist and itinerant cameraman, Matuszewski had an interest in the medium that reflected his concern with documentation and education. Film, he felt, was a tool for scientific discovery and advances in medical research, as well as a means of accurately depicting historical events. His ideas moved between France and the partitioned lands with greater ease than did those of Prószyński, perhaps because his writings refer to an undefined, warmly welcomed “truth” that he saw film portraying. Just as DuPont’s “truth” leaped from a patent on an apparatus to a state of affairs, Matuszewski’s “truth” traveled between surgical procedures and national history. His writings encouraged critics to describe the cinematograph in evocative phrases such as “mechanical history,” a history in which, because all misunderstandings and deceits would be revealed, wrongs relating to the nation would have to be made right. Unlike his colleague, Matuszewski delivered his ideas in just the right places, at just the right time.

      With his brother, Zygmunt, Matuszewski came to Warsaw from France in 1895 to open a photography studio on Marszałkowska Street. The studio, called Lux-Sigismond et Comp., lasted at least until 1908. Meanwhile, Matuszewski was traveling throughout eastern and western Europe with his motion picture camera; he even may have worked for the Lumière brothers in France between 1896 and 1898.⁴⁹ From May to November 1897, he probably served as cinematographer for the Russian tsar. Of Tygodnik ilustrowany’s claim that he had begun making ethnographic films about the customs and culture of Poland in 1898, only one bit of evidence remains: Matuszewski’s Sceny ludowe w Polsce (Folk Scenes in Poland), projected in July 1898, is likely the first ethnographic film made in the partitioned lands.⁵⁰ His most notable achievement in film production was in the field of medical documentation. 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,