STACH

F.2024-02-0067

1974

A home movie by Jerzy “George” Skwarek, shot in Chicago in early 1970, depicts his two Polish colleagues testing a 16mm camera and is the only film in Skwarek’s collection shot in this gauge.

A home movie by Jerzy "George" Skwarek, shot in Chicago in early 1970, depicts his two colleagues from Poland who also emigrated to the United States. The film shows the testing of a 16mm camera and is the only film in Skwarek’s collection shot in this gauge. The first part has an unintentional red tint, possibly the result of a mistake in the processing lab. For this reason, the image is hardly visible – we can recognize electricity pylons and houses in the distance. Then three men appear talking by the car, one holding a camera, and the other a lens. Skwarek alternately zooms in and out, directing the camera towards the electricity pylons and a tall chimney, probably of a factory building, a car, and a sticker “Chicago 1974” on its windshield, the street, and passing cars, only to return to the silhouettes and faces of the men again. Then, the camera moves to the interior of an apartment, and with it, the red tint disappears. In the apartment room, we watch two men from the previous scene – Stanisław Słowakiewicz and the other, whose name is unknown. The title of the film "Stach" comes from the diminutive of "Stanisław," the name of the first man. Skwarek zooms out so that the studio lighting used in this scene becomes visible, from the harsh light of which the filmed man squints his eyes. Słowakiewicz looks directly into the camera and comments on something; another man soon takes his place. The men present to the camera and inspect the photographic equipment – a camera, lenses, and an object (box?) with the inscription “Kodak Professional.” The film ends with an alternating zoom-in and zoom-out of the object the man holds, and the image fades away.

The two men depicted in the film, one of which was identified as Stanislaw Słowakiewicz, are from Zakopane and Nowy Targ, towns in southern Poland situated in the mountains. They worked in Poland as photographers, but after moving to the United States, they earned money in other ways (most likely by doing manual labor). Słowakiewicz worked as a photographer in two of the most touristic places in Zakopane – Krupówki Street, the town's main street, and Gubałówka, a mountain in the Gubałówka Range. He specialized in taking pictures with a white bear, or rather a person dressed as one, with whom you could take a photo for a fee. The white bear mascot remained an important tourist attraction and an inseparable part of the landscape of these places for years. The popularity was most likely related to the surprise effect of seeing a white bear in the Polish mountains.

Jerzy Skwarek recalled in an interview conducted by Agata Zborowska in 2024 that on the occasion of John Paul II’s visit to Chicago in 1979, he arranged with the then Polish bishop in Chicago for exclusive permission for himself and Stanislaw Słowakiewicz to be directly in front of the stage where the Polish pope was celebrating a mass. Skwarek is most likely referring to the outdoor mass in his native language for Polish Catholics held in the parking lot of Five Holy Martyrs Parish, 44th and Richmond streets, where Bishop Alfred Abramowicz was then pastor. The space in front of the stage was most likely the closest place the press could access during the event.

16mm

100 feet

Color

Mag Stripe

1/1

Yes

English

Reversal Positives

Home Movies
Amateur

Photography