Was the Cinema Fairground Entertainment?

The history of the very first beginnings of popular cinema in Poland has not yet been definitively written, and for many reasons deserves to be reassessed today. The traditional view is that the years 1900 to 1908 were a period of 'fairground cinema', an expression which originally referred to the way films were shown but eventually became an aesthetic term and was used above all in a pejorative sense. According to that view, then, pre-1908 Polish cinema was fairground entertainment, its spectators were fairground people with corresponding needs and tastes, and the world portrayed in the films did not extend beyond that of the fairground.