Lublin film visuals in the collection of The State Archive in Lublin and The Lublin Museum from the interwar period

Małgorzata Sławek-Czochra

Abstract

Citizens of Lublin watched the first movies in 1899, that is only four years after the Lumiere brothers’ first paid public screening in Paris. The first cinema was opened in 1908 and from that moment cinemas have been important in the panorama and the social life of Lublin. Currently, only archival media materials, like film posters, present their repertoire and the ways of functioning in the interwar period. The first part of the article gives general summary of film posters development in Poland. In the next sections of the article, visual materials (cinema posters) are analyzed. They were smaller than in the West, because they were placed in special display cases, usually next to the entry to the cinema. In the posters which were printed in Lublin until the 1940s the lettering, often supplemented with simple but still distinct ornamentation, is dominant in the visual layer. Some posters timidly imitate new trends in the arts developing in the main centres (Lvov, Cracow and Warsaw), set by such personalities as: Jan Tschichold, Henryk Berlewi, Władysław Strzemiński. These posters are valuable as documents, attesting to history and the social life of Lublin. The means of a critical analysis of sources and an analysis of the content are c in the article. The results of the detailed analyses have a factual character and represent a contribution to further research on the extensive subject of film and cinema culture development in Poland in the interwar period.