The Law of the Looking Glass. Sheila Skaff

the ‘habits and customs of “highlanders”’ are, what has happened in sports, what the latest fashions are, etc.”²⁵ He continues, “On the basis of the available materials, one can risk the assertion that audiences had the opportunity to see a broad, diverse, and interesting range of films. The program was limited to French cinema almost entirely, though, modestly enriched with Italian and German pictures. It is easy to notice that the very popular Danish films (Asta Nielsen!) but, most of all, American films were not shown.”²⁶

      As one indicator of exhibition practices, the terms used to describe audiences may reveal the priorities of certain distributors and exhibitors. Warsaw newspapers, for example, used the term “wszyscy,” or “everybody,” to describe audiences. There was everybody—as in a broad range of social, linguistic, and economic groups—and there was “everybody”—in a different sense. In Warsaw, this “everybody,” like “tout Paris” in France, was the inteligencja, a cultural elite composed of artists, writers, businesspeople, and public trendsetters. Beginning in this period, the inteligencja forged a very specific relationship with cinema that vacillated between love and hate. For example, critic Leo Belmont describes learning in 1909 that two eminent intellectuals regularly attended the cinema: “Once, when I had finished giving a lecture in Lublin, the respectable Dr. Biernacki, one of the editors of Kurier lubelski (Lublin Courier), gave me the honor of presenting me with a slightly timid proposition to go for relaxation with him to the cinema. He said, ‘Perhaps you don’t like it?’ I cried, clasping my hands, ‘But sir! How can one not like the cinema? I am in love with the cinema . . .’ He said, ‘You are not alone. We hosted two men from Zakopane who run off to the cinema every week . . .’ And, to my greatest surprise, he related two famous names that carry with them that sinfulness [Stefan Żeromski and Jan Lemański]. He said, ‘Just please do not tell anyone.’”²⁷

      Perhaps in order to distinguish the viewing practices of the inteligencja and the rest of society, Warsaw exhibitors raised the price of tickets in some parts of the city. The inteligencja was willing to buy expensive tickets and to support extravagant theaters in the fashionable, exclusive café district of the city. According to set designer Józef Galewski, Warsaw was an exception to the rule that people from all social groups came together to watch films (whether or not they actually mingled). Galewski claims that in Warsaw, only businesspersons and landowners, government and (Russian) military officials, and other wealthier people attended, as it was too expensive for workers.²⁸ Galewski probably has in mind the large, permanent theaters in the main Warsaw entertainment district, as the inexpensive, temporary theaters (for example, those at circuses), and smaller permanent theaters located in other areas presumably catered to a more diverse audience. Because of this, and particularly because of the way in which this influenced the building of motion picture theaters in smaller cities and towns, cinema became its own type of institution, both culturally unique and linguistically integrated. Segregation did not result strictly from linguistic or religious differences, though these were important, but also from economic differences and cultural domination that forced residential segregation.

      Intertitles in Polish appeared on imported films for the first time in 1908. (It is not clear when they first appeared in Yiddish.) Other significant changes took place in film exhibition during this period, as well. The average film’s length increased dramatically, and exhibitors were able to eliminate the practice of including live entertainment and, at least in part, the burden of constantly having to find new films to show audiences. Exhibitors gained the option of renting rather than buying films. Finally, the system by which cinema owners later influenced production began in this period. Sfinks, for example, began to earn money in distribution almost immediately after its establishment. Hertz of Sfinks, Towbin of Siła, and G. Kemmler, who represented foreign distribution companies, invested money earned from the distribution of rented foreign films in the production of domestic ones. Challenging them were new distribution companies, of which there were at least six in 1911.

      As exhibitors drew audiences to indoor screenings in permanent motion picture theaters, the spaces used for exhibition became less and less public. One significant consequence of this change was the escalating involvement of cinema in political issues. Increasingly, cinema owners’ choices fostered audiences’ antipathy toward majority or minority groups in each empire. To project German or Russian films was to make a political statement, if a sometimes inadvertent one. In the Kingdom of Prussia, intertitles, too, became a sensitive subject. Hendrykowska explains, “Even though laboratories for making Polish intertitles had existed in Warsaw since 1908, the majority of pictures that were shown were still written in German and Russian and, therefore, in the languages of the empires. In addition, Polish translations left a lot to be desired [as they employed Russified Polish]. The situation did not improve, but only worsened when the first ‘sound’ films (mainly German) came to the screens.”²⁹ She continues, “The closer it came to World War I, the more often pictures of a propagandist character appeared within cinema programs that were, on the surface, completely neutral and entertaining. We should add to this the fact that popular films were oftentimes the source of social antagonism. This was not difficult, considering that the majority of motion picture theaters in Pomerania and Silesia found themselves in German hands.”³⁰ It is not clear whether intertitles actually caused this much of a stir or not. As Hendrykowska also mentions, they may have served to displace tension over changing cinema ownership.

      An editorial in Dziennik bydgoski, the sole Polish-language periodical in the city in 1908, claimed that cinema should be used in the project of Polish nation building. At this time, the German Empire had passed a law prohibiting the use of the Polish language at public gatherings. Fearful that the language would fall into disuse, the writers proposed cinema as a subversive tool for keeping their language alive. The combination of visual images and intertitles was to be a pedagogical instrument, a way of teaching Poles to speak and write in Polish. As Guzek writes, cinema “took on not only a political dimension but also an educational one, even a didactic one, directed toward the least-educated social groups. The cinematograph was to be a vessel for the Polish word, and not an image of universal meaning. It was to be the ally not of a circus shed, but rather of a folk library or a self-educating circle of workers.”³¹