Film Review: A Trick of the Light
Film's past meets its present in this documentary/narrative hybrid from Wim Wenders.
An ode to cinema’s birth that aims to both set the historical record straight and pay loving tribute to the magical medium itself, Wim Wenders’ A Trick of the Light gets its long-awaited U.S. theatrical premiere this week as part of New York City’s IFC Center retrospective of the great German director. Produced in 1996, Wenders’ film was made in collaboration with his graduate students at the Filmhochschule München (The University of Television and Film Munich) in honor of cinema’s centennial and concerns the origins of the world’s first moving pictures. While France’s Lumière brothers have long been credited with that monumental invention, they were, in fact, bested by eight weeks by three German men: the Skladanowsky brothers, whose revolutionary bioscope debuted to acclaim in 1895.
The Skladanowskys aren’t famous because, as they themselves admitted, their device turned out to be inferior to the Lumière one that immediately followed it. Nonetheless, Wenders celebrates their ambition and artistry with an unconventional biopic that gracefully segues between fiction and non-fiction modes. Most of his 73-minute film’s action assumes the guise of a silent artifact, replete with iris effects and narrated by the young daughter of Max Skladanowsky (Udo Kier), who served as an unofficial assistant on her relatives’ creation (not to mention as an occasional subject). In these reenactments, Wenders details the development of the bioscope, which was born from Skladanowsky’s earlier, hugely popular photographic flip-books, and which ultimately proved to be a dual-projector machine that had to be cranked by hand.
This action is shot by Wenders with a similar hand-cranked camera that gives the proceedings a rich, F.W. Murnau-style character, and it’s staged with the sort of bumbling slapstick that was typical for the era’s inaugural movies. The result is footage that pays homage to cinema’s earliest days, although at a certain point A Trick of the Light’s stabs at humor – including a bit involving one of the Skladanowsky brothers wooing a would-be actress, and another in which they try to film a boxing kangaroo to little success – become a bit redundant and strained. Fortunately, Wenders intercuts his dramatic material with a touching interview with Max Skladanowsky’s 91-year-old daughter Lucie, who sifts through old scrapbooks and talks about mechanical do-doodads while recalling her beloved father and uncles’ groundbreaking work. A spry and amusing subject, Lucie’s remembrances of failures, mishaps and triumphs are an engaging counterpoint to the director’s recreations and ground Wenders’ project in poignant emotional terrain.
During these chats, the actors playing the Skladanowskys occasionally appear in the room alongside the real-life Lucie, thus creating a sense of the way in which the movies are born from an interactive dialogue between truth and fantasy, the present and the past. Those moments, as well as late shots of the Skladanowskys gazing in wonder at modern construction projects throughout Germany, help elevate A Trick of the Light beyond just a joyful trifle, suggesting that constant invention, and reinvention, is the lifeblood not only of the movies, but of life itself.
Click here for cast and crew information.
