Inserted in the splendid setting of the Golden Night that takes place in Ravenna on October 6th, the Ravenna Nightmare Film Fest this year proposes an appointment, with the historical collaboration of the Circolo Sogni Antonio Ricci, with a fantastic flavor.
Evenged by the specificity of Nightmare Classic, dedicated to the enhancement of the History of Cinema, the proposal of the XVI edition focuses on a film whose historical value is as great as its beauty. The relationship between contemporary cinema and its memory has been upset by the advent of digital technology. Ravenna Nightmare has always felt the need to give voice, through retrospectives, personal and tributes, to the cinema of the past. The work of film libraries around the world has changed, it is no longer a question of preserving the increasingly rare and precious films, but of restoring them and restoring them in a projectable format. It is unthinkable to transform any film into DCP, so the nature of the retrospect has also changed. We have moved from the classic, philologically flawless retrospective, to the presentation of the best that the film libraries around the world have done over the years and continue to do.
Without any doubt, with these requirements and many more is the film of the beginning of the century entitled The Adventures of Prince Achmed by Lotte Reiniger that sees the director one of the rare women who has managed to write the history of cinema. (Germany 1923-26 - 66 min). Lotte Reiniger, is considered the creator of the silhouette film, a true pioneer. The Adventures of Prince Achmed is among the oldest animated feature films with a silhouette in the history of cinema.
Lotte Reiniger, together with her husband and collaborator Carl Koch as well as many of the greatest innovators of the period (Walter Ruttmann, Berthold Bartosch, Alexander Kardan), was inspired by the stories of "The Thousand and One Nights", preserving their charm, comedy and even violence, and transposed them into cinematic language. Despite "The Adventures of Prince Achmed" achieved its first success in France (following a first screening in Berlin in May 1926), the film is recognized as a unique product of the Golden Age of German cinema. The film was made in Postdam in a small depèndance in the estate of the young Berlin banker and patron Louis Hagen, who was interested in the project after seeing the early work of Reiniger. "The adventures of Prince Achmed" is a perfect example of fantasy cinema, able to evoke the atmosphere of Arab legends through the tools of cinema. The original negative was destroyed in Berlin at the end of the Second World War, along with many other works by Reiniger. Fortunately, the film's positive nitrate film had been kept at the British Film Institute's archive and new copies were made. In 1999, as a tribute on the occasion of the 100th birthday of Lotti Reiniger, the film was restored by the Deutsches Filmmuseum in Frankfurt, with the insertion of signs in German language copied from the original drawings by Dulac.
