By Daniel Bickermann. There is an old Polish saying that seems to portray both the nation's long history of suffering and the ingenuity and the unbreakable adaptability of its population. It goes like this: “The situation is great, but not hopeless”.

Although Polish engineers worked closely with and around the Lumière brothers during their invention of the “Kinematographe” and although there was even a Polish alternative projector, it wasn't until the founding of the first sovereign Polish republic after World War 1 that the Polish film industry could blossom. In those early years it made its good reputation mostly with national epics and literary adaptations. In this surrounding the careers of international silent film stars like Pola Negri or the world famous opera film star Jan Kiepura started. But the avantgarde scene was also a fixture in this extraordinarily sophisticated film culture before World War 2 – this scene among others brought forth Jerzy Toeplitz, who would later, as longtime head of the legendary Lodz film school, train all postwar Polish talents of distinction. The Second World War, where the country's neighbouring war powers Russia and Germany would take turns conquering and pillaging the nation then constituted an abrupt low point from which no new beginning seemed possible.

Risen from ruins

Legend has it actually, that one functioning cinema and a derelict gym hall in Lodz reconstructed as a studio, was everything that was left of the Polish film industry in 1945. But out of those ruins then rose a fertile landscape with a tradition in film production that was unique in Europe – it concentrated on “film groups”, which were granted considerable freedom of creative choice for a Communist country. The Polish School with its indefatigable pioneer and figurehead Andrzej Wajda put moral and social topics front and centre and by doing so hit a nerve with Europe's most educated and cineastic audience: In the mid-60s the about 30 Polish films already reached a proud market share of 35%, even though Polish cinemas had been opened for Hollywood movies. The loyal audience, which was organized in more than 200 local film clubs and gave some Polish film unbelievable box-office stats like 30 million visitors, would become another fixture of Polish cinema – more than 400 short films produced annually during the 60s attest to an extraordinarily vibrant national film culture, especially since this gave birth to masters of the short form like Zbigniew Rybczynski, who would carry on the Polish avantgarde tradition. Still 1990 Poland had the highest VCR density in the world with more than one million units.

Although the endlessly productive Wajda would dominate Polish film culture from the 50s to the 70s with his work in the theatre, on TV, in film politics and of course in the cinema, there was, nonetheless, a fertile new generation of filmmakers emerging: Directors like Agnieszka Holland, Feliks Falk, Roman Polanski and of course Krzysztof Kieślowski have also gone through the Lodz film school (as did Wajda). Not even the strict censorship of the Jaruzelski regime, which from 1980 on tried to suppress the social realist sujets of the “Polish School”, could harm this generation. Polanski went to the US (where later on Agnieszka Holland would also go), while most of the other filmmakers seemingly took refuge in genre films, while actually delivering the same socially explosive messages past the clueless censors.

Governments change, the audience stays the same

After the democratic revolution the film industry struggled with massive inflation and the rough new production environment – and still managed to revolutionize itself within only ten years from a mostly locally organized state-directed economy to a flourishing private sector, which won international reputation and awards mostly because of Krzysztof Kieślowski. After the millennium then there were several TV crises, which always resulted in crises of funding for cinema, and the almost unbelievable audience numbers of former days could never be reached again – which was also due to the massive changes in ticket pricing. But still the Polish audience remained one of the most sophisticated and loyal in Europe, and the massive streams of visitors at the major festivals in Warsaw or Gdynia as well as at the more specialized gatherings like the short film fest in Krakow or the world famous Camerimage attests to that. Plus there are also successful annual Polish Film Festivals in places like Los Angeles, Seattle or Berlin. So Polish cinema is very much alive and in good health.

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• THE END (PL 2009. Agnieszka Pokrywka)