The final film of our ‘Thousand and One Nights trilogy’ is the oldest surviving animated feature film. Director and animator Lotte Reiniger (1899–1981) worked in an attic in Potsdam, near Berlin, between 1923 and 1926, with a pair of straight nail scissors in her hand, cutting the shadow puppets required for the 24 different frames per second that make The Adventures of Prince Achmed (as she wrote herself in London in 1972: ‘it may be left to the algebraic abilities of the kind reader to figure out how many frames would be necessary for an opus of one hour in length’). Reiniger displayed a precocious talent to cut shadow silhouettes, which she used in her own home-made shadow-theatre in Berlin. Initially she wanted to be an actress and studied with Max Reinhardt (1873–1943). She drew the attention of film director Paul Wegener (1874–1948) and collaborated in some of his films from the 1910s. She also created the dream sequence for Fritz Lang’s (1890–1976) Die Nibelungen (1924). During her long career (her final film is from 1980), she went on to make nearly sixty films (all of them shorts, except for Achmed), of which about forty survive. Reiniger is still the most highly-regarded figure in the history of silhouette animation.

Shadow play originated in pre-modern China, with significant centres in India and in Indonesia. Curiously, these locations are featured in the film, which uses especially the Tale of Prince Ahmed (spelled Achmed both in the original German title and in the official English release) and is set in Baghdad, the fictional archipelago of Wak-Wak, and China. Aladdin is also present, as well as the Tale of the Ebony Horse. There is no frame narrative here, and instead of disconnected episodes we get a flowing narrative. The nature of the film has been described as ‘triple anti-mimetic’: it is animated, it is set in a marvellous world, the silhouette cuts are non-mimetic. Realism is not a priority, and the setting is possibly even vaguer than in Pasolini’s Arabian Nights. The Middle Ages are here through motifs such as Aladdin’s lamp or ‘the Caliph’. If it is true that animation has the ‘special capacity to depict interior states of memory, dream, fantasy, feeling and consciousness’, very few animated films make use of this capacity to such a great extent as Achmed. The director Walter Ruttmann (1887–1941) collaborated on it. Walt Disney (1901–1966) was an admirer of his and Reiniger’s work and briefly took him to Hollywood during the late 1930s, where Ruttmann helped on Fantasia (1940) and, before that, on Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) – in which the wicked queen has the same twitching expressiveness of eyes, eyebrows and nose as the Magician in Achmed.

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• Part of the Medieval Film Club, for more information go to the website.
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