Którędy nad morze?
Which way to the sea?

Excerpts from the visual archive of the colonial complex of interwar Poland

Summary/Abstract: The article is an attempt to describe the „maritime turn” or „turn to the sea” in the interwar period in Poland from a spatial and visual point of view. The author argues that the Baltic Sea appears in the imagination of the majority of the country’s population primarily through images, and that a careful investigation of popular visual media – outdoor advertising, but most importantly cinema – allows one to capture not only the propaganda and rhetorical dimension of imperial and maritime politics but also the basic remodeling of space that happened in Poland at that time. Using the example of the 1927 movie Call of the Sea (dir. H. Szaro) and in reference to other cinematic productions of the period, the article attempts to characterize the development of ways of showing/seeing and locating the sea on the map and in the social imagination. The key dimensions of this representations are low artistic quality and superficiality, which are interpreted here not in aesthetic terms, but as a testimony to how the sea was present in the lives of the majority of Polish society at that time – namely as decoration, background, fantasy, dream, joke, rather than the experience of a transoceanic journey or even seaside holidays.

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