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Lotte Reiniger
Jan. 8th, 2021 07:36 amLotte Reiniger was a German animator who invented silhouette animation, in which intricate cut-paper figures cavort across a multiplane camera (with Reiniger also invented, ten years before Walt Disney). Reiniger is most famous for her full-length film The Adventures of Prince Achmed, but she also made lots of short films adapted from fairy tales or opera scores. Kanopy has three of them: “Papageno,” “Harlequin,” and “The Stolen Heart.”
Reiniger’s skills with her scissors are visible in all these films, but her work is most jaw-dropping in “Papageno” (a short featuring the character from the opera The Magic Flute), which features not only intricately cut feathers, both on the birds that Papageno catches and on Papageno’s own feathery skirt and head dress, but also a plethora of lovely delicate birdcages. Really lovely. This was my favorite part of The Magic Flute (I must confess that Papageno and his girlfriend Pagagena chirruping their names at each other is the only part of the opera I remember…) and it was fun to revisit it.
“Harlequin” is also a short based around a piece of classical music. According to Kanopy, is “a love story,” which is quite a description for a movie where the hero seduces three women, marries two, and then is executed by firing squad… for bigamy, I guess? Then his true love does battle with the devil over his corpse (the devil has long curly horns, and is defeated when the girl thwacks him with the ball and chain the hero wore on his way to the firing range), at which point the hero is resuscitated by a cupid. I guess a story that ends with love triumphing over death and damnation is a love story, in its way, but three seductions in thirty minutes is not what you’d usually expect from that description!
Finally, “The Stolen Heart” is about a monstrous giant who steals all the musical instruments in a town, only for the instruments to come to life and free themselves from his spiderweb and fly back to their owners, playing themselves for dear life all the way. According to Kanopy, scholars argue that this is an anti-Nazi allegory. I sometimes feel that scholars are a little too ready to say this about anything created in Germany in the interwar years, but in this case they probably have a point.
Reiniger’s skills with her scissors are visible in all these films, but her work is most jaw-dropping in “Papageno” (a short featuring the character from the opera The Magic Flute), which features not only intricately cut feathers, both on the birds that Papageno catches and on Papageno’s own feathery skirt and head dress, but also a plethora of lovely delicate birdcages. Really lovely. This was my favorite part of The Magic Flute (I must confess that Papageno and his girlfriend Pagagena chirruping their names at each other is the only part of the opera I remember…) and it was fun to revisit it.
“Harlequin” is also a short based around a piece of classical music. According to Kanopy, is “a love story,” which is quite a description for a movie where the hero seduces three women, marries two, and then is executed by firing squad… for bigamy, I guess? Then his true love does battle with the devil over his corpse (the devil has long curly horns, and is defeated when the girl thwacks him with the ball and chain the hero wore on his way to the firing range), at which point the hero is resuscitated by a cupid. I guess a story that ends with love triumphing over death and damnation is a love story, in its way, but three seductions in thirty minutes is not what you’d usually expect from that description!
Finally, “The Stolen Heart” is about a monstrous giant who steals all the musical instruments in a town, only for the instruments to come to life and free themselves from his spiderweb and fly back to their owners, playing themselves for dear life all the way. According to Kanopy, scholars argue that this is an anti-Nazi allegory. I sometimes feel that scholars are a little too ready to say this about anything created in Germany in the interwar years, but in this case they probably have a point.
