Lotte Reiniger’s The Adventures of Prince Achmed is the first full-length animated film in cinema history, yet her name remains relatively unknown among film scholars. Partly, this results from the “great man” tradition in film histories, repeatedly arguing that a few heroic males advanced film as an art form. But an equally important cause for her obscurity is Reiniger’s unique relation to the avant-garde. Unlike many of her contemporaries, who rejected traditional narrative form and content, Reiniger chose “conventional” fairy tales as the subject for most of her films. And so, film scholars have typically dismissed her the avant-garde canon.
Walter Benjamin’s 1936 essay, “The Storyteller,” may shed light on Reiniger’s awkward historical position. He saw the forces of modernization putting an end to storytelling; this traditional, “collectivizing” experience was giving way to isolation, through an overload of information, technology, and speed. Yet, according to Benjamin, that very loss makes “it possible to see a new beauty in what is vanishing” (Illuminations, 87). Similarly, Reiniger did not see her work in film in opposition to past traditions, but a way to revitalize them, using a new form, as when she used stop-motion photography to dramatize a tale from The Arabian Nights. A modern, existential condition is visible in the construction of her silhouettes: fragmented pieces of paper bolted together at various joints, moving mechanically from frame to frame.