LOTTE REINIGER

Lotte Reiniger, born in Berlin in 1899, was among the first artists to explore the techniques of animated films. His first film, "Das Ornament des verliebten Herzens", dates back to 1919. Working in Berlin in the early 1920s, he was able to elaborate a system of animated cardboard shapes by placing them directly under the camera, thus producing with incredible delicacy and uniqueness. of the silhouette figures. He began working with the help of her husband, Carl Koch, and later collaborated with Jean Renoir in France. In 1934, Lotte Reiniger, like many other German creative directors, left Germany for England, where he joined the avant-garde G.P.O Film Unit. After successfully making a BBC television series made up of light and shadow games, he produced a series of fairytale inspiration with Primrose Productions, which are still seen all over the world. One of these, "Il piccolo galante", won the first prize at the 1955 Venice Film Festival.

Lotte Reiniger made the figures for his films by cutting them with the use of scissors. The depth and the delicate tones of the background of his films, are made from various layers of paper tissues, photographed on a glass plate illuminated from below. Many of these figures are made especially for close-ups and long fields, with slight differences in details and contours. His latest films are in color thanks to the use of gradations and shades of colored jelly, functional to obtain the effect of landscapes. The art of Lotte Reiniger is unique and is still an object of admiration. Lotte Reiniger died at the age of 82 in June 1981 in Dettenhausen, near Tübingen, where he spent the last months of his life. The complete repertoire of the works by Reiniger contains 40 films created using the silhouette technique.

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.