The Skladanowsky brothers
| Movie | |
|---|---|
| Original title | The Skladanowsky brothers |
| Country of production | Germany |
| original language | German |
| Publishing year | 1995 |
| length | 58 minutes |
| Age rating | FSK 0 |
| Rod | |
| Director |
Wim Wenders students at the HFF Munich |
| script | Wim Wenders students at the HFF Munich |
| production |
Veit Helmer Wolfgang Längfeld |
| music | Laurent Petitgand |
| camera | Jürgen Juerges |
| cut | Peter Przygodda |
| occupation | |
| |
The Skladanowsky Brothers is a German feature film from 1995 . In the anniversary year of cinema, Wim Wenders shot a homage to the Skladanowsky brothers with students from the HFF Munich , who showed their short films in the winter garden in Berlin in 1895 , which, together with the presentation of the Lumière brothers in Paris, marked the birth of cinema.
The film is divided into three acts , the first two of which are set in 1895, the third in the present in 1995. In addition, in the first two acts, the viewer is given a narrator who comments on the event from the off . The first act is told from the perspective of little Gertrud, daughter of Max Skladanowsky, the second from the perspective of Max Skladanowsky, with the voice of Rolf Zacher being heard here.
action
Act I: How Dad Invented the Kintopp
Little Gertrud lives with her father Max Skladanowsky and his brothers Emil and Eugen in Pankow near Berlin. Her everyday life is shaped by the inventiveness of the three men, especially with her uncle Eugen, who works as a clown and magician , she has an intimate relationship. Her father has long been working on the invention of a device with which moving images can be played while he has already solved the problem of the camera. In his opinion, the invention of the kintop is in the air. So far, he and Emil have been earning a living mainly by showing fog pictures or the magic lantern at fairs. Gertrud finds this form of entertainment boring and fake and believes that she has to push the development forward.
When one day, to Gertrud's disappointment, Eugen had to travel for a long time because he was involved in a circus, they took him up on the roof of the house beforehand, so that Gertrud could keep him life-size with her despite his absence. But the little one does not want to believe that and looks into her father's box. In doing so, she accidentally exposes the filmstrip, but there is a second one. Finally Max has solved the problem of film transport and he can happily present Gertrud with the life-size projected Eugene. Others are also secretly interested in Skladanowsky's invention, but the family manages to put the spy off repeatedly.
Act II: The first performance
On December 28, 1895, Max Skladanowsky was sitting with his brother Emil in the Grand Café on Boulevard des Capucines in Paris and witnessed the performance of the Lumière brothers. He realizes that his own machine is hopelessly inferior to the invention of the French. He recalls the preparations for his own demonstration:
The news of the groundbreaking invention has already got around in Berlin and so many artists have come to be captured on film strips by the Skladanowskys on the grounds of a beer garden. The operators of the renowned variety theater Wintergarten on Friedrichstrasse have also gotten wind of it and are trying to go to Pankow to offer the brothers a commitment. The spy, who watches the whole thing from a distance, tries to find out as much as possible. He offers the vaudeville owners his competing product, which Emil notices. He follows the man and is satisfied and relieved to witness how the idea thief in his basement experiences an embarrassment in front of the winter garden directors when his bicycle-operated device explodes.
While posting the advertisements for the winter garden demonstration, the Skladanowskys discover that a famous vaudeville artist is making a guest appearance in the city with her even more famous serpentine dance. They manage to persuade the lady to perform in front of her camera, which should give her performance the final pep. But at a nightly rendezvous between Emil and the beer garden waitress Josephine, whom he adores, it happens: Emil holds a burning candle too close to the film strip hung on a clothesline and one of them catches fire. Now, of all things, the pictures of the famous serpentine dancer have been destroyed. Without Max's knowledge, Emil and Gertrud re-shoot the scenes with Josephine as a double.
When the performance finally takes place, neither Max nor the audience notice the mistake. Only the artist, who is also present, becomes suspicious, which she quickly forgets when she receives applause from the audience. So the presentation will be a complete success.
Act III: 1895-1995
In the present, Lucie Hürtgen-Skladanowsky, born in 1904 as the younger daughter of Max Skladanowsky, talks about her memories of her father, her uncles, her sister and the pioneering days of cinema. Suddenly Eugen and Gertrud reappear and look around the room. The scene immersed in color is discolored again and becomes black and white. When Eugene and his little niece see the well-known spy at the window, they chase him away.
A modern taxi is waiting for the two of them, but Eugen conjures up a “more contemporary” coach that they take away. Finally they disappear at the large construction site on Potsdamer Platz .
background
The brothers Max and Emil Skladanowsky showed their films on November 1, 1895 in the Berlin Wintergarten Variété. They were eight weeks earlier than the Lumière brothers, who presented their work in Paris on December 28, 1895. In contrast, the Skladanowskys' stripes consisted of variety numbers such as a boxing kangaroo or a serpentine dance recorded in front of light or dark curtains. The apparatus from Berlin called the Bioskop was ultimately inferior to the invention of the Lumières, because they could both record and play back with their cinématographe and were able to produce longer films.
In 1995, on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the cinema, Wim Wenders shot this film together with students from the HFF Munich about the birth of the medium. They decided against the production of a documentary and in favor of a tongue-in-cheek narrative style that interprets history more freely, because they wanted to honor the naive and unorthodox way with which the Skladanowsky brothers approached their invention. They also wanted to work out their status as penniless hobbyists without precision engineering training and without an industrial sponsor.
The film was also conceived as a silent film and provided with voiceover narrators. The parts that played in 1895 were filmed on a historical hand crank camera from Askania , while the parts showing the present were shot on current cameras from ARRI .
While parts of it had already been shown at various short film festivals, the arte TV station showed the film in full for the first time on December 28, 1995, the centenary of the Lumière brothers' screening. The film was preceded by explanations by Wim Wenders and the complete broadcast of the historical variety films that were shown in the winter garden at the time. These were in detail:
- Italian peasant dance : Children's group Ploetz-Larella
- Strange horizontal bar : Brothers Milton
- Boxing kangaroo : Mister Delaware
- Juggler : Paul Petras
- Acrobatic potpourri : the Grunato family
- Kamarinskaya. (Russian national dance ) : Brothers Tscherpanoff
- Serpentine dance : Mademoiselle Ancion
- Wrestlers : Greiner and Sandow
- Apotheosis : Skladanowsky brothers
In the film, Lucie Hürtgen-Skladanowsky (* July 6, 1904 in Berlin ; † May 15, 2001 ), the last eyewitness of a family that made film history, has a say .
Awards
Wim Wenders and the students won the Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau Prize of the Murnau Foundation for the first 15 minutes of the film.
Reviews
- film-dienst : “A lovable and charming tribute to the Skladanowsky brothers. [...] The special charm of the homage lies in the attempt on the one hand to recreate the stylistic means of the early moving images [...] and on the other hand to develop new narrative forms. "
- Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung : "Wenders pays tribute to the cheerful inventiveness of the Skladanowskys by filming large parts of his subtle, entertaining, playful etude himself with an old crank camera."
Web links
- A Trick of Light in the Internet Movie Database (English)
- The Skladanowsky brothers at filmportal.de
- The Skladanowsky brothers on wimwendersstiftung.de
- Ulrike Holdt: The boxing kangaroo . Media Studies University of Trier
Individual evidence
- ↑ Wim Wenders' introduction to the broadcast on arte, December 28, 1995.
- ↑ A life with a cinema . In: Berliner Zeitung , July 6, 1994. or Hürtgen-Skladanowsky, Lucie (1904–2001) . Family History & Genealogy Message Board
- ↑ The Skladanowsky Brothers. In: Lexicon of International Films . Film service , accessed March 2, 2017 .
- ↑ Quoted from: cinema-muenster.de ( Memento of the original from February 3, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
