User Reviews

Max Skladanowsky is one of the people with a claim to inventing motion pictures, along with Edison's team in the U.S., William Friese-Greene in Britain and the Lumieres in France. In reality, the invention of a practical form of projected motion pictures has several reasonable claimants and the earliest artifact seems to be a Babylonian pottery from several thousand years B.C.E. that offers a sort of "flip book" motion picture of a leaping goat. So take your choice.

Mr. Skladanowsky seems to hold the honor of showing the first program of motion pictures in Germany and he did produce, direct and photograph films from 1895-1897, and a couple more a decade later.

This is one from 1895, showing Eugene Sandow, a famous strong man of the period, in a wrestling match. Given the bulky, immobile equipment of the period, the two wrestlers must have choreographed their fight extensively to stay in the frame at all times. So this is definitely as fixed a fight as any you ever saw. Still, it does show good composition and motion.

Obviously, Skladanowsky wanted to show people how potential this new technique, Bioscope, can do to our reality. From the early cinema side, the modern action cinema seems to still remain in such a fundamental, original purpose of cinema that what humans can do without using much of their brain. Yes, it's the action, it's important, essential, and quite boring to see in the artwork.

Obviously, Skladanowsky wanted to show people how potential this new technique, Bioscope, can do to our reality. From the early cinema side, the modern action cinema seems to still remain in such a fundamental, original purpose of cinema that what humans can do without using much of their brain. Yes, it's the action, it's important, essential, and quite boring to see in the artwork.

Ringkämpfer (1895)

Max and Emil Skladanowsky directed this film that clocks in at just around ten-seconds and features a couple men wrestling. There's certainly nothing here that is going to make people go "wow" but at the same time this is entertaining for what it is. Basically we've got a brief wrestling match between a couple men and for the most part it is entertaining enough since there's action throughout the very short running time. At least the directors knew to at least capture that part.