The Law of the Looking Glass by Sheila Skaff

Author:Sheila Skaff [Skaff, Sheila]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Performing Arts, Film, History & Criticism
ISBN: 9780821417843
Google: dO7fuEHARnIC
Publisher: Ohio University Press
Published: 2008-01-15T03:56:02+00:00

6

The Transition in Practice, 1930–36

Flaming Hearts: Historical Sound Films

WAS THERE A “POLISH NATIONAL CINEMA” before World War II? It is difficult to answer this question in a way that adequately reflects the conditions under which the fledgling film industry created and exhibited films before World War II. First, the film industry in Poland was never an entity completely separate from the film industries of western Europe and the United States. From French itinerant exhibitor Eugène Joachim DuPont to Yiddish film producer Joseph Green (Józef Grinberg), international representatives ensured that cinema was not a strictly national endeavor. Second, people came from every ethnic group to work in an industry that allowed for much more professional integration than other businesses. Those who made Yiddish-language films also made Polish-language films, and vice versa. Directors moved among several production companies. Many screenwriters spoke multiple languages; they and composers freelanced on projects for various producers. Critics wrote for several publications at a time. These were not isolated instances of interethnic cooperation: they were the norm. As important as it is to understand how separate national identities developed through cinema, it is even more important to recognize that they did not develop in isolation from each other.

The linguistic and ethnic conflicts that plagued exhibition were both practical and abstract, and they defied solution. According to film scholar Alina Madej, exhibitors perceived Polish-Catholic patriotic films as attractive—a magnet—to audiences: “After Poland gained independence, it seemed as though this magnet would become a broadly conceived notion of Polishness. In the interwar years, there began to take shape a model of a film spectator that was to serve to disarm the more or less imaginary Polish inferiority complexes. Film producers assumed that in this way, they would satisfy social expectations and fulfill their patriotic mission at the same time.” The film industry “wanted to avoid dissonance both with the popular vision of cultural history that was disseminated in the lower regions and with its official version that various, permanent social-cultural institutions guarded, at any cost. Cautious of conflict with the government, which was represented in the film industry by censors, producers supported the patriotic education formulated by the ideologues of the governing camp with all their might.” Still, she adds, “The patriotic declarations in magazines and film programs were too often announced in vain, which was the result of poor recognition of audiences’ real tastes.”1

Madej claims that patriotic declarations were not helpful in the countryside, either, but for a different reason. The reintroduction of traveling cinema in the late 1930s “was supposed to promulgate film culture in the remote parts of Poland that had not known the invention since the days of the Lumière brothers. The rural population looked upon its organizers with distrust. They considered ‘film people’ everyday swindlers and con men, an assumption that could have influenced the Catholic clergy’s aversion to cinema. However, later—as was written on the pages of Film in 1939—‘They had a hard time watching the films. They cried and laughed, and in

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