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EASTERN EUROPEAN DOCUMENTARY dist picture. Subsequently, exchange of units and technicians has been restricted to the limits of Eastern Europe.
Poland and Eastern Europe
Developments in Poland have followed a similar pattern to Czechoslovakia, except that the Poles had to start literally from scratch in 1945 with even less pre-war foundations to work on. The task of building their shattered film industry actually began during the war, when a Military Film Unit was established in 1943 under Aleksander Ford to work with the Polish Army in Russia. Their main work was news-reels, but included a compilation film, The Battle ofLenino. In 1944 this unit was reorganised as 'Polish Army Film Producers', still concentrating mainly on news-reels. In 1945, with the creation of Film Polski, the whole business of making and exhibiting films began on an organised national basis, but still in the face of extreme difficulties.
'Not one studio, camera, or lens, not one foot of film remained . . .Some cameras were received as reparation from the Germans; other equipment had to be improvised. A candy factory was converted into a factory for projectors. A gymnasium and an athletic field were requisitioned for a studio. . . .' 1
Everything, in fact, had to be produced on the spot. Inevitably, news-reels remained the principal activity at first, but some documentary production was started. The work of the feature section naturally took more time to develop.
The revival of production owed a great deal to the survivors of a group of film enthusiasts who had formed in 1930 an avantgarde film society 'Start', and later a production co-operative which was responsible pre-war for a number of short films and one or two features. This group included people like Aleksander Ford, Wanda Jakabowska, Eugene Cekalski and Jerzy Toeplitz. Most of them have ultimately moved into feature production. It was Wanda Jakabowska who made The Last Stage (1947), a terrible documentation of the life of women internees in Auschwitz, while Ford made Border Street (1947) about the tragic end of the Warsaw Ghetto, both of them highly realistic films. Jerzy Toeplitz, on the other hand, became the head of the documentary section. He, too, has shown himself to be fully alive to the
1 Christine and Eugene Cekalski, 'Polish Film Builds for the Future', Hollywood Quarterly, vol. ii, no. 3, April 1947.
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