Charlotte "Lotte" Reiniger

       Charlotte "Lotte" Reiniger (June 2, 1899 – June 19, 1981) was a German silhouette animator and film director. She was born in Berlin-Charlottenburg, German Empire, on June 2, 1899. As a child, she was fascinated with the Chinese art of silhouette puppetry, even building her own puppet theater so that she could put on shows for her family and friends.

      As a teenager, Reiniger fell in love with cinema, first with the films of Georges Méliès for their special effects, then the films of actor and director Paul Wegener, known today for The Golem (1920). In 1915, the young woman attended a lecture by Wegener that focused on the fantastic possibilities of animation.

      After a bit of persuasion, she convinced her parents to enroll her in the acting group Wegener belonged to, the Theater of Max Reinhardt. In an attempt to attract the attention of her distant and very-busy hero, she started making silhouette portraits of the various actors around her. This had its desired effect, and soon she was making elaborate title cards for Wegener's films, many of which featured silhouettes. 

      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 shortfilm studio. It was here that she met her future creative partner and husband (from 1921), Carl Koch, as well as other avant-garde artists such as Hans Cürlis, Bertolt Brecht, Berthold Bartosch, and others.

      The first film Reiniger directed was Das Ornament des verliebten Herzens (The Ornament of the Enamoured Heart, 1919), a short piece involving two lovers and an ornament that reflected their moods. The film was very well received. She made six short films during the following few years, all produced and photographed by her husband. These were interspersed with advertising films (the Julius Pinschewer advertising agency invented ad films and 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 Fritz Lang's Die Nibelungen). During this period she became the centre of a large group of ambitious German animators, such as Bartosch, Hans Richter, Walter Ruttmann, and Oskar Fischinger.

The Art of Lotte Reiniger, 1970 from the Met.

      In 1923, a unique opportunity came her way. She was approaced by Louis Hagen, who had bought a large quantity of raw film stock as an investment to fight the spiraling inflation of the period, who asked her to do a feature length animated film. The result was The Adventures of Prince Achmed, completed in 1926, the first animated feature film, with a plot that is a pastiche of stories from One Thousand and One Nights. Although it failed to a find a distributor for almost a year, once premiered in Paris (thanks to the support of Jean Renoir), it then became a critical and popular success.

      Reiniger anticipated Walt Disney and Ub Iwerks by a decade by devising the first multi-plane camera for certain effects. In addition to Reiniger's silhouette actors, Prince Achmed boasted dream-like backgrounds by Walter Ruttmann (her partner in the Die Nibelungen sequence) and a symphonic score by Wolfgang Zeller. Additional effects were added by Carl Koch and Berthold Bartosch.

      The success of Prince Achmed meant that Lotte Reiniger would not need a stroke of luck to make a second feature. 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 score of this three-part film this time was composed by Kurt Weill, Paul Hindemith and Paul Dessau.

      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 Bertold Bartosch and included a 20-minute silhouette performance by Reiniger.  Unfortunately, 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 – the result being so unsuccessful as to ruin any enjoyment of the film.

      Reiniger also attempted to make a third animated feature, based on Maurice Ravel's opera L'enfant et les sortilèges (The Child and the Bewitched Things, 1925), but found herself unable to clear the rights for the music with an unexpected number of copyright holders. She worked with British poet, critic, and musician Eric Walter White on several films, and he wrote the early book-length essay on her work – Walking Shadows: An Essay on Lotte Reiniger's Silhouette Films, (London: Leonard and Virginia Woolf, 1931).

      With the rise of the Nazi Party, Reiniger and Koch decided to emigrate (both were involved in left-wing politics), but found that no other country would give them permanent visas. As a result, the couple spent the years 1933–1944 moving from country to country, staying as long as travel visas would allow. They cooperated with Jean Renoir in Paris and Luchino Visconti in Rome. Somehow, they still 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 1944, then moved back to Berlin.

       In 1949, Reiniger and Koch moved to London, where she made a few short advertising films for the Ground Film Unit and John Grierson's General Post Office Film Unit. While she was living in London in the early 1950s she became friends with "Freddie" Bloom, who was the first director of the National Deaf Children's Society, and asked her to design a logo for the new charity. Reiniger responded by cutting out 4 children running up a hill. Bloom was amazed at her skill with the scissors – in a few moments she created about four different silhouettes of the children from black paper. The logo was used until the 1990s, when a design company was invited to revamp the design. The result was a very minor modification but the new design was also dropped a few years later.

      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 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.

      Reiniger was awarded the Filmband in Gold 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 June 19, 1981, at the age of 82.

• Lotte Reiniger biography and selection of works at the British Film Institute's Screenonline
• Lotte Reiniger at the Internet Movie Database
• "Born to Be Wild", a biographical excerpt from Women and Animation, a Compendium (edited by Jayne Pilling) focusing on Reiniger's childhood; part of the British Film Institute's "Drawn to be Wild" website^{[dead link]}
• "Lotte Reiniger's Silhouettes" by Abhijit Ghosh Dasitidar
• "Lotte Reiniger pictures and photos", listal.com

The Adventures of Prince Achmed

Title card from the 1926 animated film  
The Adventures of Prince Achmed

      The Adventures of Prince Achmed is a 1926 German animated fairytale film by Lotte Reiniger. It is the oldest surviving animated feature film; two earlier ones were made in Argentina by Quirino Cristiani, but they are considered lost. The Adventures of Prince Achmed features a silhouette animation technique Reiniger had invented which involved manipulated cutouts made from cardboard and thin sheets of lead under a camera. The technique she used for the camera is similar to Wayang shadow puppets, though hers were animated frame by frame, not manipulated in live action. The original prints featured color tinting.

      Several famous avant-garde animators worked on this film with Lotte Reiniger. These included Walter Ruttmann, Berthold Bartosch, and Carl Koch.

      The story is based on elements taken from the collection 1001 Arabian Nights, specifically The Story of Prince Ahmed and the Fairy Paribanou featured in Andrew Lang's The Blue Fairy Book. With the assistance of Aladdin, the Witch of the Fiery Mountain, and a magic horse, the title character reclaims the magic lamp and conquers the African sorcerer. The culminating scene in the film is the battle between "die Hexe" (the witch) and "der afrikanische Zauberer" (the African sorcerer), in which those characters undergo fabulous transformations. All is well in the end: Aladdin marries Dinarsade (Achmed's sister and daughter of the Caliph); Achmed marries Pari Banu; the African sorcerer is defeated; and the foursome return to the Caliph's kingdom.

       No original German nitrate prints of the film are known to still exist. While the original film featured color tinting, prints available just prior to the restoration had all been in black and white. Working from surviving nitrate prints, German and British archivists restored the film during 1998 and 1999 including reinstating the original tinted image by using the Desmet method.

• Die Abenteuer des Prinzen Achmed at the Internet Movie Database
• Detailed notes on the film, including Lotte Reiniger's description of its history (PDF)
• DVD Times Review
• The Adventures of Prince Achmed (Review)

The Little Store of Cut-Out Town

Directions. Cut out on the heavy black line, fold on all the dotted lines and paste X to XX.

This little store was designed by Patten Beard. Click on it to download the largest version possible.

Cut-Out Company are grocers,

And they own this little store,

Where they sell at cut down-prices

Cut-Out groceries galore-

Paper breakfast foods and sugar,

Paper crackers, paper jam,

Paper vegetables and spices

And all brands of paper ham.

Paper Lolly Pops in cases

On the paper counters stand,

And the little paper children

Keep them always in demand.

When they go on mother's errands--

And they have two cents to spend--

With their precious paper pennies

To the store their way they wend.

Here are scissors, here the picture,

Cut it out and let us see

When you fold it and you paste it

What the Cut-Out store will be!

poem and pattern by Patten Beard

"Clara" paper doll

This paper doll is "Clara." She was published in 1903 by the Sunday Republic newspaper. I have restored her so that little people may color and cut her out just for fun.

"Thomas" paper doll

Here is a boy paper doll named Thomas. He was included in a junior section of the Sunday Republic in 1903. Thomas, like most small boys of his day, wore suspenders and nickers. His mother kept his hair relatively long for a boy. Thomas would not have worn full length pants until he turned twelve or thirteen years of age.

Silhouettes by Nelly Bodenheim

These silhouettes are by Nelly Bodenheim who was a Netherlands illustrator, 1874 to 1951.

The Eastford Boys Silhouettes

Silhouette of a hockey player.

Silhouette of a boy jumping hurtles.

Silhouette of a boy studying a globe.

"Irene" paper doll

"Irene" is from an old Sunday Republic paper published in 1903. She has been restored by Kathy Grimm for little people to color and cut out. Click on the picture to download the largest file possible.

"Myrtle" paper doll

"Myrtle" is a paper doll from an old Sunday Republic newspaper edition published in 1903. She has been lovingly restored by Kathy Grimm so that little people can color and cut her out.

Silhouettes by a Swedish Artist

Gus Walle. Maker of
Silhouettes. (self portrait)

With His Little Shears Mr. Walle is Making Portraits of Well Known Men and Women.

      Any one who wants to call Gus Walle a psaligraphist can do so with impunity. When you can apply a name like that to a man and not have anything happen to you there must be some good reason for it. In this case the reason is that a psaligraphist is what Mr. Walle really and truly is and he is proud of it.

      The art of cutting silhouettes, or psaligraphy, is much more practised abroad than in this country. In Stockholm, where Mr. Walle lived before he came to America, there have been several masters of it. His own mother was an accomplished manipulator of the little shears, and he himself, watching her from the time he was a child and imitating her for his own amusement, has become so expert that his swiftness and cleverness are astonishing.

       Although Mr. Walle might stand for being called a psaligraphist, he does not describe himself by any such high sounding name. But he will tell you more or less about the origin of the art. He says it was carried to a high degree of perfection by the Greeks. The monochrome figures on Etruscan vases are really silhouettes. Later the art fell into disuse until the middle of the eighteenth century. From that time it was very much in vogue until the invention of photography drove it out again.

      Many of the old time silhouette makers couldn't have cut a profile freehand any more than they could have walked on air. They placed a person so that his shadow would be cast on the wall, then they traced this and reduced it to a smaller size. Some would have the shadow cast on ground glass and trace it on that. All kinds of apparatus were devised for copying the profile mechanically, but they were not eminently successful.  

Mlle Gaby Deslys

     This young man from Stockholm doesn't bother with paraphernalia. He has a pair of scissors about four inches long, three inches of that length being handle. They look as if they might have been intended for surgical use they are so slender. Mr. Walle has been using them for sixteen years and he thinks he would almost have to give up his profession if anything happened to them.

Mr. Walle's Way of Work.

      When he makes a silhouette he does not post the person against the light or against a black cloth or anything of that sort. He simply tells his subject to sit on a rather high office stool. He himself sits on a chair only a few feet away.

      There is only one point about which he is at all particular; he prefers to have the person's right side toward him. A great many persons are inclined to protest about this. they have been informed by photographers that their left is their best side and they want to turn that one to the silhouette artist.

      There really is a great difference between the sides of almost every face; but the variation is in the modelling, the shape of the eyes, the way the hair grows, the corners of the mouth, the lift of the eyebrows and so on. When one comes to think of it, prompted thereto by the silhouette men, one realizes that the outline of the head is the same whichever way you take it.

      The reason the artist in this case wants his subject's right side is because it is easier for him to cut that way. He invariably begins at the bottom of the paper at what will be the front of the picture when finished. He cuts every detail as he goes, the buttons on the coat, the lace jabot: everything is reproduced and with astonishing rapidity. He scarcely looks at the paper his cutting. His hands move as surely as those of a musician who is absolutely familiar with the keys.

small boy

      Yet all the time he is turning and twisting the paper, making little fluttering motions with it as he outlines the lace, slicing boldly in for the curve of the throat and sweeping around the top of the head as freely and easily as if he were merely writing his name. How it happens to come out all right in the end is a mystery to the bystander.

      You might think he would need to block out in some general proportions what he is going to make. Otherwise the head might be out of proportion or the outline might wander dangerously before it had climbed the peak of the topmost feather on the hat and started on the backward descent. But he takes absolutely no precautions to insure proportion. He seems to have instinctive sense of it and the little scissors shear their way unhesitatingly and unerringly.

      If the features to be reproduced are bold as many as six thicknesses of paper can be cut at once, thus making six copies of the same silhouette. The number of thicknesses that can be cut simultaneously diminishes, according to the delicacy of the features and the size of the silhouette to be made, until only a single one can be cut at a time.

Big Silhouettes Hardest. 

      The very large silhouettes are the hardest to make, partly because there are more details of outline to be reproduced and partly because it is not quite as easy to visualize the large picture and "feel" it as a whole. Mr. Walle has made silhouettes with heads that were more than twelve inches in diameter.

      On the other hand he makes many full length silhouettes in which the head is only half an inch long. When he makes one of these full length figures he begins with the toe of the shoe and cuts his way up the front of the figure and down the back without a pause except perhaps for an umbrella or cane or chair.

Mrs. John Jacob Astor

      All these details are cut just as they come instead of being cut by themselves and are pasted on separately. Another hard thing to do is to cut a row of persons to be mounted on the same card. They are posed one after another and all cut from the same sheet of paper so that they fit together with only a narrow line of white between.

      At a recent dinner party where Mr. Walle was engaged he made a row of heads of all the guests, with the dinner table suggested below them. In addition he made three copies fo separate silhouettes of each individual present, including some of the Metropolitan Opera House artists who sang after the dinner.

      Silhouettes of women are as a rule more interesting to Mr. Walle to make because there is so much more variety in their hair and dress. Men's features seem more striking at first thought, but they are not always so by any means.

      While the nose is of course the most prominent feature in a profile, it isn't necessarily the one which gives the most characteristic line. The curve under the nose and of the upper lip is one of the most important sections of a profile. The chin and the line underneath it are also important. In fact not only every detail of outline but also the angle at which the silhouette is finally mounted on the card is significant.

      After the cutting of the outline is competed the artist begins to make what seem like the most careless slashes into it. As likely as not he cuts the head off entirely. In this way he secures the white lines which break up the black and add detail and character.

      Some of the paper he uses is already gummed on one side. He has a pad which he wets and on which he then lays the pieces of the silhouette gum side down. When this gum is softened he takes the paper up with a penknife blade and lays it on the card. This must be done right at the first try or the whole thing is spoiled. It cannot be moved even a fraction of an inch or the card will look soiled.

      If the head has been cut off the silhouette is placed first on the card. Then the rest is added, leaving just a tine line of white to indicate the collar. The paper is smoothed down carefully and the work is done. For rapidity, accuracy and delicacy it is an astonishing performance. The Sun, May 5, 1912.

More Silhouettes by Gus Walle coming soon.

Josephus Hyde And His Sinful Pride

Josephus loved to strut, and cry:

"No boy in town is rich as I!"

And vainly both his aunties tried

To break him of such foolish pride.

His little playmates, in delight,

Made fun of him with all their might,

While he pretended not to see

Or sneered at them unpleasantly.

At length misfortunes came, -- and left

Josephus of his wealth bereft!

He made his way, -- but first of all

He learned: -- Pride goes before a fall!

by Elizabeth Kirkman Fitzhugh.

Authors And Artists Starring In Latest Silhouette Movies

Scene from Gilbert-Bray movie, "Inbad the Sailor."
 Left to right: J. Bryant, Francis Ramsey,
May Wilson Preston, Connie Neell.

      New York, Feb. 16. 1916 --There's something new under the sun, or rather behind the spotlight--the silhouette movie.

      It has darkened the lives not only of some movie actors, but of Irvin Cobb, Owen and Mrs. Johnson, James Montgomery and Mrs. Gibson, Edgar Selwyn, Margaret Mayo Selwyn, May Wilson Preston and her husband James, and among others, Inbad the Sailor hero of the first silouette movie.

      The inventors, C. Allen Gilbert, illustrator, and J. H. Bray, cartoonist, induced these notables to go into the movies when they were lured to the Gilbert Bray studio.

      There the authors and artists and their wives or husbands, moving in profile across the stage, were thrown into bold relief against a white background, and their movements recorded by a motion picture camera.

      Author Cobb acted a brief skit, entitled "Preparedness," with the aid of a toy gun, an American flag and his vast proportions. 

      Illustrator Flagg acted Flagg the Harlequin, since his costume was for something besides exposing his flagstaff figure. 

      One lady illustrator, wearing one of last summer's silhouette gowns, upon learning she would illustrate herself if she appeared between the spotlights and the curtain, sat down in a corner and not even the moving picture of "Inbad the Sailor" could move her.