Film Culture (1956)

THE FILMS OF LOTTE The field of the animated film in this country is a territory largely claimed and cultivated by Walt Disney, U.P.A. and the big studio unitt—MGM, Warners, Paramount. Canada’s Norman McLaren is represented occasionally in the art theatres. But outside of McLaren, Jiri Trnka’s The Emperor's Nightingale, and the British Animal Farm, foreign cartoon production remains unknown. It is therefore welcome news that Contemporary Films, Inc, will release several of the famous silhouette films of Lotte Reiniger in America. Like McLaren’s, Miss Reiniger’s is a singular and personal art, founded on a manual talent that approaches wizardry. Her tools are simple and few: a high, glasstopped table lit from beneath, a camera, a pair of nail scissors. All figures and scenery Miss Reiniger cuts from thin black sheets of metal; wire hinges at their joints provide the figures with maximum flexibility and expressiveness. Placed in proper spatial relationship in their settings of tissue, light and shadow, the figures are photographed by a stop-motion camera as in standard animation technique, frame by frame, movement by movement. To simulate close-ups and long shots, multiple silhouettes of graded sizes are used; the camera does not move. In close-ups, the cutting and hinging become painstakingly detailed: jaws, fingers, lips are mobile. Effects of clouds, mists, storms are painted on a glass sheet situated between the silhouette tableaux and the lighting. Production is of course painfully slow. Her first feature, The Adventures of Prince Achmet, which Miss Reiniger made with Walter Ruttmann, Bertold Bartosch and her husband, Carl Koch, took two years. The Adventures of Prince Achmet was the first fulllength animated film in the history of the cinema. Materially, it owes its creation to social calamity ; caught in the great currency deflation of 1923, a prominent German banker presented Miss Reiniger with a gift of raw film stock into which he had sunk his declining assets. Achmet was thereby realized. Its public premiere held in 1926 at Louis Jouvet’s Comédie des Champs Elysées served both to introduce audiences to a startlingly new kind of film and to initiate Miss Reiniget’s career. Her subjects have remained fantasy and romance. Carmen (1933) and Papageno (1935) are perhaps her most popular films. Others include Puss in Boots, The Little Chimney Sweep, The King’s Breakfast, Sleeping Beauty, The Frog Prince and Snow White and Rose Red. Two abortive projects were Elzsir d’ Amore and The Golden Goose, left unfinished because of the war. In Great Britain where she now has her studio, Lotte Reiniger made a film for the Crown Film Unit and a series for BBC television. One film of this series, The Gallant Little Tailor, was awarded First Prize in its field at the Venice Film Festival of 1955. Jack and the Beanstalk, completed last year, was 20 REINIGER The Gallant Little Tailor the first film to use a new process, “Silhouette Color,” in which Miss Reiniger’s figures move against transparent multi-colored backgrounds. Thus the ancient craft of the shadow show has been enriched and mobilized by the resources of the cinema. Witty, fragile, continually inventive, the films of Lotte Reiniger are ready to charm a new audience.