Nikola Tesla (Ethan Hawke), body framed by a Roman arch, skating in a sunlit courtyard.
- Title: Tesla
- Director & Writer: Michael Almereyda
- Release Date: 27 January 2020 @ Sundance Film Festival
- Distributor: IFC Films
- Language, Runtime, Medium: English, 102 minutes, Color digital film
a biographical drama that follows the torrid and temperate climate inside the mind of gilded-age inventor Nikola Tesla (Ethan Hawke), while re-presenting and delineating his revolutionary professional accomplishments through narrator and character Anne Morgan (Eve Hewson).
In Tesla, Anne, Victorian philanthropist and daughter of capitalist JP Morgan, travels space and time, from her nineteenth century salon hangs to contemporary, post-industrial New York, MacBook in hand, to tell the story of Nikola Tesla, Electrical Discoverer and Inventor, who:
- b. 1856 in Croatia, d. 1943 in Manhattan, NY
- visualized in a flash his idea for an alternating current motor in Europe; his friend Anital (Ebon Moss-Bachrach) witnessed Tesla’s design “in the sand” and accompanied Tesla to the United States to pursue electrical innovation
- studied engineering in Prague
- worked with Thomas Edison (Kyle MacLachlan) for six months
“Nothing grows in the shadow of an oak,” Tesla says of Edison
- reproduced his alternating current system large-scale in collaboration with inventor and capitalist George Westinghouse (Jim Gaffigan)
- Westinghouse pays Tesla $50,000 and $250/month
- Tesla declines royalties for Westinghouse devices
- participated in the “War of the Currents,” a period in which Thomas Edison campaigned against alternating current technology, calling it “impractical and deadly.”
- demonstrated that alternating current is “beautiful and safe” at the Pavilion of Light, 1893 Chicago World’s Fair.
- carried on some kind of relationship with performer Sarah Bernhardt (Rebecca Dayan)
- moved his operations to Colorado in 1899 to study wireless electricity and communications in a higher altitude with greater lightning storms.
- partnered with Anne’s father, JP Morgan to develop a wireless communications tower for the international transfer of stock data.
- obsessed over the tower
- claimed to receive communication from Martians
- failed to implement in the industrial world the “ideas, thoughts, all the essential details finished in my mind,” or what Tesla called:
“light, heat, mode of power, a complete system of communication” for everybody
- or did he fail? Alternating current technology still powers the world today. See Notes for more on Tesla’s work (alternating current), resource links, and references.
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@author: Justin Branch
@course: HUM 110.0006
@edited: 08 October 2022