Is It Possible to Identify Who Was the King of Laughter?: Notes on Film Reception Studies in Interwar Poland
Wojciech Świdziński
woyciesz@gmail.comThe Aleksander Zelwerowicz National Academy of Dramatic Art (Poland)
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6840-4069
Abstract
The article undertakes to verify a claim from Wojciech Świdziński’s book Co było grane? Film zagraniczny w Polsce w latach 1918-1929 na przykładzie Warszawy [What Was on Screens?: Foreign Movies in Poland 1918-1929. A Case Study of Warsaw] (2015), according to which the now-forgotten Danish comedians Pat and Patachon enjoyed greater popularity in interwar Poland than Charlie Chaplin himself. This pretext is used to consider the validity of using quantitative data in research on Polish cinema before 1939, especially on film reception. The author lists the problems accompanying the collection, aggregation, and analysis of numerical data, such as latent variables, data gaps, and incoherence. Next, he presents detailed data on the presence of films featuring Chaplin and Pat and Patachon in the cinemas of Warsaw, Kraków, and Białystok between 1925 and 1928. The analysis partly confirms the thesis posited earlier. However, it is difficult to see this as a conclusive argument in favour of the absolute effectiveness of quantitative research on cinema history. In the author’s opinion, it makes sense insofar as it is part of a possibly broad, contextual analysis of the phenomena under study.
Keywords:
quantitative methods, film reception, silent film, Charlie Chaplin, Pat and PatachonReferences
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Authors
Wojciech Świdzińskiwoyciesz@gmail.com
The Aleksander Zelwerowicz National Academy of Dramatic Art Poland
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6840-4069
PhD in Humanities; theatre and film scholar. Lecturer at the National Academy of Dramatic Art in Warsaw (since 2024, Dean of the Faculty of Theatre Studies), member of the Polish Society for Film and Media Studies. He published the book Co było grane? Film zagraniczny w Polsce w latach 1918-1929 na przykładzie Warszawy [What Was on Screens?: Foreign Movies in Poland 1918-1929. A Case Study of Warsaw] (2015). He is also the author of an academic study of Andrzej Włast’s collection of movie columns. He published scientific and popular science articles in Kwartalnik Filmowy, Ekrany, Pleograf, and Stolica.
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