SILHOUETTE FILMS.

Auckland Star, Volume LXVIII, Issue 26, 1 February 1937, Page 11

SILHOUETTE FILMS.

FAMOUS WOMAN'S WORK. Miss Lotte Reinfger, the maker of silhouette films, spoke on her work to the Arundel Society in Manchester recently, says the Manchester "Guardian." Her address was a preface to the exhibition of her silhouette films and of her methods of making them. It wag illustrated with the showing of one of her films, "Harlequin," and with lantern slides of the cut-out figures which are her actors. In explaining her own work, Miss Reiniger began at the beginning: '"When I was a child I could not do much, but I could cut silhouettes. I never liked my silhouettes to be quite and motionloss; I always played with them, and I had my primitive little shadow theatre when I was 12 years old. In school 1 was allowed to use the theatre to illustrate our English lessons with Shakespeare plays; I played with the figures and the other girls read the various parts. That is why my English is so bad." Her English is really good.

"When I got older, and ought to learn a proper job, I could not stop this cutting and playing. At the same time I was interested in films and acting. When I was hanging around behind stage at Reinhardt's theatre, cutting silhouettes of all the actors like mad, a man called Paul Wegener, who was doing some interesting trick photography, took pity on me and helped me to get in touch with people with whom I was able to start doing trick films. This went quite well, and I did not stop this business from 1919 until now." She discussed her own type of trick film in comparison with others, placing them exactly between the cartoon film which Disney had made successful and the puppet or marionette film; "for," she said, "with the puppets they have in common the use of marionettes; with the cartoons they compare because they are photographed, like them, frame by frame."

Twenty-four Per Second,

With lantern slides Miss Reiniger demonstrated how her cut-out "actors" are made, how their limbs are joined with little wire hinges; how backgrounds are cut in layers of transparent paper; how the pictures are pierced together on a glass sheet, with a light from underneath so that the joints are no longer visible, and with the camera looking down on the picture from above. One second of time needs 24 different pictures; between pictures the figures are moved, each joint being adjusted to the movement; a 12-riiinute film like "Carmen" needs about 15,000 different pictures. The film shown at the lecture, "Harlequin," takes its characters from the old Italian commedia dell' arte, and its musical accompaniment from Scarletti, Pergolesi and other Italians of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It is fantastic, pretty, entertaining, an art which puts forward no obvious theory to justify itself; personal, but obviously charming; one wondered why it should not have made itself better known to the general English public, but perhaps the reasons are practical and commercial. At times Harlequin, Columbine, the Captain, and the Wealthy Spinster eeemed to caricature real life, but they never attempted to copy it. Most impressive, in the technical aspect at least, were two things: the suppleness of movement which these pieces of board and lead take on, and the individual character which they all have by the end of,the story.