Early Film
We might say that Polish film history begins in 1894, with the patented invention of Kazimierz Prószyński’s (1875 – 1945) Pleograf, a camera and projector in one. Although Prószyński beat both the Lumière brothers and Edison in designing this early movie camera, he was not as successful in popularizing his machine (he did contribute significantly to the history of cinema with later innovations in handheld camera stabilization). Early films in Poland, writes Sheila Skaff, were shown by travelling exhibitors on Lumière equipment from an initial official screening in Kraków in 1986, though Edison equipment soon followed. By the first decade of the 20th century, major Polish cities (located throughout the three partitions of Poland) were home to many permanent movie theaters.
The spread of permanent theaters was commensurate with the emergence of a competitive filmmaking industry in Poland, with Warsaw at its center both in terms of film production and film exhibition. The industrial center Łódź, where the focus of the film industry would turn after WWII, also had a lively film exhibition scene in the early 20th century. Early Warsaw studios like Sfinks competed against each other and against imported foreign film, often basing Polish productions on classic texts and bestselling novels. From this early stage until the outbreak of WWII, the Polish film industry was heavily connected with the Jewish community. Sfinks, for example, was founded by Alexander Hertz in 1911, a Jewish filmmaker, one of several prominent industry leaders who negotiated between Polish and Yiddish source material and audiences (as well as crew). Poland’s most famous silent film star, Pola Negri (1897 – 1987), got her start at Sfinks before moving on to international stardom and a successful career in silent film in Hollywood. During her retirement, she was one of several actresses approached to play the iconic Norma Desmond in Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard (1950).
A Photograph of Pola Negri sourced from the Polish National Digital Archives (3/1/0/16/1114).
When the new Polish state was established, political disagreements about how Poland should be governed, including the best way to manage Jewish-Catholic relations, coupled with economic difficulties, impacted the film industry. Cinema could now participate in the national project. The conversion to sound, which began in the late 1920s, was especially significant because it made the national vernacular audible (intertitles before independence were sometimes translated into Polish, but even after 1919, some cinema owners still opted not to feature Polish intertitles). Performance and public discourse in Polish, after all, had been variously suppressed and forbidden in the partitions, thus imbuing the language itself with powerful social and political meaning. The 1919-1920 war with the Soviet Union also occasioned the production of films with patriotic messages. Navigating the early years of the nation state, however, was difficult. The cash strapped state instituted high taxes on luxury goods, including cinema tickets. Domestic production throughout the 1920s was low even as the number of cinemas rose. Movie theaters, after all, also screened foreign films; in 1930, for example, only 10% of films screening in Poland were made domestically according to the Central Film Agency (Skaff 87).
Cinema was also in a difficult position in terms of its perceived cultural value. Film in the interwar period has been historically regarded with suspicion, as variously low-brow, low-quality, and, when funded by the government, often suspiciously propagandistic. It was undoubtedly a mass medium that appealed broadly, but also offered space for political and aesthetic development and could thus appeal as a socially conscious medium. Skaff notes that improvements in technology and engagement with foreign film resulted in a shift toward more aesthetically compelling filmmaking in the late 1920s, significantly improving the quality of domestic production. By the late 1930s, on the eve of WWII, Skaff writes, the variety, quantity, and quality of film production increased markedly (167). Czy Lucyna to dziewczyna (Is Lucyna a Girl; 1934, dir. Juliusz Gardan) is one of the most enjoyable comedies from this “golden age” of Polish cinema. In the film Eugeniusz Bodo (1899 – 1943), one of the most popular actors of the interwar period, is an engineer who falls in love with one of his employees, a woman who is impersonating a man to work in her conservative father’s company. This gender bender melds comedy with romance in a style typical of 1930s entertainment cinema. It also features musical numbers by the lead actors, who were often singers and dancers in this period. The ebullient mood of the late 1930s cinema, however, was soon to be crushed by the coming war.
Eugeniusz Bodo (left), with Jadwiga Smosarska (center) who is dressed as a man, in the 1934 film Czy Lucyna to dziewczyna (Is Lucyna a girl). Photo found in the Polish National Digital Archive (3/1/0/11/12259).
The Socialist Period
WWII decimated Poland’s nascent film industry. Many of the industry’s leading figures were killed during the war, including in resistance fighting and concentration camps. Kazimierz Prószyński, for example, the inventor with whom this section begins, was killed in Auschwitz at the age of 70 after being arrested for his participation in the wartime underground. Bodo starved to death while travelling to serve a sentence in a Soviet gulag in 1943, perfidiously, after the USSR had already realigned itself with the Allies and agreed to free Polish prisoners of war. Others in the film industry, pioneers of the first generation of Polish filmmaking died naturally as they reached old age. Still others emigrated, even after hostilities ended, in response to the “government-sponsored ethnic, religious, and political discrimination” they faced in the early years of the Polish People’s Republic (Skaff 185). Those who stayed were tasked with creating a national film school, which was established in Łódź in 1948. It’s first graduates inaugurated the “Polish Film School” (Polska szkoła filmowa) celebrated internationally for its dark postwar realism. Prime examples include renowned filmmaker’s Andrzej Wajda’s (1926 – 2016) trilogy of war films: Pokolenie (A Generation; 1955), Kanał (Sewer; 1957), and Popiól i diament (Ashes and Diamonds; 1958). True to the dire mood of the devastated nation, the films are philosophical contemplations on the scale of loss from the war, often broaching subjects that were heretofore forbidden to publicly discuss, like the tragic fate of the non-communist wartime resistance. Andrzej Munk’s (1921 – 1941) Zezowate szczęście (Bad Luck; 1960) is another representative example of the postwar cinema. The tragicomic film follows a Jewish character as he navigates the 1920s, 30s, WWII, and the Stalinist postwar.
By the mid 1960s, however, the national mood had lifted, and in addition to film, television came to play an increasingly significant role in Poland’s cultural life. Experimental TV signals were first broadcast in 1938, and the first official program aired in 1939, but the medium’s development was interrupted by the war. Regular programming resumed in 1953, and the first color broadcast was transmitted in 1971. While a good deal of programming in the socialist period was crudely propagandistic (as were many films), the mid-century saw the production of quite a few television series that went on to become cult classics. Stawka większa niż życie (More than Life at Stake, 1968-69, streaming on YouTube with English subtitles) offers a fascinating example of how politics and entertainment were entwined. The series follows Kapitan (Captain) Kloss who is a Polish spy modeled on the then popular James Bond. In the show, he goes undercover as a Nazi officer and coordinates with the Soviet-aligned resistance. By excising any trace of non-Soviet resistance, the series presents a version of WWII in which the Soviets are the only heroes. Poles, though aware of this historical chicanery, were enamored of Kloss and enjoyed the serial for its action sequences, femme fatales, elegant mise-en-scène, and witty repartee. By the late 1960s, the trauma of WWII gave way to a more playful engagement with war memory, evinced also by the famous Grzegorz Brzęczyszczykiewicz sequence in the 1969 war comedy Jak rozpętałem drugą wojnę światową (How I Set off WW2; dir. Tadeusz Chmielewski).
Unlikely as it may seem to Western readers, comedy was a popular and enjoyable genre in the socialist 60s and 70s. The 1970 film Nie lubię poniedziałku (I Hate Monday; also dir. Tadeusz Chmielewski) is a perfect example of the kind of humor Polish audiences enjoyed in these decades. Made at the tail end of the relative economic prosperity of the 1960s and anticipating the crisis of the 1970s, Nie lubię is a colorful ensemble omnibus about daily life in Warsaw. Reminiscent of Jacques Tati, the film puts a socialist twist on the absurdities of modern life, gently poking fun at a political and economic system that in a few short years would undergo a series of crises that threated the legitimacy of the socialist state. A translated excerpt is available here.
The lighthearted mood of 1960s comedies was quite different from the Kino moralnego niepokoju (Cinema of Moral Anxiety) that emerged in the late 1970s in response to Poland’s increasingly precarious economic situation and the relentlessly positive propaganda that obfuscated deep issues in the nation. “Moral anxiety” directors include the aforementioned Wajda, as well as Krzysztof Kieślowski (1941 – 1996), Krzysztof Zanussi (1939 – ), and Agnieszka Holland (1948 – ), who got her directing start in this period. Zanussi’s Barwy ochronne (Camouflage; 1977) is embedded below. The strident critique of these films reached a peak in the early 1980s together with the upheaval of the Solidarity movement. The martial law (Stan wojenny) crackdown of 1981 dramatically curtailed the movement, but together with the momentous political protests that rocked the nation in the late 70s and early 80s, the Cinema of Moral Anxiety underscored the collapse of the progressive narrative of socialist progress. The Moral Anxiety films were quite specific to Poland’s 1970s circumstances, making them less easily translatable than the postwar cinema that had enamored international audiences. Nevertheless, many of the directors who emerged in this time went on to pursue careers abroad, especially in France.
The cinematic 1980s thus began with a dark mood, and a good deal of government censorship. Film scholar Piotr Zwierzchowski writes that in search of profits (and non-political expression), cinema turned to “projections of nudity” that “were meant to divert attention away from the bleak reality of Poland enmeshed in crisis,” and serve as a “marketing technique luring viewers to cinemas” at a time when video began luring viewers away from theaters (170). And yet even in a decade that was closely policed in terms of political content, nudity gave cover, so to speak, to politics. The 1984 science fiction film Seksmisja (Sexmission; dir. Juliusz Machulski), for example, is at once a misogynist fantasy and a strident critique of the communist system that reimagines the totalitarian present as a future utopia composed entirely of women. Rounding off the 80s, Wojciech Marczewski’s 1990 film, Ucieczka z kina “Wolność” (Escape from Liberty Cinema), is a good example of a postsocialist transitional film. Ucieczka tells the story of a film censor who must suddenly deal with film images that have come to life and begun complaining to audiences who gawk in awe at the screen. This magical realist tale, in which the disgruntled characters ultimately flee the cinema, sets Polish cinema up for an uncertain future in the 1990s.
Postsocialist Cinema
Postsocialist cinema in Poland turned hard toward the market, and especially, towards Western genres that could be churned out to the delight of popular audiences. One fan favorite, the 1997 film Kiler (Killer; dir. Juliusz Machulski), follows an ordinary man who is mistaken for an assassin, and swept up into the Warsaw criminal underworld. And while this action comedy doesn’t quite read as a serious political film, its themes of easy money, organized crime, and corruption map closely onto the historical reality of the 1990s, a decade of economic and political shock when fortunes were made quickly and ruined even faster.
The 1990s in Polish cinema are also remembered for the work of Krzysztof Kieślowski, especially his Trzy kolory (Three Colors Trilogy: Blue, 1993; White, 1994; and Red, 1994), a set of films that intertwines the fates of Polish and French characters in the newly reunited Europe. Kieślowski’s collaboration with the French film industry was not unique—directors like Wajda and Holland had worked in France since the 1980s. The political situation of the 1990s, however, opened new opportunities for Polish filmmakers to work abroad and to make international co-productions. Poland’s accession into the EU in 2004 further hastened the country’s integration with Western European screen industries. Kieślowski notwithstanding, the 1990s are known for films that did well in the domestic box office, but hardly made a dent beyond Polish borders. In the 21st century, Poland has returned to international attention as a filmmaking center. Art films such as Ida (2013, dir. Pawel Pawlikowski), Zimna wojna (Cold War; 2018, dir. Pawel Pawlikowski), Córki dancingu (The Lure; 2015, dir. Agnieszka Smoczyńska), IO (EO; 2022, dir. Jerzy Skolimowski, a veteran of the Polish Film School), and Chłopi (The Peasants; 2023, dir. DK Welchman & Hugh Welchman), among many others, have drawn the attention of global film aesthetes. Popular cinema too, has performed well at the box office. For a taste of a recent caper that charmed Polish audiences, take a look at Netflix’s Najmro (2021, The Getaway King, dir. Mateusz Rakowicz).
Poland’s most famous 21st century IP, however, is undoubtedly Wiedźmin (The Witcher). The Polish video game studio Projekt Red released the first Witcher game in 2007; by 2015, they had an international breakthrough hit with Witcher 3: The Wild Hunt. The games are based on Andrzej Sapkowski’s (1948 – ) Wiedźmin series, a set of novels about a supernatural monster hunter named Geralt that showcase the author’s imagination, but that are also steeped deeply in Slavic folklore. Most readers will be familiar with the 2019 Netflix adaptation of the same story, but Polish audiences will surely also fondly remember the 2002 Polish TV serial. For those of a more indie gaming bent, Polish studios have also been successful on a smaller scale. 2014’s This War of Mine is a 2-D survival strategy game, which is a critically acclaimed and haunting game. Its trailer, set to Tadeusz Wożniak’s 1972 hit ballad “Zegarmistrz światła“ (The Watchmaker of Light), is eerily reminiscent of WWII; unfortunately, it also foreshadows the harrowing contemporary images of war now associated with Ukraine.