Cinema Culture in Warsaw (1895/6-1939): A transnational Perspective

• Applicant: Dr. Karina Pryt
• Subject Area: Theatre and Media Studies
• Term: from 2016 to 2022
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 325534972

Over the last few years, research in the humanities and the social sciences has moved beyond the dominant framework of national culture to address issues of media culture in a transnational perspective. Aided by a cross-disciplinary spatial turn, issues of space and place have become the center of attention and contributed to the development of new perspectives and approaches to complex, site-specific phenomena in media history and media culture, replacing the latent idealism of the grand historical narrative of national culture.This interdisciplinary project is situated at the intersection of history and film studies and proposes to explore the heuristic potential of the new approach by studying the cinema culture in the multi-ethnic city of Warsaw between the emergence of this form of leisure at the turn of the 20th century and its destruction in the Second World War and the ravages of the Holocaust. The goal is to reconstruct and map the subject of enquiry. At the same time, the aim is to replace an older map, which was exclusively focused on Polish cinema and suggested by older approaches to film history and the history of the city. The focus lies on transnational networks between local cinema businesses and global players in the film industry, as well as on cultural and linguistic diversity of the producers and consumers, among whom a significant number were Jewish. The attention shifts also towards different political forces and common sociocultural and sociolinguis-tic norms, which affected this field of business and culture.The project targets a social and cultural history of the film business, of cinemas and cinema au-diences in accordance with the constructivist study of nationalism and the transnational histori-ography. Therefore it takes the spatial perspective and proposes to combine the New Cinema History in film studies and the history of the city. The essential input comes also from the Jewish Studies as well as the iconic turn in history. Spatial data will be categorized and mapped through the Geographical Information System (GIS). The intention is to reconstruct a topography of leisure by studying cinema programs, release and exhibition patterns, the structure of film com-panies and the exhibition business, as well as the function of cinemas as social spaces. The study closes with a critical analysis of visual representations of the cinema culture in Warsaw. The inquiry focuses the processes of visualization as well as the shifting in the spatial develop-ment and in the political and sociocultural norms, which affected the cinema culture and their visual representations. The project seeks to close an important gap in the cinema history and the cultural history of 20th century Central Europe and make contributions to the New Cinema History and the history of the city. It uncovers also a mosaic stone in the complex and contradictory interlacing of Polish-Jewish relations.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants