Everything around us is a clue about what came before, and we as a culture absorb and reuse the essence of each other's stories in new ways all the time - but sometimes we forget what brought them into being in the first place. Examples: Zombies, Godzilla
The film we are going to be watching together is such a clear expression of the movements across the world happening 100 years earlier - we HAVE to start back in time, to understand more fully how this piece came into being and what impact it might have had audiences at the time... just as we are looking at this film which is 100 years old now, scouring it for clues about ourselves in this time.
+ Orientalism and Colonial Expansion
According to Wikipedia: "The Age of Imperialism, a time period beginning around 1760, saw European industrializing nations, engaging in the process of colonizing, influencing, and annexing other parts of the world."
Edward Said redefines the term Orientalism to describe a pervasive Western tradition—academic and artistic—of prejudiced outsider-interpretations of the Eastern world, which was shaped by the cultural attitudes of European imperialism in the 18th and 19th centuries.
The 1700's and 1800's, western society was flooded with and fascinated by goods from the eastern parts of the world - Japan refused to let western ships in to their ports until the 1850's (Japan's long period of isolation was from 1639 to 1853) - and while the West was rapidly industrializing, the delicate, elaborate handcrafted artifacts and ancient feeling designs became coveted as relics of a bygone time. Art Nouveau was an iconic design art movement from approximately 1890 to 1910 in Europe and North America known for featuring decorative vine like tendrils. This movement was heavily influenced by the ukiyo-e movement in Japan because of increased communication between Asia and Europe. It also provides access to a sexualized lens, as Victorian society perceived "proper" women as untouchable in that way - women considered to be from less modern, civilized cultures were distant enough from Victorian identities and social codes that it was considered safe to engage with desire via nudity and other sexually suggestive tropes while looking at, painting and engaging with these 'other' women.
Edward Said redefines the term Orientalism to describe a pervasive Western tradition—academic and artistic—of prejudiced outsider-interpretations of the Eastern world, which was shaped by the cultural attitudes of European imperialism in the 18th and 19th centuries.
The 1700's and 1800's, western society was flooded with and fascinated by goods from the eastern parts of the world - Japan refused to let western ships in to their ports until the 1850's (Japan's long period of isolation was from 1639 to 1853) - and while the West was rapidly industrializing, the delicate, elaborate handcrafted artifacts and ancient feeling designs became coveted as relics of a bygone time. Art Nouveau was an iconic design art movement from approximately 1890 to 1910 in Europe and North America known for featuring decorative vine like tendrils. This movement was heavily influenced by the ukiyo-e movement in Japan because of increased communication between Asia and Europe. It also provides access to a sexualized lens, as Victorian society perceived "proper" women as untouchable in that way - women considered to be from less modern, civilized cultures were distant enough from Victorian identities and social codes that it was considered safe to engage with desire via nudity and other sexually suggestive tropes while looking at, painting and engaging with these 'other' women.
Art Nouveau vs Japanese Ukiyo-e
When Napoleon entered The Holy Roman Empire in 1793 - it was a scattered range of principalities still living as feudal societies, with agrarian based serfs working the lands of local lords and lesser kings. After Napoleon abolishes the feudal system, The Holy Roman Empire becomes Germany, and the german people are hungry for a sense of cultural identity as push back against French occupation.
1001 Nights (often called Arabian Nights) was published in the English language and fully entered Western cultural consciousness in 1706.
According to Wikipedia: "The work was collected over many centuries by various authors, translators, and scholars across West Asia, Central Asia, South Asia, and North Africa. Some tales trace their roots back to ancient and medieval Arabic, Sanskrit, Persian, and Mesopotamian literature. Most tales, however, were originally folk stories from the Abbasid and Mamluk eras, while others, especially the frame story, are probably drawn from the Pahlavi Persian work Hezār Afsān (Persian: هزار افسان, lit. 'A Thousand Tales'), which in turn may be translations of older Indian texts.
Common to all the editions of the Nights is the framing device of the story of the ruler Shahryar being narrated the tales by his wife Scheherazade, with one tale told over each night of storytelling. The stories proceed from this original tale; some are framed within other tales, while some are self-contained. Some editions contain only a few hundred nights of storytelling, while others include 1001 or more."
By the time the Grimm Brothers - inspired by the historical touchstone of 1001 Nights - decide to compile extensive texts on the folk tales of the German cultural experience (first published in 1812) those foreign stories had become popular culture. Jacob and Wilhelm were scholars of cultural linguistics, and the oral history present in folk stories provided clues about the linguistic development of German dialects as much as the symbols being used told about what Germans valued - they were looking for the essence of Germanness as a political statement against French occupation. In the process of gathering the fairytales, they had to maintain a rigorous academic process of weeding out ones that were derivative of stories from 1001 Nights - which had been consumed and loved by western society for 100 years at this point.
*Brother's Grimm are considered to be a part of the Romantic Movement. Wikipedia says: 'Romanticism (also known as the Romantic movement or Romantic era) is an artistic and intellectual movement that originated in Europe towards the end of the 18th century. For most of the Western world, it was at its peak from approximately 1800 to 1850. Romanticism was characterized by its emphasis on emotion and individualism as well as glorification of the past and nature, preferring the medieval to the classical. Romanticism was partly a reaction to the Industrial Revolution, and the prevailing ideology of the Age of Enlightenment, especially the scientific rationalization of Nature. It was embodied most strongly in the visual arts, music, and literature; it also had a major impact on historiography, education, chess, social sciences, and the natural sciences. It had a significant and complex effect on politics: Romantic thinking influenced conservatism, liberalism, radicalism, and nationalism.
The movement emphasized intense emotion as an authentic source of aesthetic experience. It granted a new importance to experiences of sympathy, awe, wonder, and terror, in part by naturalizing such emotions as responses to the "beautiful" and the "sublime". Romantics stressed the nobility of folk art and ancient cultural practices, but also championed radical politics, unconventional behavior, and authentic spontaneity. In contrast to the rationalism and classicism of the Enlightenment, Romanticism revived medievalism and juxtaposed a pastoral conception of a more "authentic" European past with a highly critical view of recent social changes, including urbanization, brought about by the Industrial Revolution.
Many Romantic ideals were first articulated by German thinkers in the Sturm und Drang movement, which elevated intuition and emotion above Enlightenment rationalism. The events and ideologies of the French Revolution were also direct influences on the movement; many early Romantics throughout Europe sympathized with the ideals and achievements of French revolutionaries. Romanticism lionized the achievements of "heroic" individuals – especially artists, who began to be represented as cultural leaders. Romanticism also prioritized the artist's unique, individual imagination above the strictures of classical form. In the second half of the 19th century, Realism emerged as a response to Romanticism, and was in some ways a reaction against it.
*Just about every major movement sprouted in the wake of war.
+ Modernism - Victorians vs the past
With rapid industrialization, cities vaulted into the future - Photography formed as a medium in 1822, The first World's Fair was in 1851, the first motorized vehicles appeared in 1886, the first film and electricity arrived in cities two years later. In this new, modern age - engaging with ancient artifacts becomes a way to really feel that sense of being in the future, folk cultures become a prop.
+ Lotte born 1899 - Fantasy genre arises
In 1858, a Scottish author writes the first Fantasy novel. Sci fi started a little earlier, with Gothic writer Mary Shelley - 1001 Nights was instrumental in shifting the way stories were framed - freeing writers up to play with structures that are not explicitly based on classical forms of story structure and character relationships.
1899 - Lotte is born
1900 - Wizard of Oz is published. Frank L Baum was focused on crafting a modern fairytale, which in his mind did not have the ordinary tropes like Genies and Magic Lamps.
1901 - Walt Disney is born (Disney's father was born the same year as Kaiser Wilhelm of Germany - who started ww1, and Napoleon died when he was 41)
+ Scherenschnitte and German immigration
The Pennsylvania Germans brought the art of scherenschnitte to America in the 1700s and used the cut work to decorate birth, baptismal, and marriage certificates. The art form is more than 2,000 years old with the oldest surviving papercut found in China and dates to the 6th century. Papercutting came from China to Europe and by the 14th century had spread throughout the world. However, because the art form was brought to Colonial America by Swiss and German immigrants who settled in Pennsylvania, the German terminology has dominated the art form in America.
This elaborate paper cutting style was taught in German schools, focused on young women learning how to create them. While they are clearly a cross pollination of ancient Asian cultural traditions (paper was first created in China) and medieval traditions of lacemaking and embroidery - this style of craft is considered women's work, especially by upper class women. In the chronically beleaguered German economy, I suspect that the use of scherenschnitte for holiday decorations, put up in windows, given as gifts - was a really profound folk response to economic lack. As German immigration to America in the 1800's outpaced other nationalities, these immigrants brought this style of making into the American cultural narrative - still found in pockets of Jewish and Appalachian communities. The artist Kara Walker skillfully employs these elaborate paper shadow shapes to construct intense narratives with fairytale properties - she names Lotte Reiniger as a huge influence in this aspect of her work - drawing from all of these overlapping cultural touchstones and narratives.
Lotte studied at Charlottenburger Waldschule, the first open-air school, where she learned the art of scherenschnitte, the German art of silhouette, inspired by the ancient Chinese art of paper cutting and silhouette puppetry.
Waldschule für kränkliche Kinder (translated: forest school for sickly children) was the first open air school, built in Westend of Charlottenburg, Germany in 1904 by Walter Spickendorff, a city architect. The school was founded by the pediatrist Bernhard Bendix and Berlin's school inspector Hermann Neufert. It led to the beginning of the open air school movement which quickly spread across Europe and North America. Approval for the school was granted by the local authority in June 1904 and it opened on August 1. Spickendorff designed the school to provide the most exposure to the sun. The school took its name from its situation within a pine tree forest, the Grunewald, part of Germany's capital since 1920.
German Scherenschnitte
Chinese paper cutting + Indonesian Wayang Kulit
Kara Walker's work with scherenschnitte
inspired by Lotte's work:
+ WW1 and Berlin
Kaiser Wilhelm takes the German throne in 1888 - he was a grandson of Queen Victoria of England, and his Aunts, Uncles, Siblings and Cousins were ruling most of the other countries that still maintained a monarchy, particularly in Europe. As a child with a disability - his drive to prove himself and outpace his family manifested in both positive and negative ways. The still new country of Germany springs forward into urbanization and industrialism faster then cities can hold, and Berlin is the energetic center of the Kaiser's attention. So when Lotte was born in Berlin 10 years later, she lands into a dizzy heartbeat where electricity is still new, the new urban poor fill the street and mass immigration to America was taking place while the Germans who stay are trying to find a sense of where they belong in the world's narrative.
At the same time the Kaiser decides to expand his naval capacity in competition with England and France, and begins sending ships to meddle in territories occupied by those countries. The tensions that arise from these actions and the naval arms race become the powder keg that sets off WW1 - 'The war was presented inside Germany as the chance for the nation to secure "our place under the sun," as the Foreign Minister Bernhard von Bülow had put it, which was readily supported by prevalent nationalism among the public. The German establishment hoped the war would unite the public behind the monarchy, and lessen the threat posed by the dramatic growth of the Social Democratic Party of Germany, which had been the most vocal critic of the Kaiser in the Reichstag before the war.'
When WW1 broke out Lotte was 15 years old. A year later she attends a lecture of a film maker that becomes her mentor, and the same year the war ends she has her first animation job on a film - somehow she manages to exist in a safe enough place where maintaining this kind of focus is possible, amidst steep rations, economic depression and the horrors of global war.
In 1918 the monarchy was abolished, following Germany's loss of the war. The German Monarchy existed for merely 47 years. In Russia the Monarchy fell in 1917, as well as the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian Monarchies shortly after the war.
The stuff of fairy tales - of princes and princesses and royal courts and carriages were falling into the past tense.
Kaiser Wilhelm and Carving up the spoils with his family
Berlin city center during the War
World cinema between the wars proved fertile ground for a wide range of narrative and aesthetic experiments. As the war ends, Lotte has entered adulthood and the film industry. The Weimar Period begins - a socially democratic decade where German expression in art and film flourished. The artists and makers that young Lotte was interacting and collaborating with brought aspects of German Expressionism and other Avant-guard forms into her work from the time.
*German Expressionism was an artistic movement in the early 20th century that emphasized the artist's inner emotions rather than attempting to replicate reality. German Expressionist films rejected cinematic realism and used visual distortions and hyper-expressive performances to reflect inner conflicts.
The artistic legacy of WW1 is connected to worldwide grief, the naming of PTSD (Shellshock it was called back then) the freedom from realism that the development of photography made room for - an embedding of artistic, film and literary practices in a descent into the self and an exploration of our sensory experience.
Lotte was initially drawn to the films of Georges Méliès - a stage magician that was inspired by the tricks he could play through the camera lens (as opposed to Hollywood evolving from Vaudeville - which becomes Slap-Stick storytelling style you can still see in American cartoons - from the first mickey mouse on) and even though there was stiff competition and nationalism in the two major film industries. German films from this period would go on to inspire so much of what we know of American cinema - from genres like film noir and detective stories to directors like Hitchcock and Tim Burton.
At the same time Lotte is expanding as an artist crafting shadow puppets, Walt Disney is also working as a young animator for American studios making commercials that often involve shadow puppets - he pioneers the use of cell animation in his spare time which will define his company's style - but it is clear in so many moments in The Adventures Of Prince Achmed that Disney is deeply inspired by aspects of her storytelling and imagery. The shape of the vultures match those in Snow White, The battle between the wizard and the witch can be seen in The Sword in The Stone etc. Disney also receives some of her studio members when they have to leave during the rise of the Nazis and he takes and then modifies the multi plane camera she develops for filming this project.
German Expressionism in Film
Before the production of this film, animation techniques were reserved for tricks and silly short films and commercials - she saw a potential for serious storytelling that very much like 1001 Nights effected what the western world saw as possible - blew open an avenue for people like Walt Disney to later define generations. Fable, illustrated shadow-play, and silent film coalesce for the first time.
Even though she was deeply apart of the Avant-guard culture of the Weimar art scene, she was known for never expressing a political opinion, sometimes to the frustration of her peers. I see a resonance between her and Disney - 2 artists who came into their own between 2 world wars and large scale economic depressions - who devoted their lives to escaping into worlds of childlike wonder.
More recent feminist reflection on Lotte's entire body of work starts to see her gently reframing the stories she tells so that the originally passive female characters become the focal point, and we follow these young women as they explore and engage with the world.
*Animation scholar William Moritz suggests: ‘The genre of silhouette films also constitutes for Reiniger a kind of feminist validation of a women’s folk art form’. Through her pioneering fusion of silhouette craft with the emerging medium of animation film, Reiniger’s work transforms a handmade form – traditionally practiced by women with no access to formal training – into a distinctly modern and aesthetically radical medium. It is the very handcrafted and homemade quality of Reiniger’s animations that renders her films so powerful. Her creative practice specifically flourishes within a ‘domestic’ environment, rather than being inhibited by these conditions. In a 2015 ‘Female Gaze’ edition of Sight and Sound, the contemporary animator Ruth Lingford reflects on Reiniger as one of her ‘formidable female role-models’ in the 1980s, recalling that ‘animation seemed like a female-friendly art form, with its craft associations and its cottage-industry promise of self-sufficiency’.
*Many of her friends and colleagues were disappointed with Reiniger’s decision to animate a fairy tale instead of dealing with the political and economic problems of Germany at that time. Esther Leslie said, “What did the dancing shadows, trapped in a flat world of genies and demons, caught only with sidelong glances, have to do with the spectacular collapse of the German economy in the epoch of hyperinflation?” Why was she creating pure fantasy during a time of great upheaval? Those around Reiniger saw fairy tales as sheer escapism, as irrelevant to a suffering nation, and had no greater context on the society that they saw in crisis. Lotte would only say, “I believe in the truth of fairy tales more than I believe in the truth of the newspaper.”
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