The Adventures of Prince Achmed
Nov. 11th, 2001 04:28 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
eubThis is a movie that played in the 3RFF this afternoon -- the last showing, and it's too bad, because it was very nifty. It's an animated film made in 1926 by a 23-year-old German woman. It's silent, with an orchestral score in this reconstruction.
The plot is not so much the point, but it's Prince Achmed and later Aladdin trying to save Achmed's sister and his newfound love from a delectably malicious sorcerer, with the powerful help of a witch. Let's admit up front that it's a movie of its times -- not exactly condescending towards Arabians and Chinese and Africans, but it certainly takes them as Orientalist exotics. Nor do the princesses have much to do.
Visually, it's wonderful. Mostly it's done with delicate articulated paper silhouettes; it also uses sand and straw and rippled glass and flowing amorphous textures that I don't know how she got -- the opening sequence of the sorcerer conjuring up a horse is a tour de force of these. The backgrounds are levels of gray (now tinted) that shimmer in and out of visibility. The Djinn is a shifting shape of sand. People move double-jointedly, both angular and sinuous.
I remember the reflections in rippling water, the translucent ocean waves, the sorcerer's transmutations -- bags of gold into porcupine-bats that roll like tumbleweed... it was absorbing to watch.
(BTW, if the subtitled translations of the German dialogue screens were accurate (which in some cases, and I'm saying this as a non-speaker of German, they manifestly were not), Brautigan is bridegroom and Zorn is fury.)
The plot is not so much the point, but it's Prince Achmed and later Aladdin trying to save Achmed's sister and his newfound love from a delectably malicious sorcerer, with the powerful help of a witch. Let's admit up front that it's a movie of its times -- not exactly condescending towards Arabians and Chinese and Africans, but it certainly takes them as Orientalist exotics. Nor do the princesses have much to do.
Visually, it's wonderful. Mostly it's done with delicate articulated paper silhouettes; it also uses sand and straw and rippled glass and flowing amorphous textures that I don't know how she got -- the opening sequence of the sorcerer conjuring up a horse is a tour de force of these. The backgrounds are levels of gray (now tinted) that shimmer in and out of visibility. The Djinn is a shifting shape of sand. People move double-jointedly, both angular and sinuous.
I remember the reflections in rippling water, the translucent ocean waves, the sorcerer's transmutations -- bags of gold into porcupine-bats that roll like tumbleweed... it was absorbing to watch.
(BTW, if the subtitled translations of the German dialogue screens were accurate (which in some cases, and I'm saying this as a non-speaker of German, they manifestly were not), Brautigan is bridegroom and Zorn is fury.)
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no subject
Date: 2001-11-12 06:50 am (UTC)I really, really wish I'd seen this. Oh well.
no subject
Date: 2001-11-12 07:43 pm (UTC)It's apparently coming out on video (the screening was from video), so maybe a place like Heads Together will pick it up. And, hmm, on region-2 PAL DVD.
no subject
Date: 2001-11-12 08:10 pm (UTC)And I should be paying more attention to the film fest than I am...