Max Skladanowsky

Max Skladanowsky ( born April 30, 1863 in Pankow in Berlin, † November 30, 1939 in Berlin) was a pioneer of the film. With his brother Emil Skladanowsky (1866-1945) he developed the Bioscop, with whom she first short film sequences projected before a paying audience on November 1, 1895. With this pioneering achievement Skladanowsky went down in film history.

Life

Max Richard Skladanowsky was the fourth child of Carl Theodor Skladanowsky (1830-1897) and Auguste Luise Ernestine Skladanowsky. After school, he began his training in 1877 as a photographer and glass artist in the photographic studio Werner in the Altenschönbach Straße 24 and the glass painter and lithographer Dehn in the beautiful Allee 48 in Pankow. In 1879 he found a job in the theater apparatus factory of Willy Hagedorn, where he was responsible for " fog pictures " and fog image sets. In the same year his father Carl founded a company together with his two sons, Max and Emil for the production of mechanical moving mist images. This showed Max Skladanowsky along with his father on tours throughout Germany and Europe. The first demonstration took it on 18 November 1879 in the Friedrichstrasse 218 in the Great Hall of the Berlin flora instead. After his father had withdrawn from the joint venture, it is the brothers Max and Emil led further and, for their demonstrations, new attractions, including a electro-mechanical- pyrotechnic water spectacle theater. In February 1893 They played with it at the Orpheum in Frankfurt am Main.

Unhappy with the quality of the painted fog pictures, Skladanowsky experimented with photographic image sequences. In 1894 he built first a first film camera (crank case I), later a projection apparatus ( Bioscope ).

For a fee of 2,500 Reichsmark he left the evaluation for his invention of the vaudeville conservatory, where it was shown on November 1, 1895, the final number as part of a vaudeville program. In displays, the screening of the Bioscops was announced as the " most interesting invention of modern times ." The 15 -minute film program consisting of eight short film strips, which included the boxing kangaroo, was well received by the audience and also found in the press attention. An editor of the national newspaper wrote on November 5, 1895

" The finale of the presentation jumps to the smaller stage of Bioscop. The ingenious engineers used here amusing moment photography and bring them in enlarged form to display, but not rigid, but alive. How does he do that is to know the devil. "

For about four weeks Max Skladanowsky showed daily in the conservatory Vaudeville his short films, to sold-out house, each with about 1,500 guests. Then the brothers traveled through Europe, performed as in Copenhagen and Stockholm. Soon they added their program with Berlin street scenes, later followed first short films with a plot, such as The Night Free, A Flying Hunt, the wife of Schulze 's Revenge and Modern Joan of Arc.

On December 28, 1895 Skladanowsky took part in the demonstration of the technically superior cinematograph by the Lumière brothers in the Grand Café and then improved his projector " Bioscope ". But he lacked a market establishment and the necessary capital and perhaps also the commercial business acumen, which is why he had to leave about 1 ½ years off after his conservatory commitment from the business of moving images.

In 1897 the last screening of the Bioscops in Szczecin and the two brothers parted. Emil drew from now with the convertible decoration and the water spectacle theater on. Max Skladanowsky devoted himself increasingly to the distribution of Abblätterbüchern ( Taschenkinematograph, living pictures in book form, see flipbook ) and three-dimensional images ( Plastic worldviews ). 1907/908 he founded his company projection for all and produced with little success a number of films, some with his older brother Eugene (1859-1945) as a performer.

In subsequent years, both came again in business disputes, which in 1930 decided the copyright Berlin Chamber in favor of Max Skladanowsky.

Skladanowsky grave, which is run by the city of Berlin, located in the Pankow Cemetery IV, Berlin- Niederschoenhausen, Buchholzerstraße ( Herthaplatz ), main entrance, on the left rear. An official roll of honor of the city of Berlin is at his longtime residence in the Waldow Road 28 in Niederschoenhausen. Not far from 1951, the Wrangelstraße was renamed Skladanowskystraße.

1995 turned the German director Wim Wenders together with students from the School of Film and Television in Munich ( HFFM ) pays homage to A Trick of Light (film title ). It is mentioned among other things, why the inventions Skladanowsky were the ideas of the French Lumière brothers technically inferior and therefore could not prevail. To word comes Lucie Hürtgen - Skladanowsky, born 1904 daughter of Max Skladanowsky. Parts of the film were shot with a classic silent film camera.

In September 2010 Skladanowsky was honored with a star on the Boulevard of Stars in Berlin.

The original Bioscope is now in the Potsdam Film Museum, where it came from the county museum Bitterfeld. There is a replica of Skladanowsky camera.