This little film about cinema functions on several levels – and not only because it recounts the origins and pioneers of German cinema (in an appropriate documentary style), but also as a result of the production context of the film itself, given that it is comprised of three separate shorts that Wim Wenders shot with students of the University of Television and Film Munich (HFF), where he himself had studied between 1967 and 1970… Immediately prior to making Lisbon Story and free from the kind of ethical and philosophical constraints of larger scale productions, Wenders chose to experiment, together with youngsters eager to work and discover the vocation of cinema. He embarked on a three-year project that, above all, afforded him the opportunity to rediscover the pleasure of giving himself over to the simple act of storytelling, and joyfully communicating his love of cinema… This process of regeneration occurred through the eyes of children, as it had in the past – if one is  to believe the legend, immortalised here by Wenders, that German cinema came into being when a little girl who could not bear the fact that her uncle was leaving requested a full-size moving image to remember him by. The cinema was created, then, from an act of love…
In recreating the history of the birth of German cinema, Wenders skilfully mixes extracts from a lengthy interview with Lucie Hürtgen-Skladanowsky (the Truth) with a complex and protracted reconstruction (the False) of the invention of the Bioskop (the machine by which the Skladanowsky brothers managed to capture moving images) together with the programme of nine shorts (lasting roughly 15 minutes) presented to the public in Berlin’s Wintergarten on 1 November 1885 – prior to the first Lumière screening in Paris, that is. The playful and paradoxical mixture of Reality and Fiction reaches its culmination when the little girl, who is the protagonist of the fictional part of the film, can be seen walking around on the set of Lucie’s interview, flicking through photos and gazing with curiosity at the elderly lady recalling the past with great nostalgia. The short circuit between Reality and Fiction could not be more pronounced.

Giovanni Spagnoletti, Lontano o vicino, in Wim Wenders, edited by Stefano Francia di Celle, Torino Film Festival/Il Castoro, Turin-Milan 2007

Die Gebrüder Skladanowsky is a film about the beginnings of cinema and its German inventors: the Skladanowsky brothers from Berlin. Wim Wenders and a group of students from the Munich Film Academy shot the film in 1995 on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of film, using stylistic devices from silent cinema, including a hand-cranked camera from the 1920s producing16 frames per second.
The film music by French composer Laurent Petitgand also pays homage to the silent film. The world premiere of the restored version in Bologna will create a special viewing and listening experience: Laurent Petitgand, who wrote the music for ten of Wenders’ films, including Tokyo-Ga, Faraway, So Close! and The Salt of the Earth, will perform and accompany the screening live at Cinema Modernissimo with electric piano, saxophone, harmonica, and guitar.