Charlotte "Lotte" Reiniger (2 June 1899 – 19 June 1981) was a German film director and the foremost pioneer of silhouette animation. Her best known films are The Adventures of Prince Achmed, from 1926, the oldest surviving feature-length animated film, and Papageno (1935). Reiniger is also noted for having devised, from 1923 to 1926, the first form of a multiplane camera, (an extract from ) one of the most important devices in pre digital animation. Reiniger worked on more than 40 films throughout her career.
Biography
Early life Lotte Reiniger was born in the Charlottenburg district of Berlin on 2 June 1899 to Carl Reiniger and Eleonore Lina Wilhelmine Rakette.Dresden, Germany, Marriages, 1876–1922, and Berlin, Germany, Births, 1877–1899 (in German), indexed in Ancestry.com. As a child, she became fascinated with Scherenschnitte. She studied at Fontane-Schule in Berlin and put on shows with her schoolmates. Throughout this time in her life is when she began to develop a love of theater and cultivated her then dreams of becoming a play actress. Reiniger translated her love of acting to her silhouette puppetry in order to create her unique and fanciful recreations of her favorite plays and fairytales.
As a teenager, Reiniger developed a love of cinema, first with the films of Georges Méliès for their special effects, then the films of the actor and director Paul Wegener, a German actor, writer, and film director known for his pioneering role in German expressionist cinema and The Golem (1920). In 1916, her love of theater led Reiniger to her future mentor and colleague when she attended a lecture by Wegener that focused on the fantastic possibilities of animation. Reiniger eventually convinced her parents to allow her to enroll in the acting group to which Wegener belonged, the Theatre of Max Reinhardt. She began by making costumes and props and working backstage for Wegener's play productions. She started making silhouette portraits of her classmates and the actors around her, which intrigued Paul Wegener and led to her future collaborations with the director. Soon enough she was making elaborate title cards for Wegener's films, many of which featured her silhouette animations.
Adulthood and success In 1918, Reiniger animated wooden rats and created the animated intertitles for Wegener's Der Rattenfänger von Hameln (The Pied Piper of Hamelin). The success of this work got her admitted into the Institut für Kulturforschung (Institute for Cultural Research), an experimental animation and short-film studio. It was here that she met her future creative partner and husband (from 1921), Carl Koch, as well as other avant-garde artists including Hans Cürlis, Bertolt Brecht, and Berthold Bartosch. She began animating films of her own.
The first film Reiniger directed was Das Ornament des verliebten Herzens (The Ornament of the Enamoured Heart, 1919), a five-minute piece involving two lovers and an ornament that reflects their moods. The film was an early showcase for Reiniger's style of expression through movement. The film was very well received, and its success opened up many new connections for Reiniger in the animation industry, not just in Germany but internationally as well. She continued to work on short films and advertisements during this time.
She made six short films over the next few years, all produced and photographed by her husband, including the fairytale animation Aschenputtel (1922), based on the Brothers Grimm telling of Cinderella. These shorts were interspersed with advertising films (the Julius Pinschewer advertising agency sponsored a large number of abstract animators during the Weimar period) and special effects for various feature films—most famously a silhouette falcon for a dream sequence in Part One of Die Nibelungen by Fritz Lang. During this time, she found herself at the centre of a large group of ambitious German animators, including Bartosch, Hans Richter, Walter Ruttmann and Oskar Fischinger.
In 1923, she was approached by Louis Hagen, who had bought a large quantity of raw film stock as an investment to fight the spiraling inflation of the period. He asked her to make a feature-length animated film. Reiniger later recalled, "We had to think twice. This was a never heard of thing. Animated films were supposed to make people roar with laughter, and nobody had dared to entertain an audience with them for more than ten minutes. Everybody to whom we talked in the industry about the proposition was horrified." The resulting film was The Adventures of Prince Achmed, based on One Thousand and One Nights. Completed in 1926, The Adventures of Prince Achmed is believed to be the oldest surviving feature-length animated film, debuting over a decade prior to Walt Disney's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. (It was predated by Argentine director Quirino Cristiani's El Apóstol, released in 1917, but no copies of this film are known to survive.) Although it failed to find a distributor for almost a year, once premiered in Paris (thanks to the support of Jean Renoir), it became a critical and popular success.
Reiniger developed a predecessor to the multiplane camera for certain effects. As described in Reiniger's book Shadow Puppets, Shadow Theatres, and Shadow Films, she placed backlit planes of glass in front of a camera with a manual shutter to achieve a layered effect. Again, she presaged Disney; only in the 1930s would Disney and Ub Iwerks develop the version of the multiplane camera that would become a mainstay of traditional animation. In addition to Reiniger's silhouette characters, Prince Achmed featured dream-like backgrounds by Walter Ruttmann (her partner in the Die Nibelungen sequence) and Walter Türck, and a symphonic score by Wolfgang Zeller. Additional effects were added by Carl Koch and Berthold Bartosch.
Following the success of Prince Achmed, Reiniger was able to make a next film. Doktor Dolittle und seine Tiere (Doctor Dolittle and his Animals, 1928) was based on the first of the English children's books by Hugh Lofting. The film tells of the doctor's voyage to Africa to help heal sick animals. It is currently available only in a television version with new music, voice-over narration, and a high framerate. The score of this three-part film was composed by Kurt Weill, Paul Hindemith and Paul Dessau.
She released Der scheintote Chinese (The seemingly dead Chinese-Man, 1928), the first animated film with a queer happy end.:de:Liste von Filmen mit homosexuellem Inhalt
A year later, Reiniger co-directed her first live-action film with Rochus Gliese, Die Jagd nach dem Glück (The Pursuit of Happiness, 1929), a tale about a shadow-puppet troupe. The film starred Jean Renoir and Berthold Bartosch and included a 20-minute silhouette performance by Reiniger. The film was completed just as sound came to Germany, and release of the film was delayed until 1930 to dub in voices by different actors.
Reiniger attempted to make a third animated feature, inspired by Maurice Ravel's opera L'enfant et les sortilèges (The Child and the Bewitched Things, 1925), but was unable to clear all of the individual rights to Ravel's music, the libretto (by the novelist Colette), and an unexpected number of copyright holders. When Ravel died in 1937, the clearance became even more complex and Reiniger finally abandoned the project, although she had designed sequences and animated some scenes to convince potential backers and the rights-holders.
Reiniger worked on several films with British poet, critic, and musician Eric Walter White, who wrote an early book-length essay on her work.
Flight from Germany and later life With the rise of the Nazi Party, Reiniger and Koch had difficulties to work in Germany and took the chance to move to London, without ever gaining permanent visas. As a result, the couple spent the years 1933–1944 moving from country to country, staying as long as visas would allow. With the release of sound film, Reiniger and her husband began to work with music in relation to animation. They worked with film-makers Jean Renoir in Paris and Luchino Visconti in Rome. They managed to make 12 films during this period, the best-known being Carmen (1933) and Papageno (1935), both based on popular operas (Bizet's Carmen and Mozart's Die Zauberflöte). When World War II commenced they stayed with Visconti in Rome until 1943. When the SS invaded Rome, they fled to Venice, where they tried in vain to make a living from illustrations and essays. Due to the lack of funds they had to return to Berlin, where at least they could stay with Reiniger's mother. Reiniger startet to work on a fairy-tale film for schools, Die Goldene Gans, which she did not complete until 1948.
In 1949, Reiniger and Koch moved to London, where she made a few short advertising films for John Grierson and his General Post Office Film Unit (later to be renamed the "Crown Film Unit"). By 1953, Reiniger had founded Primrose Production with Louis Hagen Jr., the son of the financier of Prince Achmed. With this company, she made over a dozen short silhouette films based on Grimms’ Fairy Tales for the BBC and Telecasting America. Reiniger continued to work on and off over the years, her last film being 'The Rose and the Ring,' released in 1979.
In the early 1950s, Reiniger lived in London and worked at Beconsfield Studios in Buckinghamshire. During this time, she became friends with Freddy Bloom, the chair of the National Deaf Children's Society and editor of quarterly magazine called TALK, for which she designed a logo that was used until the 1990s.
With Louis Hagen Jr. (the son of Reiniger's financier of Prince Achmed in Potsdam), they founded Primrose Productions in 1953 and, over the next two years, produced more than a dozen short silhouette films based on Grimms' Fairy Tales for the BBC and Telecasting America. Reiniger also provided illustrations for the 1953 book King Arthur and His Knights of the Round Table by Roger Lancelyn Green.
After a period of seclusion after her husband's death in 1963, renewed interest in her work resulted in Reiniger's return to Germany. She later visited the United States, and began making films again soon after. She made three more films, the last of which, Die vier Jahreszeiten, (The Four Seasons) was completed the year before she died.
Reiniger was awarded the of the Deutscher Filmpreis in 1972; in 1979 she received the Great Cross of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany. Reiniger died in Dettenhausen, Germany, on 19 June 1981, at the age of 82.
Art style Reiniger's art style was developed from her love of paper animation and the theater. Reiniger had a distinct art style in her animations that was very different from other artists in the time period of the 1920s and the 1930s, particularly in terms of characters.
In the 1920s especially, characters tended to rely on facial expressions to express emotions or action, while Reiniger's characters relied on gestures to display emotions or actions. Reiniger's cutout animations had a fluid quality that expressed characters' emotions and actions in a way that was not possible through traditional silent film. This was due to the unique way she shaped and animated her characters through the paper cutout techniques that she developed through practice. Because paper animations were forced to rely on gestures and action due to the nature of the medium, Reiniger was able to convey emotion that facial expressions or sound film could not imitate. Because of this, Reiniger's characters are not usually anatomically correct, but they are able to express a fluidity which is very important to her style of expressionism. Although there are other animators in that time period that used these techniques, Reiniger stands out because she is able to accomplish this style using cutout animation. Reiniger's figures resemble stop-motion animation in the way that they move.