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The Law of the Looking Glass. Sheila Skaff
Читать онлайн.Название The Law of the Looking Glass
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9780821442524
Автор произведения Sheila Skaff
Серия Polish and Polish-American Studies Series
Издательство Ingram
In the partitioned lands, cinema roused the first audiences to compare the images on the screen to the aesthetic, linguistic, and economic conditions of their own communities. Audiences, and later, filmmakers, formed a multifarious and fickle relationship with the apparatus and the screen. No writer more thoroughly describes the complexity of the situation than does Karol Irzykowski in his book on film theory, Dziesiąta muza: Zagadnienia estetyczne kina (The Tenth Muse: Aesthetic Considerations of Cinema), published in the reconstituted Poland in 1924 and republished in 1957. In a chapter titled “The Law of the Looking Glass,” Irzykowski considers the ways in which cinema both reflects and distorts reality. He claims that cinema allows viewers to study the world without directly engaging in it:
I once saw the moves of some English gymnasts as they marched in time, breaking up to form patterns such as stars, etc. I am not embarrassed to admit that I liked these performances in the cinema better than the many live ones I had seen. There is in man a desire to view things and events in abstraction from reality. The more directly he has experienced them, the more he would like to have them before him once again in a less committal, harmless and more exact form. This is one of the sources of art (as well as of science). For only half of the world is ruled by the principle of action; the other half is subject to the laws of reflection.2
Irzykowski argues that cinema offers an escape from the necessity of physical interaction with the world even as it extends the possibility of studying others’ interactions with it. As such, it may have cushioned the blows of modernity—including those resulting from its lack—for audiences in the partitioned lands. Irzykowski explains
In cinema, a locomotive rushes straight toward you. It is already approaching, expanding more rapidly than in reality, like a monster, in order to devour you . . . when suddenly it is surrendered, it has infiltrated you; you still feel anxiety for a moment—an anxiety that is truly nice, maybe the kind that some English lord experiences when he is hunting in the jungle with a protective shield. But if you also had heard the chug of a locomotive and the clang of its wheels and had sensed its horrifying weight, if the foul odor of its smoke had reached you, you would have been petrified and would have jumped up and run away, thinking that under the pretense of a motion picture show you had been lured into a trap. . . . But this is only an optical locomotive, a locomotive-apparition, which passes through you.3
Because film is a visual medium, Irzykowski implores filmmakers to pay attention to the consumption of its imagery by viewers. Audiences lord over the screen, according to Irzykowski. In doing so, they become masters of the terrain presented there, impassively devouring even the most terrifying images. He writes
By all appearances, photographic objectivism is one of the cinema’s features. However, a certain mystical possessiveness resides in humans, which identifies “seeing” with “having.” This is why cinema aims to make the world optical. . . . It not only renders what we usually see. It also spies for us, persistently and courageously, that which we do not see because of inaccessibility or impatience. It shows the struggle of a polyp with a crab in the water, it breaks a horse’s gallop into its components, it sees in ellipsis how grass grows; in the end, it even makes us believe that it sees unusual and supernatural things (special effects, fantasy films).4
Two issues are at stake here. First, Irzykowski’s claim that cinema is an entirely visual medium derives from an intellectual tradition that considered an organic desire to overcome linguistic barriers an essential element of Polish national culture. For more than a decade before writing his book, Irzykowski had been declaring his opposition to the transition from silent to sound film, which occurred in independent Poland in 1929 and 1930 and which contributed to the widening divisions among speakers of the welter of languages encompassed by the new state. Irzykowski, for one, considered words amorphous, insubstantial, and detrimental to communication. Inside the motion picture theater, language differences led to ethnic tension, segregation, and even violence. In his view, cinema was undergoing “the same sort of basic cultural transformation of the soul that happened in the invention of writing or script. However, those changes took place slowly, while this one is occurring abruptly and before our own eyes.”5 His struggle to cut short this transformation is one of the major issues in the region’s cinema.
The second issue arises as early as the first projections. Viewers’ “mystical possessiveness” of the objects on the screen is of particular relevance to the partitioned lands. Cinema granted audiences a peek at the symbols of modern national consciousness, of which they had long read and heard. They had seen these symbols in still photographs, but now they could glean meaning from people’s interactions with them and the other objects on the screen. Every movement, from the way that the leaves rustled to the tipping of a hat, took on meaning. Film exposed movement—and, therefore, motivation—that viewers brought under their control by the very act of comprehending it. Irzykowski writes, “The optical surface of the world is becoming larger. Let’s imagine that it had been twisted, wrinkled, and creased until now and that the folds are now slowly smoothing out, in order to obey the law of reflection.”6 Yet Irzykowski accentuates the potential for misunderstanding the world through cinema. He concludes, “Cinema is a cult of visibility. Cinema registers the world, but it may also turn it into fiction.”7 What, then, may it turn into fiction?
Because cinema in Poland is associated with the country’s political and cultural situation, a brief introduction to Polish history may be helpful. In the late eighteenth century, Austria, Prussia, and Russia annexed parts of the region. In the partitions of 1772, 1793, and 1795, the empires carved new borders through the corresponding eastern, northwestern, and southwestern lands of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, or Res Publica, until, little by little, it ceased to exist. The Polish constitution passed on May 3, 1791, which promised to create a modern constitutional monarchy, never had a chance to take hold. For the most part, the territories’ ties to the empires were based on historical, ethnic, or geographical connections that existed only on paper. In reality, the inhabitants retained many of the diverse cultural, religious, and linguistic traditions known under the Res Publica. The languages spoken in the region included German, Lithuanian, Polish, Russian, Ukrainian, and Yiddish. A serf-labor, agrarian socioeconomic structure remained intact for many years. Members of the powerful Roman Catholic Church lived alongside Jews, Orthodox Christians, Protestants, and Uniates. Most significantly, a revolutionary spirit—a free, curious, polyglot spirit—took hold during the final partition. The opening line of the anthem adopted by the newly formed Polish foreign legion in Italy, “Jeszcze Polska nie umarła, kiedy my żyjemy” (Poland has not died as long as we live), illustrated the new sense of nationhood.8
Consequently, in 1896, cinema did not arrive in Poland but in parts of Austria-Hungary, the Kingdom of Prussia, and the Russian Empire, where descendents of some of the inhabitants of the former Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth had carried on a century-long struggle for independence. Inhabitants were usually allowed to move freely among the formerly Polish areas of the empires, though for most of the nineteenth century, their opportunities were limited by informal social restrictions on movement between classes, in particular the continued exploitation of peasants and Jews (even after the abolition of serfdom) by landowners. The political and cultural state of affairs of the region varied according to empire and period. As a result, each part of the region greeted the introduction of cinema a bit differently.
The southern region of Galicia, which was under Hapsburg rule, included the present-day Ukrainian towns of L’viv (Ger. Lemberg, Pol. Lwów) and Drohobych (Ger. Drohobytsch, Pol. Drohobycz).