Film Museums in Poland – the Offer and Visitors

Abstract

Analyses of film tourism often stress the fact that it is a chimeric phenomenon, difficult to manage and transient. Thus, it is important to create permanent attractions that would draw film lovers, irrespective of the changing conjuncture on the tourist and film market. Those can be, for instance, film museums. As a result of the conducted inventory (size and character of collection, topic of exposition, additional activity, etc.) more than a dozen facilities of museum character whose expositions are in different ways connected with cinematography were identified in Poland. They were divided into five groups: film museums proper, halls of memory, institutions related to museums, other museums connected with film and defunct museums (closed down). The second part of the paper characterises visitors to four institutions (Museum of Cinematography in Lodz, Oskar Schindler’s Enamel Factory in Krakow, Bedtime Cartoons Museum in Rzeszow, Kargul and Pawlak Museum in Lubomierz). On the basis of the available general museum statistics, the level of frequency, visitors’ structure (including characteristics of typical visitors) and seasonality of the tourist traffic were determined. Oskar Schindler’s Enamel Factory in Krakow is a rarity against all the other facilities. Due to the number of visitors (over 400 thousand) and the range of impact (prevalence of foreign tourists), it has an international status. In turn, the potential of other museums has, so far, been poorly used.