Stephen Barber explores the work and legacy of Berlin’s first film makers…
In exploring the final detritus of cinematic projection, embodied in the shattered and gutted projection-boxes, the dust-encrusted cans of negated celluloid, and the once-luxurious, now-decrepit auditoria of the cinema-palaces of the 1920s, whose facades still constellate the Broadway avenue, in Los Angeles’ Downtown, for my book Abandoned Images, I often experienced the sense that filmic time was held on a knife-edge in that precarious urban location, erasing any linearity of futures or pasts or presents, and could veer from one extreme to another, from film’s end to its origins, or back again, in the blink of an iris.
And that preoccupation with the seminal welding-together of cinematic projection’s end and its initiation then took me from Los Angeles to Berlin, where two near-forgotten brothers, Max and Emil Skladanowsky, had originated public film-projection by showing a program of their own films, on celluloid stock, to a paying audience at the Wintergarten Ballroom, in Berlin’s Central Hotel, on 1 November 1895, almost two months before the Lumière Brothers undertook their own first film-projection for a public audience, at the Grand Cafe in Paris, on 28 December of that year.
The Skladanowsky Brothers were almost immediately overtaken, in both technological and aesthetic domains, by their many rivals, so that they became stranded in film-historical no-man’s-land, their status overlayered within the conflicting, multiplicitous traces both of film’s origins and of the onset of film-projection.
The brothers hand-constructed their own projector, with the explicit aim of enabling spectators to assemble in a specific location, orient their vision towards a large-scale screen, and view a program of films, together, as an audience. They named their projector the ‘Bioskop’, from the Greek: ‘to see life’: an instrument that would exact an ocular and sensorial form of entrancement.
They also built their own film camera and shot a number of films, and had already reached the stage of experimenting with test-projections of those films, for private audiences of friends and colleagues, in the entertainment room of a cafe in one of the industrial districts of northern Berlin, before they were commissioned by the directors of a far larger and prestigious venue, the Wintergarten Ballroom, to project those films to a paying public, over the duration of a month, as part of a program that would predominantly feature live performances.
The public audience for the Skladanowsky Brothers’ first film-projection event, on 1 November 1895, had a particular form: it was a wealthy audience, of sensation-avid Berliners and international travellers, in sharp distinction to the relatively impoverished artisan-showmen who projected their films to that audience. The brothers possessed a specific urban location, in their attachment to industrial northern Berlin, especially the heavily-populated tenement-districts of Prenzlauerberg and Pankow, which were inhabited at that time mainly by factory-workers, employed notably in the area’s many breweries.
As well as living in those districts, Max and Emil Skladanowsky also rented their workshops there, and shot their first film on the rooftop of a building above one of the areaâ€â€¦