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, Marian Fuks, Samuel Ginzburg, Aleksander Hertz, and Mordechaj Towbin. Likewise, a small cadre of other film professionals was established, among the most successful of whom were camera operators Konstanty Jastrzębski and Stanisław Sebel, directors Wiktor Biegański and Andrzej Marek (Marek Arnsztejn), and actors Antoni Fertner, Ester Rachel Kamińska, Samuel Landau, and Maria Mirska. Their specialties were apparent from the beginning: the diligent Sebel, for example, nourished a talent for filming adaptations of Yiddish texts, while Jastrzębski specialized in adaptations of Polish literary classics, as demonstrated in his work as Antoni Bednarczyk’s camera operator on Dzieje grzechu (The Story of Sin, 1911), based on the novel by Stefan Żeromski.
New production companies formed after Pleograf folded. Towbin founded Kantor Zjednoczonych Kinematografów “Siła” (widely known as Siła) around 1908. Towbin also owned one of the first permanent cinemas in Warsaw, Iluzjon, which opened in 1908, and in 1910, he established the first film rental office. In that same year, with camera operator Joseph Meyer (stopping in Warsaw on his way from Moscow to Paris) and stage comedian Fertner, Towbin produced a short (120 meter) comedy, Antoś pierwszy raz w Warszawie (Antoś in Warsaw for the First Time), in which Fertner plays a cheerful naïf from the provinces who stumbles helplessly around the streets of Warsaw. Fertner, joint owner of the Oaza cinema, had a great deal of control over the film. Not only did he star in it, but he also commissioned it and projected it for the first time (after Meyer had developed the negative in Paris) to a full house of 180 people at Oaza on October 22, 1908.
Soon Towbin hired Sebel as his camera operator and Marek as screenwriter and director, and began to produce multiple-reel films based predominantly on classic works of Yiddish literature. Breaking from the prevalence of comedy in earlier domestic productions as well as from Yiddish comedic traditions, Siła productions were melodramas, either sensational or domestic. The company’s first film was Der vilder foter (The Cruel Father, 1911), based on the play by Jacob Gordin (Zalmen Libin) about a father’s murder of his daughter’s illegitimate child. Next, it made Hasa die yesome (Chasydka i odstępca; Hasa the Orphan or The Hasidic Woman and the Apostate, 1911), and Mirele Efros (1912), based on another popular play by Gordin about a respected widow in a difficult relationship with her daughter-in-law. Finally, Towbin made Abraham Izaak Kamiński’s adaptation of Gordin’s Bóg, człowiek i szatan (God, Man, and Devil, 1912). These films varied in length from 550 to 1250 meters, lasted approximately thirty to sixty minutes, and, unlike films from just a decade earlier, were the main attraction, no longer just the accompaniment to live theater.
Towbin also took on the somewhat taboo subject of politically motivated violence in the Kingdom of Prussia. The circumstances surrounding the making of his first feature film, Pruska kultura (Prussian Culture), are not clear. Małgorzata Hendrykowska and Marek Hendrykowski claim that the film was probably not made in Poznań, although its title does advert to the region surrounding the city.1 Regardless of its origin, it is likely that authorities censored the film. In May 1908, Kurier warszawski announced that a motion picture that depicting scenes of battle between the Polish inhabitants of Poznań and Germans had been advertised in a Moscow newspaper. According to Kurier warszawski, Towbin commissioned the picture from a Parisian firm after the local administration had prohibited him from producing it in Warsaw. The newspaper claimed that the film had been shown successfully in Italy. Most likely, this same Prussian Culture was shown at a Marszałkowska Street theater in Warsaw under different political circumstances in September 1914.2
The largest and most enduring production company in pre–World War II Warsaw was unmistakably Hertz’s Sfinks, established in 1909. Active, competitive, and undeterred by the political instability of World War I and the burdens of economic and cultural transformation, its founder was responsible for the success of Sfinks’s twenty-seven-year stretch of film production. A banker and, beginning in 1905, an activist in the Polish Socialist Party (PPS), Hertz established personal contacts with such future government leaders as Józef Piłsudski. The socialist platform of the PPS consisted of an eight-hour working day, a minimum wage, social insurance, and the gradual socialization of land, as well as universal suffrage, freedom of speech, compulsory education, and equal rights for national, racial, and religious minorities. Most significantly, the PPS placed first priority on the restoration, against Russian political interests, of an independent Poland. Authorities arrested Hertz in 1908 on unspecified charges