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Polish-German film relations in the process of building German cultural hegemony in Europe 1933-1939
(2022)
The article presents Polish-German film relations in the framework of Nazis cultural diplomacy between 1933 and 1939. The Nazi effort to create a cultural hegemony through the unification of the European film market under German leadership serves as an important point of reference. On the example of the Polish-German relationship, the article analyses the Nazi “soft power” in terms of both its strength and limits. Describing the broader geopolitical context, the article proposes a new trail in the research on both the film milieus and the cinema culture in Poland in the 1930s. In mythological terms, it belongs to cultural diplomacy and adds simultaneously to film history and New Cinema History.
In the first two decades, when cinema was developing worldwide from a novelty into an entertainment industry, Warsaw belonged to the multinational Romanov empire. Located at its western borders, this Polish city was an important transportation and trade hub and became also a site of the domestic film industry with all its branches – production, distribution, and exhibition. The new medium had a special appeal, and it has always been assumed that the cinema was a social place where people of different classes and ethnicities came together. This article looks at the development of the local cinema market and explores the participations of the local Russian, Polish and Jewish populations. Inspired by the New Cinema History (NCH), it takes its contraposition from the traditional film historiography that uses a top-down approach as a method and the national paradigm as a defining category. Instead, it gives a three-perspectival view utilising a variety of sources including a collection of cinema programmes in three languages from 1913. Based on that, it maps screening venues with QGIS and analysis of cinema programmes, shedding new light onto the complex cinema culture of the city that was called Varshava (Варшава) in Russian, Warszawa in Polish, and Varshe (ווארשע) in Yiddish.