Sfinks contributed to the domestic film industry the addition of Polish intertitles to foreign films, which Sebel designed for Pathé Frères in Sfinks’s Marszałkowska Street laboratory beginning in 1908. Sebel and his colleagues at Sfinks also developed their own film prints, a practice that saved the company money and gave them complete control over their productions. In its first years in business, Sfinks made actualités and news event films, beginning probably with Wzlot aeroplanu w Warszawie (An Airplane’s Ascent in Warsaw, 1909). The company covered many of the major events of the day, including court proceedings, outdoor sporting events, medical procedures, horse races, and funerals. Sfinks also attempted to create a weekly newsreel in 1912, which it named Dziennik (Daily). The newsreel format did not enjoy much success, which drew Hertz’s attention to the ongoing discourse about the differences between documentary and fiction in the stateless nation.
Hertz remained director of Sfinks until his early death in 1928. Over this long career, he took the political changes in the lands in stride. In 1912, for example, he allowed the owners of one of the largest Russian production companies to collaborate with Sfinks, then ended this arrangement in order to align himself with German producers in 1915. Hertz’s character, connections, and financial shrewdness ensured the success of his company at a time when many other companies failed. He demonstrated a successful mix of love for the cinema, which he called by a term of his own invention, ruchosłońcopis (moving luminous record), and contempt for cinema enthusiasts, whom he regarded as hopeless fanatics. He approached producing films as others approached producing alcohol or other legal but addictive drugs. In short, he recognized that, if given the chance, people would use the cinema as a means of escape from the daily grind, and he disdained them for it. Regardless of the reasons for Hertz’s ambivalent relationship with his customers, his attitude seems to have taken a heavy toll on the film industry. Hertz shaped his spectators’ viewing practices by offering certain types of films in particular, those that would cater to audiences’ need for escape and their willingness to suspend disbelief. He offered them films that portrayed the vision of national history and culture that he wanted to perpetuate at any given moment. Because of this determination to shape the industry according to his own wishes, Hertz counts among the most complex of early film producers.
Like earlier producers, Hertz saw potential in adapting literary texts for the screen. He usually chose popular melodramas that the largest number of viewers would instantly recognize. He usually did not adapt from Yiddish texts, but Sfinks’s first feature-length adaptations did include Meir Ezofowicz (1911), based on the novel by Eliza Orzeszkowa. The ambiguous aspects of this film’s production cause one to wonder whether Hertz’s disdain for filmgoers had something to do with a long-standing ambivalence in the attitudes of the nation’s minority and majority groups toward one another as he may have inadvertently or purposely encouraged animosity in hiring people to make the film. The plot concerns a Jewish family whose ancestors had lived in the area of the Russian partition for hundreds of years and who, like the area’s Catholic inhabitants, carried hopes for the restoration of Polish independence. The title of this Polish novel is a Yiddish personal name—a detail that helped draw the attention of speakers of both languages to it. The film used quotations from the novel in its intertitles, lending it authenticity in the minds of some critics.3
Hertz made a strange decision, however, when he chose a well-known anti-Semite, Józef Ostoja-Sulnicki, to write and direct the film. A review of Meir Ezofowicz in Kurier warszawski criticizes the film and comments on the difficulties faced by its creators, including lack of “suitable, proper terrain for filming”—presumably because of their anti-Semitic behavior, they were not permitted to film on location.4 Władysław Banaszkiewicz and Witold Witczak claim that Ostoja-Sulnicki was chosen for the role of director of Meir Ezofowicz because, as a “radical anti-Semite,” he depicted Jews as xenophobic in a way that reflected growing xenophobia in the population at large.5 However, criticism of the film, such as that in Kurier warszawski, hinted that Jewish communities probably shunned him because of his social views, which, ironically, were why he received the job. The situation sheds light on the complex, sometimes contradictory relationship that Hertz fostered between Catholics and Jews in his films. The seemingly bizarre choices made in filming Meir Ezofowicz may have arisen from Hertz’s insistence on offering a little something for everyone—for Polish speakers, a Polish novel; for Yiddish speakers, a Yiddish title; for multiculturalists, a story of positive intercultural relations; and for anti-Semites, an anti-Semitic director. Finally, scandal-seekers chitchatted about the fact that a prominent Jewish producer had hired the enemy to direct his films.
The outrage over this film was surprisingly short-lived. For example, Natan Gross claims in Film żydowski w Polsce (Jewish Film in Poland), “The fact that Ostoja-Sulnicki wrote anti-Semitic texts may not be a foregone answer to questions about the meaning of the film. In addition, he was probably only nominally the director, and in reality the film was probably made by the head of Sfinks himself, Aleksander Hertz.”6 Gross defends Hertz’s decision without explaining why Hertz continued to hire Ostoja-Sulnicki to direct other films, even after the minor scandal over Meir Ezofowicz, or why he chose him in the first place. Władysław Jewsiewicki offers a similar explanation: “Hertz, a patriot and PPS sympathizer, was not only a good businessperson. He also understood the touchiness of Polish public opinion, which manifested itself in more than just artistic matters. For this reason, he always chose directors for his films from the journalistic-literary or theatrical milieu with names that sounded Polish (Ostoja-Sulnicki, Sulimierski, Pawłowski, and Puchalski). However, once they were in the studio, these directors did not always have a say; the esteemed director Hertz, who ran his company with an iron fist, made the decisions. In the Sfinks studio, he took care that the last names of even the camera operators and technicians sounded Polish. This phenomenon is even more characteristic considering that Hertz came from a Jewish family.”7
Improbable as it may seem, the decision did amount to little more than trite conversation for a few gossipers. Hertz knew that hiring Ostoja-Sulnicki would enhance, rather than hinder, the film’s financial prospects and its place in cinema history. In the Meir Ezofowicz scandal, Hertz proved that he could be successful by choosing a name that would ignite a fire and that once he dismissed the decision as insignificant, audiences and historians would excuse him. He knew that audiences would want to believe in the image presented on screen and that intellectuals in Poland often preferred to remain silent rather than become trapped in the impropriety of name-calling. His way of doing business was more than a media ploy or a means of satisfying people of all political ideologies: In this and similar endeavors, Hertz exploited practices of spectatorship that had been established in the first years of cinema in order to condition his audiences to accept the filmic image as the ultimate truth.
Hertz’s other adaptations were less controversial but equally demonstrative of his strategies. Early examples include Wykolejeni (Aszantka; Human Wrecks, 1913), based on the popular novel by Włodzimierz Perzyński, and Edukacja Bronki (Educating Bronka) by Stefan Krzywoszewski. Hertz also wrote original scripts for Przesądy (Prejudices, 1912), a story of the love of a count’s daughter for a servant’s son, and Niewolnica zmysłów (The Slave of Sin, 1914), a film about a young woman’s self-destruction in the name of love and the debut of actress Pola Negri (Apolonia Chałupiec). In the years leading up to the First World War, Hertz began to collaborate with a small company called Sokół and to buy out other companies, until he eventually held a monopoly on film production.
Finkelstein and Samuel Ginzburg established the Kosmofilm production company in 1913, though Ginzburg (who had helped establish Siła just a few months earlier) soon left it. Run by Finkelstein, Kosmofilm had its own studio and laboratory in Warsaw. Its interests resembled those of Towbin’s Siła in that the company produced films mainly on Jewish subjects with actors from the eminent Warsaw Jewish Theater, including the Kamiński family: Abraham