Deep-Sea Expedition – Speck’s Palace

Original Poster designed by Otto Baumberger for the 1916 movie “Deep-sea expedition” – though it was less a film in the traditional sense than the very first footage ever shot underwater. It was only thanks to the creators, the inventive brothers John Ernest Williamson and George Williamson from England, that the film adaptation of Jules Verne’s novel “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea” also hit theaters in 1916. The astonishment must have been immense at both performances.

Jean Speck, who was born in southern Germany, rose from being a shoemaker and innkeeper to become Switzerland’s cinema pioneer. As early as 1899 (four years after the Lumière brothers’ first film screenings in Paris), he was showing three-minute films in Zurich in a wooden shack located behind the Globus – thus establishing Switzerland’s first permanent cinema. In 1907, Speck received Zurich’s first cinema license, opened in 1912 the Lichtspieltheater, a venue dedicated exclusively to film screenings, in Zurich’s Kaspar-Escher-Haus; and in 1922 – due to its immense success – the Kino Seefeld.

maybe of interest as well:

Opening of the Cinema Seefeld