Czy da się określić, kto był królem śmiechu? Uwagi o badaniach recepcji filmu w Polsce międzywojennej
Is It Possible to Identify Who Was the King of Laughter?: Notes on Film Reception Studies in Interwar Poland

Summary/Abstract: The article undertakes to verify a claim from WojciechŚwidziński’s book Co było grane? Film zagraniczny w Polscew latach 1918-1929 na przykładzie Warszawy [What Was onScreens?: Foreign Movies in Poland 1918-1929. A Case Study ofWarsaw] (2015), according to which the now-forgotten Dan-ish comedians Pat and Patachon enjoyed greater popular-ity in interwar Poland than Charlie Chaplin himself. Thispretext is used to consider the validity of using quantitativedata in research on Polish cinema before 1939, especially onfilm reception. The author lists the problems accompany-ing the collection, aggregation, and analysis of numericaldata, such as latent variables, data gaps, and incoherence.Next, he presents detailed data on the presence of filmsfeaturing Chaplin and Pat and Patachon in the cinemasof 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 argu-ment in favour of the absolute effectiveness of quantitativeresearch on cinema history. In the author’s opinion, itmakes sense insofar as it is part of a possibly broad, con-textual analysis of the phenomena under study.

• Details
• Contents