Emil Skladanowsky

Max had constructed a new camera with a Geneva drive in the autumn of 1895, and the new single-lens Bioskop-II projector in the summer of 1896. They also recorded new films (on 63mm-wide celluloid), much needed since the old ones started to get damaged, including the fiction film Komische Begegnung im Tiergarten zu Stockholm (Comical Encounter in Djurgården, Stockholm) in August 1896 with professional actors from the Victoria Theatre company. It was the first film recorded in Sweden. They returned to Berlin in February 1897, and shot several crowded urban street scenes. The new films were thought to meet the taste of new audiences and were much needed since the older films started to wear out. However, the investments proved to be in vain as a proposed return to the Wintergarten was not approved, their trade license was not renewed as the authorities believed there were already too many film exhibitors active in town, and they managed to find one venue for a second tour. Eventually, the last Bioskop show by the Skladanosky brothers took place in Stettin on 30 March 1897.

The Skladanosky brothers shot several films in May 1895. Their first film recorded Emil performing overstated movements on a rooftop with a panorama of Berlin in the background. This was an experimental test, not to be used in their commercial screenings. Their further choice of subjects seemed influenced by the films they probably viewed in the Kinetoscope that was installed in Berlin in March. They filmed various variety acts who where performing in town and had them perform in the gardens of theatres in full sunlight, against a neutral background (usually white, sometimes black).

Max would later claim to have constructed their first film camera on 20 August 1892, but this more likely happened in the summer or autumn of 1894. He also single-handedly constructed the Bioskop projector. Partially based on the dissolving view lantern, it featured two lenses and two separate film reels, one frame being projected alternately from each. It was hand-cranked to transport 44.5mm-wide unperforated Eastman-Kodak film-stock, which was carefully cut, perforated and re-assembled by hand and coated with an emulsion developed by Max. The projector was placed behind a screen, which was made properly transparent by keeping it wet to show the images optimally.

Emil Skladanowsky was born in 1866 in Berlin, Germany.

Max Skladanowsky (30 April 1863 – 30 November 1939) was a German inventor and early filmmaker. Along with his brother Emil, he invented the Bioscop, an early movie projector the Skladanowsky brothers used to display the first moving picture show to a paying audience on 1 November 1895, shortly before the public debut of the Lumière Brothers' Cinématographe in Paris on 28 December 1895.

Born as the fourth child of glazier Carl Theodor Skladanowsky (1830–1897) und Luise Auguste Ernestine Skladanowsky, Max Skladanowsky was apprenticed as a photographer and glass painter, which led to an interest in magic lanterns. In 1879, he began to tour Germany and Central Europe with his father Carl and elder brother Emil, giving dissolving magic lantern shows. While Emil mostly took care of promotion, Max was mostly involved with the technology and for instance developed special multi-lens devices that allowed simultaneous projection of up to nine separate image sequences. Carl retired from this show business, but Max and Emil continued and added other attractions, including a type of naumachia that involved electro-mechanical effects and pyrotechnics.