Lviv's Cinemas During World War II (original) (raw)
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Mapping cinemas in the Russian-governed Warsaw
Studia Geohistorica
Starting with the first film shows in late 1895, Warsaw experienced a considerable rise of cinema. Like in other places worldwide, this development was conditioned as much by the place’s particularities as by the time. Thus, the article illuminates the growth and scope of the local cinema market against the larger geopolitical context. Furthermore, using a sample for 1911, it maps the cinemas in QGIS, revealing spatial patterns and correlations.
Cinema and Polish-Ukrainian Relations Between the 1990s and 2010s
Images, 2023
The article reviews the role of feature films that recreate the conflictual relations of the shared history which Poland and Ukraine look at from significantly different vantage points. It analyzes these films' influence on Polish-Ukrainian relations, as well as the results of the Polish-Ukrainian dialogue. Using examples of Polish films that were commercially successful-With Fire and Sword by Jerzy Hoffman (1999) and Volyn by Wojciech Smarzowski (2016)-the article traces how cinema can articulate the problems of shared history that exist in the collective memory, and what kind of results it brings.
No longer a trivial entertainment: Popular cinema in Poland after 2000
Literatura i Kultura Popularna
No longer a trivial entertainment: Popular cinemain Poland after 2000This article discusses two types of popular films produced in Poland after 2000, a subgenre of romantic comedy, which I label “sexual comedy”, represented by the films of Andrzej Saramonowicz and Tomasz Konecki, and “popular arthouse film”, represented by Dzień świra Day of the Wacko, 2002 by Marek Koterski. To understand the specificity of Polish popular cinema in this period, the author locates it in the postwar history of filmmaking in this country, arguing that making popular films was met in this country with great resistance. The situation has changed after the fall of state socialism, when cinema had to be more receptive to the audience’s demands. The films discussed in this article reflect both this pressure and the difficulties involved in making such films.
The immediate post-WWII years represented a period of turbulent change in many European cinema cultures -and for the Soviet Occupation Zone of Germany it held true even more than for any other part of Europe. This case study examines both the new distribution system the Soviet occupation power brought to the zone and the reception of Soviet and German movies by German audiences. A collection of reports about the reaction of audiences to the Soviet movies facilitates research into attitudes to Soviet production. These reports are used for the first time for a historical research on cinema reception and give us a unique opportunity to analyse the behaviour and opinions of the post-WWII audiences through the cinemagoer´s written statements, their oral expressions written down by the cinema managers, and observations made by employees of the cinemas. The general problem Soviet production (as, in a less extreme form, any other foreign production) faced on the German market was its cultural difference and the already established expectations based on the implicit norms of a "well made movie". The prevailing evaluation of the Soviet cinema as primitive one and good enough only for children offered a chance to invert the relation between the occupier and the occupied, the custodian and the reformed, and to (re)capture the stand of cultural superiority. Through the study of reception of the Soviet movies, generally less popular as they were, the paper concludes that the enthusiastic reaction to the German production of the Nazi era goes beyond pure escapism towards the movies´ function as a confirmation of the fundamentally shaken national identity.
Iwona Guść in her contribution “Polish Film Culture in Transition: On the ‘Private Films’ of Andrzej Kondratiuk (1985-1996)” looks at the tensions that can arise between the structures of small national cinemas and “small” forms of filmmaking. Taking her cues from Yuri Tsivian’s seminal reflections on technological innovation and changing reception patterns (which seem relevant not only to early cinema but also to the new forms of spectatorship in the age of YouTube), Guść traces the fascinating career of director Andrzej Kondratiuk who in the second half of the 1980s deliberately turned from being a state filmmaker into an independent filmmaker and developed a radically personal “home movie” aesthetic, using his extended family as actors. Whereas Kondratiuk’s small and personal cinema was initially met with extreme hostility because his aesthetic confused the “ontological status of the characters” and questioned the codified line that separates filmic fact and fiction, the slow acceptance of Kondratiuk into the pantheon of Polish cinema in the 1990s, as Guść explains, points to a fundamental reconfiguration of the private and the public sphere in post-socialist Poland.
An issue discussed in this chapter concerns the movie landscape in terms of its two chosen functions: aesthetic and anthropological ones. The first function originates from the aesthetic tradition and results from the fact of objectification of the picture (image) as a subject of cognition and contemplation, entangled in the sight codes. It assumes stability and distance as a receptive experience. The second one – reading of a landscape according to the anthropological key – is based on the cultural experience that includes activities such as residing (in a place/territory), participation and engagement. It draws attention not to the view of plane itself, but rather to the space depth that can be associated with the issues of geographical environment, cultural representation, topography, and symbolism of a place and locality. In the reflection on this research, the main issue is not treating those functions as an opposition, but rather using the category of landscape to reveal the cultural practices in terms of complex network of relations between subject/environment/ agency, which characterise today's processes of mediation. The subjects of the analysis are the chosen contemporary feature films representing a certain phenomenon of Polish cinematography – " Silesian cinema. " The main purpose of this research is an attempt to find answers to the following questions: how do the pictures produced by " small cinema " express the locality? To what extent do they preserve/overcome the visual conventions and cultural stereotypes? To what extent it is possible to capture in a movie the complex problems resulting from the dynamics of sociocultural transformation of a region – especially contradictory visions of relation to modernity/postmodernity, creation of new economical divisions and tensions between global/local?
Culture and politics of post-national cinemas of the Balkans
Thomas Elsaesser pointed out in his seminal book European Cinema / Face to face with Hollywood (2005) that in the post-national period “Films’ attention to recognizable geographical places and stereotypical historical periods” begun to “echo Hollywood’s ability to produce ‘open’ texts that speak to a diversity of public, while broadly adhering to the format of classical narrative.” (p. 82) No matter how much this tendency had appeared in the past in the cinemas of the Balkans, not so rarely also in the period of “national” cinemas under communism, we have to deal today with small cinemas, which in most part confirm just mentioned hypotheses. This holds true in the case of many feature films, which deconstruct the past, but it could be proven in an increasing number of feature films, which make use of genre codes or simply try to work on globalized topics. However, at the same time, the location of the Balkans, its immeasurable cultural diversity, reach and in many respects baffling violent history remains to be a ground for some singular visualisations and dramatization in films by younger generations of film makers. On the other hand the “language” of visual media interferes into the formation of local cultures. Furthermore, digital technologies, which work not only in favour of democratisation and accessibility of contemporary visual media, are modifying perceptions and modes of appropriating cultural traditions. In such a framework aesthetics become interlaced with the social context and political statements in the cinema. Therefore aesthetics cannot be so transparently formulated as they could have been in times, when they made use of metaphors and “hidden” messages. Small cinemas of the Balkans nevertheless enter the world cinema as rather “readable” to global audiences and especially to those, who attend many film festivals. Keywords: film, socialism, post-communism, world cinema, nationalism
Polish Cinema: From History to Modernity
2023
An excellent example of such a thoughtful, deep, professional analysis is the book by film critic Alexander Fedorov “Polish Album: Movies Notes”, which reveals the theme of Polish cinematography and its reflection in the mirror of Soviet and Russian film criticism. This book continues the series of film studies publications by Professor Alexander Fedorov on Soviet and foreign cinematography. Some of these books have already been talked about in the film and media press, and some of them have won awards from the Guild of Film Critics and Film Critics. The material of this book might be of interest for higher-school teachers, students, graduate students, researchers, film critics, cinema scholars, journalists, as well as for the wide range of readers who are interested in the history of cinema art, problems of cinema, film criticism and film sociology. In connection with the publication of the monograph Alexander Fedorov gave an interview to Professor Marina Tselykh.