Highly Overrated But Still Good

After playing with our expectations, this turns out to be a very different sort of film.

It's funny, it's tense, it features two great performances from two actors and the director expertly creates a web of odd tension where you actually don't know what is happening for the majority of the run time.

Very good movie overall, highly recommended. Most of the negative reviews don't have any merit and are all pollitically based. Give this movie a chance at least, and it might give you a different perspective.

I think you will find there is something very definitely noteworthy about the film version of this that exists in that it is an entirely modern fake-up by Wim Wenders for his 1995 film Die Gebrüder Skladanowsky. As far as I am aware, the original Skladanosky film no longer exists. Clearly a must for all fans of 1990s biopics.

This is another very early short film from the Skladanowsky brothers. It features a serpentine dancer, a quite common choice of depiction in the early years of film and even if this one does not have the colors from Dickson's serpentine dancer from the same year, it's still a joy to watch Ancion move so elegantly and see her dress change into the most stunning shapes, even if it's a very very short film even for that time. Most of the time the head is the only body part we see from the protagonist compared to the huge dress filling out the complete screen and that made it even more interesting to watch. It may not be one for the masses, but for silent film enthusiasts it's surely worth a watch and it's a bit of a pity that, even here in Germany, hardly anybody has ever heard of the name Skladanowsky.

Max Skladanowsky is the German claimant to inventing motion pictures -- he was first in the game in Germany, at any rate. Although he did not put as long and sustained an effort as Edison in the US or Lumiere in France, he did one of the standard movies of the first decade of film: the serpentine dance, in which a woman in flowing robes with long sleeves whirls around. The IMDb lists ten films with approximately this title. It's not a bad idea, demonstrating movement and framing and admits of some interesting variations -- several efforts survive in tinted versions.Because there are so many Serpentine Dance movies and because they are, in the end, much of a muchness, there isn't anything particularly noteworthy about this version.