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Early Silent Cinema

Screening on Film

This selection of early silent cinema features landmark works from the Lumière Brothers and Georges Méliès. With the invention of the Cinématographe, the Lumière brothers saw the potential of the new medium to both capture and project images of everyday life in their pioneering “actualités.” The French magician, illusionist, film director, artist, and designer Georges Méliès took a markedly different turn from his contemporaries, constructing never-before-seen worlds in which human beings become comic creatures with fantastic costumes and makeup, liable to disintegrate or metamorphose into anything.

PROGRAM

  • First Program of the Lumière Brothers

    Directed by Louis and Auguste Lumière.
    France, 1895, black & white, silent, 9 min.
  • A Trip to the Moon

    Directed by Georges Méliès.
    France, 1902, 35mm, black & white, silent, 12 min.
  • The Vanishing Lady

    Directed by Georges Méliès.
    France, 1896, black & white, silent, 6 min.
  • A Trick of the Light (Die Gebrüder Skladanowsky)

    Directed by Wim Wenders.
    With Udo Kier, Nadine Büttner, Christoph Merg.
    Germany, 1995, 35mm, color and b&w, 80 min.
    German with English subtitles.

Six weeks before the Lumière brothers' legendary screening in Paris of the "first" motion picture, three German brothers in Berlin screened eight film loops. In between the acrobatics and juggling that also occupied their life, Max, Eugen, and Emil Skladanowsky had invented the Bioskop. A century later, internationally renowned filmmaker Wim Wenders brings these little-known pioneers to the fore with this whimsical and touching film. With the help of his students from the Munich Film Academy, Wenders captures their story with a mix of documentary and recreated footage—much of it shot silent at eighteen frames per second with a vintage hand-cranked camera.

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Rosine Mbakam, 2025 McMillan-Stewart Fellow