About this Event
Inspired by the tales from One Thousand and One Nights, Reiniger’s magical silhouette animation transports us to a fascinating world full of flying horses, evil sorcerers, daring witches, magnificent palaces and wild landscapes.
On the day of the great Caliph’s birthday, the powerful sorcerer appears and presents his marvellous creation: a horse that can fly through the air. The Caliph is desperate to own this magical horse, but in return he must give his enchanting daughter, Dinarsade, in marriage to the hideous sorcerer. This infuriates Dinarsade’s brother, Achmed. He chases the intruder away, but the sorcerer manages to lure the prince onto the fateful horse. Thus begins Achmed’s adventurous journey.
With The Adventures of Prince Achmed, Lotte Reiniger created the first feature-length animated film in the history of cinema. She had already developed the technique and aesthetics of this film genre to artistic perfection by the 1920s. Her style draws on Chinese shadow theatre, which she expanded upon through the technical possibilities of film. Reiniger cut out all the figures, animals and backgrounds in minute detail from black cardboard using a small pair of scissors. She connected the characters’ movable limbs to one another using fine wire joints and threads, so that she could reposition them frame by frame. It took three years to complete the film. 250,000 individual frames were shot, of which only 100,000 were ultimately used.
Reiniger’s sources of inspiration – including Chinese shadow theatre and the tales from One Thousand and One Nights – as well as her desire to create a fairy-tale-like and exotic world, led her to blend elements from different cultures and draw on cultural stereotypes. Driven by her fascination with the exotic, she romanticised these cultures in line with the prevailing notions of Asia and the Middle East at the time, whilst also perpetuating negative stereotypes. On the other hand, she portrays an old witch as a positive character, without whose decisive intervention the prince’s adventures might not have had a happy ending. Furthermore, the film likely features one of the first kisses between two men on screen. These contradictions lead us to view the film differently today, 100 years after its premiere, and perhaps to perceive its magic in a different light. Yet it has retained its impact to this day.
Germany 1926, colour silhouette animation, 65 mins. With intertitles subtitled in English.
Directed by Lotte Reiniger. With original music by Wolfgang Zeller.
About Lotte Reiniger
Lotte Reiniger was born in 1899 in Berlin and died in Dettenhausen near Tübingen in 1981. A trained silhouette artist, she entered the film business with Paul Wegener's Rattenfaenger von Hameln (1918). With her numerous shorts, she created the new genre of silhouette films. The Adventures of Prince Achmed (Die Abenteuer des Prinzen Achmed, 1923-1926) was the result of three years of work and became the first animated feature in film history.
A selection of her other films includes: Cinderella (Aschenputtel, 1922), three parts of Dr. Dolittle and His Animals (Dr. Dolittle und seine Tiere, 1928), Harlequin (1931), Carmen (1933), Papageno (1935), The Gallant Little Tailor (Das tapfere Schneiderlein, 1954), The Grasshopper and the Ant (Der Heuschreck und die Ameise, 1954), Jack and the Beanstalk (1955), The Lost Son (Der verlorene Sohn, 1974), and Aucassin and Nicolette (1976). (source: filmportal.de)
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