Wim's boys

Did the Skladanowskys invent cinema?

A Trick of the Light, which will be showing September 16 through 25 at the Harvard Film Archive, is German filmmaker Wim Wenders's attempt to resuscitate the celebrity of three pioneer movie inventors, what he did for Cuban musicians in Buena Vista Social Club.

As Wenders demonstrates, history has not been sweet to the Skladanowsky brothers (Max, Eugen, and Emil), whose claim to immortality was that they arranged the first public screening ever of cinema, November 1, 1895, at the Berlin Weingarten. I'd never heard of them. But it's true: six weeks before Auguste & Louis Lumière's December 28, 1898, public showing of actualités at the Grand Café in Paris, what is celebrated as "the birth of the movies," die gebrüder Skladanowsky had already produced a night's entertainment -- their patented two-projector Bioscope and six different photographic loops.

It was the Lumières who got acclaim around the globe with their dazzling invention, the Cinématographe, a camera and (single) projector. Says C.W. Ceram in Archeology of the Cinema about the poor Skladanowskys: ". . . in fact the Bioscope, as a double projector, was to have no future. None of its parts were adopted in new devices, and . . . it was no longer in use after 1896."

In 1923, the Skladanowskys were briefly rediscovered by the silent-movie Fox News, which went preposterously overboard in saying that the trio had produced movies by 1890. Before A Trick of Light, that was their last moment of fame. From World War II on, the three Germans' achievements, if mentioned at all, were dismissed as Nazis propagandizing.

So how does Skladanowsky-versus-Lumière play out today?

The Lumières can hold tight to the title of Fathers of Cinema because (a) half a year earlier than the Skladanowsky public show, on March 22, 1895, they held a private projection of a film, Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory, which they unveiled to the Société d'Encouragement pour l'Industrie Nationale. And (b) they shot and projected real movies. In contrast, the Skladanowskys copied and recopied still photographs, then cut and pasted them into celluloid roles of 20 pictures each. These were manually perforated and then projected on a loop, round and round, the same 20 pictures going through phases of motion.

In A Trick of Light, Wenders, using costumed performers, ingeniously re-creates the "lost" 1895 Skladanowsky program. His little loops are crude, minimalist, and charmingly nostalgic, few-second cinema bonbons: a boxing match of man versus kangaroo (!); barrel-chested Greco-Roman wrestlers; a family of gymnasts on a horizontal bar; a pre-Isadora Duncan barefooted female dancer. A Gay Nineties The Ed Sullivan Show!

Made with Wenders's students at the Munich Film Academy, A Trick of Light is genuinely that cliché'd adage "a collaborative work of love." It's a film about film, so Wenders is seen on screen with cinematographer Jurgen Jurges and their four-person student crew. Sometimes Wenders asks questions, sometimes a female student conducts interviews. The key Q&A (the film was shot in 1996) is with Max Skladanowsky's surviving 91-year-old daughter, who still remembers all, who comprehends and can articulate film technology, and who is an appealing great-great-granny type with humor and spirit.

A Trick of Light is such a relaxed, informal work that it feels reasonable when documentary slides into fiction, docudrama flashbacks of the life and times of the Skladanowskys. Simulating 1896, Wenders creates a persuasive silent-movie look via an ancient handcranked camera, underexposed lighting, iris shots. His exteriors are still-extant German cobblestone streets that conjure the 1920s gothic ambiances of Lang and Murnau.

Wenders also performs some magical sleight-of-hand, as his late-19th century personages pop up as apparitions on the movie set, casually walking between the camera crew and the old lady at a table telling her family story.

Most of A Trick of Light goes down easily. Only at the finish does Wenders get impish, with tiresome retreads of earlier shots wedged between endlessly stretched-out credits. After that: an enchanting loop of two adolescent girls doing a hop-skip-and-jump into the shot and then out of the shot, round and round, into the shot and out. When you finally leave the theater, that two-girl loop is still going.

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There's Clara Bow's Call Her Savage (1932), in which the "It" girl is practically mounted by a St. Bernard. In W.C. Fields's short "The Dentist" (1932), the comedian falls between the writhing legs of a female patient. Those are two of many unbridled moments of wild-and-sexy studio cinema pre-1934, when the ignominious Hollywood Code stopped this stuff for 35 puritanical years. You can find the details in Pre-Code Hollywood: Sex, Immorality and Insurrection in American Cinema 1930-1934 (Columbia University Press), by my friend Thomas Doherty, a learned Brandeis film professor. Although Doherty takes the side of a more wide-open cinema, he manages a case for Joseph Breen, the devout Catholic who, through his Breen Office, was the commissar of Hollywood content and believed he was helping promote Christian morals with his stringent code enforcement.