Tuesday Musings - An Animation Pioneer

The name of Lotte Reiniger isn't a household one, but it should be. In a career spanning from the 1920s through the late 70s, she has the distinction of creating the first animated feature, a "silhouette" film based on a combination of stories from the Arabian Nights, "The Adventures of Prince Achmed" (1926) showcasing her life-long interest in shadow puppets. It is elegant and quite avant-garde for its time, almost Expressionist, although the story is a bit incomprehensible at times. She also developed a multi-plane camera for animation work long before Disney. If the opportunity arises to see the film, grab the chance.

Very low resolution screenshot from Wikipedia.

Using backgrounds of pure colour, the intricate black silhouettes are beautiful (still looking for a screenshot of good resolution). Subconsciously, her work was a bit of an inspiration for parts of my film "And She Rode Forth...." as you can see below!:


...but my Heroine is considerably more gutsy than the princess in Achmed! 😃

updated later in the day: I just realized that the film is on the Criterion Channel, so catch it there if you can...in fact, subscribe to that channel if you can as it's an amazing resource for foreign, classic, experimental and cult films.


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UPDATES!

"Joyfully" has been selected by the Berlin Flash Film Festival.

ALSO - October kind of snuck up on me, so I'll have the monthly screening calendar up tomorrow...it's certainly nowhere near as full as September's was!

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