The adventures of Prince Ahmed

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Movie
Original title The adventures of Prince Ahmed
Country of production Germany
original language German
Publishing year 1926
length 65 minutes
Rod
Director Lotte cleaner
script Lotte cleaner
production Louis Hagen
music Wolfgang Zeller
camera Carl Koch

The Adventures of Prince Achmed is a German silhouettes - animated film by Lotte Reiniger had from 1926. The film premiere on May 2, 1926 in the Berlin Volksbühne am Bülowplatz. The film processes several plot motifs that Lotte Reiniger borrowed from fairy tales from the Thousand and One Nights Fund . It is the world's oldest surviving animated feature film. Only two Argentine animated films by Quirino Cristiani appeared earlier, but are now considered lost .

action

1st act

The powerful African magician conjures up nature and creates a flying magic horse. A big festival is held in the city of the caliph in honor of his birthday. The magician presents him with the magic horse and with its help fetches the flag from the highest tower of the palace. Princess Dinarsade and her brother Prince Achmed are also watching the flight display. The caliph first offers the magician money for the horse and finally the freedom to choose among the treasures of his palace - the magician chooses Princess Dinarsade. However, Achmed provides him, whereupon the magician can convince him to use the horse. The prince mounts it, continues to climb into the air and finally gets above the clouds and out of sight. The wizard is arrested and reveals that he had not told the prince how to bring the horse back to the ground.

Act 2: The story of Prince Achmed

By chance, Achmed discovered the sinking mechanism and landed on one of the magic islands of Wak-Wak, far from home. The mistress of the demon realm of Wak-Wak is Pari Banu. Achmed is entertained by the court maids, but they eventually quarrel about the stranger and Achmed flees with his horse to a neighboring island. The beautiful Pari Banu and her playmates come to this island every night in a bird dress and bathe in a magical lake. Achmed surprises them by stealing their discarded plumage. After a brief persecution, he seized Pari Banu and kidnapped her with his horse to China. Pari Banu warns Achmed about the demons, but he is determined to marry her. In the meantime, the magician has also found out the whereabouts of his magic horse with a glass ball, turns into a bat and flies away from his dungeon to Achmed and Pari Banu. In the shape of a kangaroo, he steals the bird dress from Pari Banu and lures Achmed to a ravine into which the prince falls. The magician kidnaps Pari Banu on his flying horse, assuming that Achmed had sent him with a robe as a gift. Achmed is able to free himself from the pit after a fight with a giant snake, but comes too late.

3rd act: Adventure in China

The magician brings Pari Banu to the Emperor of China and sells her to him. Pari Banu opposes the emperor's wooing. He finally offers it to his darling, a dwarf, either for marriage or for killing. The magician had meanwhile returned to the grieving Achmed and dragged him to a mountain shrouded in flames and fixed him there with a rock. He threatens to seize his sister. However, there lives a witch who is an enemy of the wizard in the Flammenberg. From her Achmed receives miracle weapons for the liberation of Pari Banu. She is being married to the dwarf when Ahmed and the witch arrive. Ahmed frees her when she is dragged into the groom's house. But the demons of Wak-Wak are also looking for Pari Banu. Ahmed can fight some of these flying kites, but others seize Pari Banu and fly away with her. Achmed spares the last demon under the promise to fly him to Wak-Wak, but Achmed throws him right in front of the gate of Wak-Wak, which only opens to those who have Aladdin's magic lamp.

4th act: Aladdin and the magic lamp

Achmed rescues Aladin from the clutches of an elephant-like monster with clawed feet and suddenly asks him about the magic lamp, which he no longer has either. Aladin tells him the story of how a poor tailor in the city of the caliph one day received a visit from a man who took him to see Dinarsade, the caliph's daughter. This man promised to give her to him as a wife if he fetched a magic lamp from a well in the mountains. Aladdin went down through several underground caves and brought up the lamp. But he was pushed back down by the man because he insisted on being pulled out of the well first before giving him the lamp. While trying to make light with the lamp, he discovered the magical power of the lamp. The ghost of the lamp brought him home again. Aladdin had a palace built overnight and astonished the caliph, who gave him the beautiful dinarade for his wife. Achmed reveals to Aladin his family relationship with the caliph and Dinarsade, but then learns that one day the palace, the princess and the lamp had disappeared and Aladin was brought before the executioner. He escaped at the last second and sailed away in a ship. In a storm he was shipwrecked and washed ashore. When he wanted to eat from a tree, it turned out to be the elephant monster. Just as Achmed explains to Aladin that the African magician was responsible for everything, the fire mountain witch comes down from heaven and urges Achmed to free Pari Banu, because she is supposed to be killed by the demons because of the flight with Achmed. The witch takes over the fight with the magician for the lamp for Achmed and Aladdin, they fight against each other in ever changing animal shapes until the witch wins.

5th act: The ghost battle in Wak-Wak

The demons are outraged by their mistress and urge her to jump off a cliff when Ahmed approaches. Aladin is supposed to let the spirits out of the lamp, but the black demons are faster and pounce on him. Achmed succeeds in freeing him from the demons, but they have already taken possession of the lamp. With the intervention of the witch they regain the lamp and let go of the good spirits who fight the black demons in a turbulent battle. A many-headed demon grabs Pari Banu. First two new heads grow out of each of the heads that Achmed has cut off in battle, but the witch can stop this with the help of the magic lamp. After defeating the demons, Aladdin's palace floats up. The witch sends Aladin, Achmed and Pari Banu home to the “land of mortals” and keeps the magic lamp. Aladdin finds his dinarade in the palace. The two couples end up with the palace back in the caliph city and are welcomed joyfully by the caliph.

background

The Adventures of Prince Achmed was one of the first animated feature films and was produced between 1923 and 1926. Lotte Reiniger was in charge of the creative management of the production team . At her side stood Walter Ruttmann , Berthold Bartosch , Alexander Kardan and Carl Koch . The original composition for this silent film comes from Wolfgang Zeller and is in the Library of Congress in Washington , which is why it was restored by the German Film Museum in 1999. The subtitles, which are common in today's versions, were added to this, which come from the censorship card from January 15, 1926.

The animated film is not drawn, it is a paper cut - silhouette film . Flat puppets made of individually cut cardboard pieces were animated using stop-motion processes. The film consists of around 96,000 individual images which, at a playback speed of 24 images per second, result in a projection time of 65 minutes.

restoration

For a long time experts assumed that only black and white copies of the film from the period between 1950 and 1960 would have survived. At that time, due to the lack of funds, the easily flammable nitrocellulose films were only copied on black and white film. The original films, however, were colored, at least in some scenes, due to subsequent viragings. In a restored version from 1989, the colors of the original were only interpreted. When Lotte Reiniger's 100th birthday was approaching in 1999, film restorers from the Frankfurt Film Archive conducted new research around the world and discovered a nitrocellulose positive of the film in the National Film and Television Archive in London , which is very well preserved for its age of 70 and which is believed to be a direct one Is a copy of the original negative. The original score of the film music by Wolfgang Zeller also appeared in the Library of Congress , which contained important information about the original editing of the film. Combined with the notes on the 124 subtitles on the censorship card of the film from the Weimar Republic, the original version of the film could be restored. In a special procedure was so in the lab "L'Immagine Ritrovata" in Bologna a new true color copy that closely resembles the original from the premiere in May 1926th

criticism

“The classic has lost none of its fascination to this day, even if trick techniques in the computer age became more and more diverse and perfect. Particularly impressive pictures show the power struggle between the good witch and the bad wizard, who transform themselves into ever new shapes until they dissolve into light effects. "

- Top video news

Film music

The orchestral original film music, which was composed during the production of the silent film, comes from Wolfgang Zeller . Since then there have been numerous new versions, some of which are based on Zeller's motifs and some are completely new compositions. The British film music composer Freddie Phillips, who had already set other Reiniger films to music, created a new version of the film in 1954 when a copyable negative version of the film was created for the first time in London.

Since the restoration of the film in 1999, the Yo-Yo Mas Silk Road Ensemble , the Jordanian-Palestinian Khoury Project , the Swiss piano quintet I Salonisti , the Teichmannhurt Trio ( Teichmann brothers and Leopold Hurt ) and the British electronic rock band Flights of Helios have performed their own interpretations, respectively Compositions to the film. On behalf of the Kurt Weill Festival , the French double bass player Renaud Garcia-Fons composed a new musical setting for a sextet of European and oriental instruments (double bass, accordion , bansuri / flute , oriental percussion, lute / tar , marimba ), which was performed in Dessau in 2011 to the film was premiered.

literature

  • Lotte Reiniger : The Adventures of Prince Achmed. 32 images from the silhouette film. With a narration of the content. = The Adventure of Prince Achmed. New edition as a contribution to "100 Years of Film". German and English. Primrose Film Productions, London and Munich 1995, XXX S., 32 sheets.
  • Barbara Lange: The Adventures of Prince Achmed (1926). A cinematic experiment In: Animations: Lotte Reiniger in the context of media history. Edited by Barbara Lange, Catherine Böhm, Andrea Haarer, Antonia Kurz, Olga Özbek and Olga Schwab, Tübingen 2012

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Lotte Reiniger, Dance of Shadows . Retrieved November 15, 2015.
  2. ↑ The Adventures of Prince Achmed . Top video news. Publisher: Children's and Youth Film Center on behalf of the BMFSFJ .
  3. ↑ The Adventures of Prince Achmed: Film & Music Performances (selection). ( Memento of the original from November 24, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.lottereiniger.de archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. LotteReiniger.de website , accessed on November 24, 2015
  4. ^ The adventures of Prince Achmed: The first full-length animated film in film history. LotteReiniger.de website , accessed on November 24, 2015
  5. ^ Animated film revitalized with new score. ( Memento of the original from November 24, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / archive.silkroadproject.org archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. Silk Road Project website , Winter 2007, accessed November 24, 2015
  6. ^ The Khoury Project présente Les aventures du prince Ahmed. Website of the Institut du monde arabe Paris, accessed on November 24, 2015 (French)
  7. ↑ Programs: Prinz Achmed / Lotte Reiniger. I Salonisti website , accessed November 24, 2015
  8. ↑ 'The Adventures Of Prince Achmed' with live score by Flights Of Helios @ Modern Art Oxford, Oxford. ( Memento of the original from November 24, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.musicinoxford.co.uk archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. In: Music in Oxford , accessed November 24, 2015
  9. ↑ Highlights 2011: "The Adventures of Prince Achmed". Website of the Kurt Weill Festival, accessed on November 24, 2015