You walk into 7th
grade Biology and at the front of the room is a big tube TV on a black rolling cart.
A buzzed excitement fills the classroom – you know what that TV means – it’s a
movie day! Whether it’s because you have a substitute, or because your teacher
just really isn’t feeling it, you don’t care, because today’s curriculum is
going to be taught by Bill Nye.
Well, this teacher is
getting overwhelmed with preparing to sell at the Corn Hill Arts Festival, so a
movie day it is!
Today I am presenting to
you the German film Die Abenteuer des
Prinzen Achmed (The Adventures of
Prince Achmed) by Lotte Reiniger. There are lots of reasons that this movie
is really cool:
1. Lotte
Reiniger is a lady.
2. Her
animation studio only had five staff members!1
3. Lots of
people think Disney’s Snow White is
the first full length animated movie, but The
Adventures of Prince Achmed came out 11 YEARS before Snow White! (1926)2
4. The
movie is a great example of Neo-platonic beliefs. The villain is boney and
hook-nosed while the protagonists are the most realistic – humanizing them in
comparison to the stylized supporting characters.
5. I wrote
about Reiniger’s film in my senior thesis as a bridge between Wayang Kulit shadow plays and modern
animation. She used stop-motion photography and cut paper on a backlight screen
to produce an animation very similar to shadow puppet performances. While you
watch the movie, try to imagine the meticulous work that had to go into
constructing each frame.
P.S. this is a silent film and the caption screens are in German, but, you should still have no problem following the narrative and there are tons of plot summaries online.
Enjoy!
Notes:
1. Rachel Palfreyman, "Life and Death in the Shadows: Lotte Reiniger's Die Abenteuer des Prinzen Ahmed," German Life and Letters 64, no. 1 (January 2011): 13.
2. Palfreyman, "Life and Death in the Shadows," 6-11.
No comments:
Post a Comment