Lotte Reiniger and ‘The Storyteller’
Still from ‘The Adventures of Prince Achmed’
Silhouette portraits, usually cut in profile and made with black paper or card, first became popular in the 18th century; inexpensive alternatives to painted likenesses, they could be created in minutes and were often available at fairs and markets. Sometimes the artists were more ambitious, creating small groups of figures. This art or craft, like that of the shadow theatre, which had a long tradition in the East, flourished throughout the 19th century and its echoes persist to this day; contemporary artists such as Christian Boltanski and Kara Walker have adapted the idiom and taken it in different directions, the former using it to develop ideas about religion, death, and memory, the latter to make work about social and cultural issues.
Silhouettes have frequently been used in the cinema, but never more ingeniously than in Lotte Reiniger’s silent films, which were made in the early decades of the 20th century. Her cutout figures, hinged at the joints and often weighted with lead, were lit from below and set against elaborate backgrounds; they were re-positioned by hand from frame to frame and photographed with a stop motion camera. Reiniger and her husband, Carl Koch, who regularly worked with her on the films, were part of intellectual and artistic circles in Berlin, but after fleeing from Nazi Germany in 1935, they travelled around Europe during World War II and eventually settled in England, where they became British citizens. Reiniger, self-taught as an artist, also designed costumes and sets for theatre and opera, staged puppet shows, and illustrated books, papers, and magazines. Although accomplished in all these fields, her real skill, which she once described as ‘uncanny’, lay in an ability to create complex and evocative silhouettes from black paper and a small pair of scissors.
Reiniger’s films, almost always based on fairy tales, fables, or ancient myths, were generally intended for adult audiences, although some later works, commissioned in Britain after the war, were made for children. ‘The Adventures of Prince Achmed’, an interpretation of The Arabian Nights, made from 1923 to 1926 and thought to be cinema’s first full-length animated film, is probably her most celebrated and admired work; it is a dense and labyrinthine story, full of magic, shape-shifting, and courtship. With no dialogue and little explanation, its mood augmented by an orchestral soundtrack, the twists and turns of the film’s narrative are not easy to follow, and its appeal is primarily visual, created by ingenuity, artifice, and ornamentation. The handmade silhouettes, with their extravagant and expressive gestures, conjure a tale, neither real nor whimsical, that is bewitching. As Reiniger once said, ‘I believe more in the truth of fairy tales than that found in newspapers’.
There have been many attempts to explain why fairy tales and fables engage and entertain us, among them C.G. Jung’s and Bruno Bettelheim’s psychological theories, as well as other more literary and cultural analyses, but an especially useful approach to Reiniger’s films can be discovered in Walter Benjamin’s essay ‘The Storyteller - Reflections on the Works of Nikolai Leskov’, written in 1936, a few years after the making of ‘The Adventures of Prince Achmed’, in which he laments the disappearance of oral tradition and the art of storytelling. Although we are brought news every morning from all over the world, Benjamin writes, there are few noteworthy stories, mainly because most reports come to us suffused with explanation. They amount to what he calls ‘information’ and are of little relevance to storytelling, in which nothing is explained and where ‘the most extraordinary things, marvellous things, are related with the greatest accuracy, but the psychological connection of the events is not forced on the reader’. We are allowed to interpret them in our own way, and they consequently develop depth and amplitude that are lacking in ‘information’, which does not survive the moment in which it was new. He goes on to remark that the art of storytelling is reaching its end because the epic side of truth, ‘wisdom’, is also fading away.
Having applied his ideas to the Russian short stories of Nikolai Leskov, Benjamin concludes with some thoughts that also help to illuminate Reiniger’s silhouette films. He quotes the poet Paul Valéry, writing about a woman who embroidered figures in silk: ‘Artistic observation can attain an almost mystical depth. The objects on which it falls lose their names. Light and shade form very particular systems, present very individual questions which depend upon no knowledge and are derived from no practice, but get their existence and value exclusively from a certain accord of the soul, the eye, and the hand of someone who was born to perceive them and evoke them in his own inner self’. ‘That old co-ordination of the soul, the eye, and the hand which emerges in Valéry’s words is that of the artisan which we encounter wherever the art of storytelling is at home’, Benjamin writes. ‘In fact, one can go on and ask oneself whether the relationship of the storyteller to his material, human life, is not in itself a craftsman’s relationship, whether it is not his very task to fashion the raw material of experience, his own and that of others, in a solid, useful, and unique way’.
For further exploration:
A short documentary about Lotte Reiniger: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q-TJvNBO1fw
Detailed information about Lotte Reiniger: https://wfpp.columbia.edu/pioneer/lotte-reiniger/
‘Prince Achmed’ trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G_9L7r8NIBc
A useful summary and analysis of Benjamin’s ‘The Storyteller’: https://mostlyaboutstories.com/benjamin-storyteller-leskov/
On Nikolai Leskov: https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2014/dec/02/brief-survey-short-story-nikolai-leskov-russian
Still from ‘The Adventures of Prince Achmed’