Sexy Turn-of-the-Century Science | THE SECRET OF NIKOLA TESLA (1980)

I said 'Free Energy!'

dir. Krsto Papić


A cryptic 1980s film of exquisite period costuming and driven by strong characterizations, TAJNE NIKOLE TESLE (THE SECRET OF NIKOLA TESLA) comes to us out of space and out of time from the former Yugoslavia.  

Starring the smart Petar Božović as Tesla, the film adroitly jump-cuts through highly dramatized stages of the inventor's life, covering the quiet, contemplative youth he spent in Lika to his immigration Stateside seeking work with Thomas Edison (Dennis Patrick), and his later associations with George Westinghouse (Strother Martin) and JP Morgan (Orson Wells), ending where the film begins, with the lone genius in his solitary New York City hotel room where he languishes in obscurity, a literal shadow of his former self. 

Theatrics aside, a lot is done right here, like the sweet relationship between Tesla and the gorgeous but married Catherine Johnson (Oja Kodar -Well's real life companion in these, his later years).  A poignant complement is served up in Tesla's relationship with his mother (Ana Karic), illustrative of his early childhood, providing clues to the unplowed depths of his emotional life as an adult.  Though readable as overwrought, her death in his arms is a moment of cinematic poetry.  Inclusion of notable celebrities to Tesla's various demonstrations like Mark Twain and Enrico Caruso are added points of joy.   

Well-emphasized is the enmity betwixt him and Edison and their classic battle over AC and DC technologies.  The contrast between the two highlights Tesla's detached coolness of character. 

Creepy references of Tesla's talking to ghosts--allusions to his spirit box--and the time he received mysterious signals from space (for which he was publicly ridiculed for) help flesh out other side of the elegant man of science, known for obsessive-compulsive tendencies also explored in the film.

His lack of concern with money and pure-hearted motivation for benefitting the the whole of humanity paint Tesla as rather saintly.  Clearly, the purpose of the film is not to be historically accurate in all respects, but to draw inferences of how history might have turned out differently had the men of power been more enlightened in this crucial era of the industrial revolution. 

Cars on an 1980s Los Angeles freeway tell the rest of the tale, with their smog-filled, air-clogged vistas, prognostications of the fear in Tesla's eyes when he hears pronouncements of Einstein's theories giving rise to atomic sources of energy; what the visionary "discoverer" saw as dooming our species' fate.

Watch THE SECRET OF NIKOLA TESLA here: