Restoration

A friend took me to see The Adventures of Prince Ahmed last night, and I have to admit I'd barely heard of it before. Big oversight.

This is not just an unusual and innovative filmwork from mid-1920's Germany, but also the earliest surviving animated feature (two earlier ones from Argentina by Quirino Cristiani are lost). Using scissors, paper, cardboard, and sometimes very thin lead sheets, artist and filmmaker Lotte Reininger, along with her husband, two assistants, and half a dozen avant-garde artists and animators, spent three years (1923-26) cutting the film's human and inhuman characters and backgrounds, while cinematographer Carl Koch painstakingly photographed them frame by frame, in the manner of modern claymation.

The results of Reininger's scissorwork and artistic conception alone demonstrate amazing skill and patience. Look, for example, at the elaborated featherwork on the prince's costume, and the lace trailing from Princess Pari Banu's headdress.

Adapted loosely from several stories in The 1,001 Nights of Scheherazade, the plot includes elements of Prince Ahmed's story as well as the famous Aladdin story, has the inevitable evil sorcerer, a sympathetic witch, and a flying horse. It's pure fairytale and all archetypes.

No original nitrate copy of Ahmed has survived. For a while only black-and-white prints were available (the original was hand-tinted). Using one of those black-and-white prints and a highly-technical, complex process, British and German archivists restored the movie in its original colors in 1998/99.

One more thing made this event memorable: the movie's soundtrack, and yes, silent movies need to have them, or lose a lot of atmosphere and mood. Last night's soundtrack was by David Keenan and Nova Karina Devonie, Seattle composers and performers, playing the score for Ahmed they were commissioned to write in 2008, on accordian, guitar, banjo, glockenspiel, viola, percussion, and slide whistle. They've performed this work extensively since '08, all over the world, from Australia to Waterloo (Iowa), and complement the film immeasurably.



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