Among the German avant-garde filmmakers of the 1920s, one in particular stood out on many levels: Lotte Reiniger, a skilled artist and former actress who made animation films featuring handcut paper characters, with plots drawn from musical opera and fairytales. From an early age, Reiniger was fascinated by the possibilities of the emerging art of cinema. While training at Max Reinhardt’s prestigious acting school at the Deutsches Theater in Berlin in 1916 and 1917, she cut silhouette portraits of her colleagues. Sparked by her friendship with the famous actor Paul Wegener, she realised her first short film, Das Ornament des verliebten Herzens, in 1919 with help from Hans Curlis, Karl Wirt and her future husband Carl Koch. In 1923, she started filming her first fully animated feature-length film, Die Abenteuer des Prinzen Achmed. The story, directly lifted from 1001 Nights, revolves around a prince who is deceived by a reprehensible magician and must overcome a series of wild adventures across several countries (and five acts) to win his one true love. Today considered the earliest surviving example of its kind, Reiniger and her team needed three years to complete the film, exposing hundreds of thousands of single images of Reiniger’s movable figures made from black paper, one frame at a time. Carl Koch developed a stand that allowed Reiniger to perfect her imaginary worlds with intricate characters and layered background designs, lit from below. She used glass plates and parchment paper to solve the difficulty of lighting. When the film was previewed at a private screening at the Volksbuhne am Bulowplatz in Berlin on 2 May 1926, the audience was stunned and reviewers were surprised. Yet it was only after a triumphant screening on 1 July at the Comedie des Champs-Elysee in Paris that Die Abenteuer des Prinzen Achmed was picked up by a German distributor.

Stefanie Plappert