Lotte Reiniger’s beautiful 1926 silent animation is brought to life with a live score by musician and filmmaker Hugo Max. Performing live scores to silent films on solo viola, Hugo regularly accompanies screenings at London’s Prince Charles Cinema and Picturehouse cinemas across the UK.
The Adventures of Prince Achmed brings the tales of the Arabian Nights to life and is the oldest surviving feature-length animated film. Created using Reiniger’s distinctive paper silhouette technique, it has inspired generations of animators and filmmakers. This promises to be a breathtakingly beautiful event for all ages.
Lotte Reiniger was an animation pioneer who developed an early multiplane camera technique, later echoed in animation technologies used by Walt Disney. Her distinctive paper silhouette style has had a lasting influence on generations of animation and filmmaking.
The film is an enchanting amalgamation of stories from the Arabian Nights, animated in cut-paper silhouettes and featuring special effects using sand, wax and soap. Reiniger designed a multiplane animation table on which she and her team of avant-garde artists innovated and animated over 250,000 frames between 1923 and 1926.
Created in an attic in Potsdam, The Adventures of Prince Achmed premiered at a private press screening at Berlin’s Volksbühne Theatre on 2 May 1926. It went on to Paris, where it premiered publicly to rave reviews at the Comédie des Champs-Élysées on 1 July 1926, before returning triumphantly to Berlin for an extended run at the Gloria-Palast from 3 September 1926.
Since then, The Adventures of Prince Achmed has endured as a dazzling, if often overlooked, monument in film history: an exquisite artefact of Weimar cinema and a genre-defying experiment in combining international folk-art traditions with the technical possibilities of a new medium.
Excerpt from “100 Years of Prince Achmed”.
Running time:
90 mins