From Lotte Reiniger to Nguyễn Trinh Thi: Examining the Evolution of Non-Western Representation in Artists’ Film and Video

Experimental filmmakers are often celebrated for their radical engagement with both form and content. This article highlights how artists’ film and video have evolved in the past century when it comes to the representation of non-Western communities and their cultures. Employing close textual analysis, it compares Lotte Reiniger’s The Adventures of Prince Achmed (1926), Len Lye’s Tusalava (1929) and Free Radicals (1958), and Nguyễn Trinh Thi’s Letters from Panduranga (2015), through a postcolonial lens. Foregrounding how Nguyễn is engaged in the nuances of postcolonial identity in a manner that is not replicated by Reiniger and Lye, it concludes that depictions of non-Western cultures in artists’ film and video have developed in the past century from spaces of exoticization to sites of inclusion and respect.

Visual Music and Kinetic Ornaments

This essay traces the theorization of interwar animation through period analogies with painting and dance, paying special attention to the valorization of concepts such as dematerialization and embodiment, which metaphors of visual music and physical kinesthesis were used to promote. Beginning in 1919, and exemplified by her feature-length film Die Abenteuer des Prinzen Achmed (1926), Lotte Reiniger directed numerous silhouette films animated in an ornate style that embraced decorative materiality. This aesthetic set her in uneasy relation to the avant-garde, whose strenuous attempts to distance abstraction from ornament took the form of absolute film, and were screened together at the Absolute film Matinee of 1925. However, their claims for aesthetic integrity were staked on territory these artists largely had in common. By adopting a feminist approach that examines networks of collaboration, publication, and artistic production in Weimar Berlin, this essay reveals Reiniger as an early proponent of haptic cinema in interwar Europe and one of animation's earliest and most perceptive theorists.

Grimms Volksmärchen in Lotte Reinigers filmkünstlerischer Arbeit

ZusammenfassungIm zwanzigsten Jahrhundert war das Volksmärchen vor allem deshalb weiterhin eine sehr produktive Gattung, weil es sich im Medium des Films ausbreitete und sich damit zugleich auf aktuelle gesellschaftliche Diskurse bezog. Das geschah zunächst durch Trick- und Animationsfilme. Als Pionierin des Trickfilms war Lotte Reiniger diejenige Regisseurin, die das alte Ideal der Natur- und Volkspoesie kreativ transformiert und gesellschaftlich aktualisiert hat. Sie stilisierte Grimms Märchen zu autonomen Silhouettenfilmen. Ihr außerordentlicher Erfolg beendete eine Tradition, nach der das Märchen zuallererst von literarischer und erzählerischer Lebendigkeit der Kultur zeugte. Die Aktualisierung alter Stoffe gelang Reiniger einerseits vor dem Hintergrund des Mentalitätswandelns nach dem Ersten und nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg, andererseits aufgrund neuer technischer Möglichkeiten.

A Woman Director in the History of Animated Film

Rapidly spreading computer technologies cause many classical art applications to disappear. One of these is the classic stop motion animation cinema. Animation film director Lotte Reiniger has an important place in the history of cinema both through her personality and films. The avant-garde style of the director puts her in the category of modern artists. Reiniger's technical and stylistic innovations in the art of animation are still important. In this study, the artistic life and film aesthetics of the Lotte Reiniger will be discussed and the elements that make it an auteur method will be examined through her animation films.

Reiniger, Lotte (1899–1981)

Berlin-born Charlotte ‘Lotte’ Reiniger, the first woman animator, was the foremost practitioner of silhouette animation (paper cut-outs lit from beneath and manipulated one frame at a time under the camera). She anticipated Disney’s multi-plane system of separating image levels under the camera to create illusory depth by a dozen years. Chinese shadow plays fascinated her as child, and a lecture by German Expressionist director/actor Paul Wegener on animated film inspired her as a teen. While a student at Max Reinhardt’s acting school, she published a book of silhouettes of his actors. Reiniger made her first silhouette film in 1919. She gravitated to fairy tales, fantasies, and operatic themes, but her films nonetheless usually contained wry social commentary, often on gender issues. She also made theatrical commercials and special silhouette effects scenes for live-action features. In 1926, assisted by husband and live-action director Carl Koch and animators Berthold Bartosch and Walther Ruttmann, she completed her feature-length masterpiece, Die Abenteuer des Prinzen Achmed [The Adventures of Prince Achmed]. The first animated feature made in Europe, it employed tinted film stock to reinforce the emotional impact of each scene. Her second silhouette feature, Doktor Dolittle und seine Tiere [Dr. Dolittle and His Animals] (1928), premiered in Berlin with a score by Kurt Weill and Paul Hindemith. Reiniger’s filigreed images are intrinsically abstract and expressionistic, and her stories partake of the surrealism of dreams. After World War II, she worked mostly in Great Britain.

Participación, Repercusión y Representación de la Mujer en el cine de Animación / Participation, Impact and Representation of Women in Film Animation

ABSTRACTThe presence of women in animation films implicates three related issues. First, the artistic one, which shows a group of influential female authors within animation, from pioneers to the most relevant modern artists. Though the first decades of the 20th century cast important names such as Lotte Reiniger or Faith Hubley, the presence of women in this artistic environment was a minority circumstance, made worse by the difficulties for financing and market competition. Secondly, and besides of this minority presence, it is most interesting the success and repercussion gained by their works through festivals, prizes and publications. Between the most respected authors nowadays we can mention Joanna Quinn, Joan Gratz, Erika Russell or Caroline Leaf, all of them artists who use commercial work to help them to continue with their more artistic pieces. In spite of all the efforts to keep their presence within animation film, we can point here the main difference with the presence of male authors in this industry. Being the cause the financing chances or the posibility of a shorter process, women take part more easily in short animation films than in full-length films. Lastly, our third approach deals with the election of gender issues for their film plots. Faith Hubley's W.O.W. (Women of the World), Petra Freeman's Jumping Joan or Regina Pessoa's Tragic Story with Happy Ending chose this commitment. The whole perspective is often joined to an institutional effort, as is the case of Women in Animation, a professional organization promoting women's roles in animation and individual expression.RESUMENLa presencia de la mujer en el cine de animación implica tres ámbitos principales relacionados entre sí. En primer lugar, el ámbito artístico, que acoge dentro de la animación a una serie de autoras influyentes, desde las que ejercieron de pioneras hasta las artistas actuales más relevantes. Aunque a partir de la década de los cuarenta ya aparecen nombres importantes como Svetlana Fili-pova, Lotte Reiniger o Faith Hubley, la participación de la mujer en este desarrollo artístico es aún minoritario, situación agravada por las dificultades de financiación y competencia comercial. En segundo lugar, y como contrapunto a la minoritaria presencia femenina en este desarrollo artístico, resulta interesante el éxito y repercusión obtenidos por sus obras, a través de festivales, premios o publicaciones. Entre las artistas más reconocidas actualmente se encuentran Joanna Quinn, Joan Gratz, Erika Russell o Caroline Leaf, que completan su investigación artística con trabajos comerciales que les permiten financiar obras más arriesgadas. A pesar de los esfuerzos por mantener su presencia en el cine de animación es quizá aquí donde se ve una diferencia más acusada con creadores masculinos. Ya que bien sea por inmediatez u oportunidades de financiación, dentro de la animación la mujer sigue unida al cortometraje, siendo realmente escasas las artistas dedicadas al largometraje. Nuestro tercer ámbito de estudio aborda la elección de la temática de género como argumento de las obras. Mujeres del mundo, de Faith Hubley, Jumping Joan, de Petra Freeman o Historia trágica con final feliz, de Regina Pessoa, por mencionar títulos de distintas décadas, afrontan este compromiso. Toda esta perspectiva está a menudo encuadrada en los esfuerzos institucionales por facilitar la labor artística de la mujer, como el caso de la organización Women in Animation, donde el concepto colectivo y la expresión individual operan con una relación recíproca y fructífera.