Silent movies - The Adventures of Prince Achmed

Is it possible that I haven't watched any silent animation films yet? Old ones, I mean, because of course even today many animation films are silent.
Film historians consider "Fantasmagorie" by Émile Cohl to be "the first traditional animation on standard film", by the way. It is from 1908!

Let's go to the first animated feature-length film, though. Disney's "Snow White", you think? No, sorry. That wouldn't fit my silent movie category very well, right?
It's "The Adventures of Prince Achmed" from 1926, written and directed by Lotte Reiniger, and yes, this is actually the earliest surviving feature-length animated film (the two earlier ones by Quirino Cristiani are believed to be lost) which was made in a silhouette animation technique invented by Reiniger using cardboard cutouts and thin sheets of lead. It reminds of shadow puppetry, for example Indonesian Wayang, but laying the silhouettes flat allows for more movement.

The plot (spoilers ahead!) told in five acts is a free adaptation of motifs from One Thousand and One Nights, the central theme being the love story of Prince Achmed and Pari Banu (called Peri Banu elsewhere).

Act 1.
The African sorcerer creates a flying horse. He presents it on the occasion of the Caliph's birthday, but refuses to sell it for money. The Caliph offers him free choice from his treasures and the sorcerer chooses his daughter Dinarsade. When Dinarsade's brother Achmed tries to prevent that, the sorcerer convinces him to try out the flying horse, but he doesn't tell him how to bring it down again.
So the Caliph's men capture the sorcerer and throw him into the dungeon.

Act 2.
Achmed finds the lever by accident and lands on the magical island of Wak-Wak ruled by the beautiful Pari Banu.
She and her maidens, dressed in flying feather costumes, arrive at a lake to bathe and are watched by Achmed who then takes her costume away and kidnaps her. The flying horse takes them to China.
There he tells her he wants to marry her, but then gives her back her costume, so she can decide if she wants to leave. She chooses to follow him.
By now, the sorcerer has escaped the Caliph's dungeon turned into a bat after he detects where his horse is. He steals the costume. When pursuing him, Achmed falls into a deep hole.
The sorcerer goes back to Pari Banu pretending Achmed has sent him and takes her away on the flying horse.

Act 3.
The sorcerer sells Pari Banu to the Emperor of China. When she rejects him, he gives her to his favorite to kill her or take her for his wife.
The sorcerer has returned to Achmed to take him to a mountain where he traps him under a boulder, so he can go back to take Dinarsade. In the flaming mountain lives a witch, however, the sorcerer's enemy who gives Achmed weapons and an armor, so he can resuce Pari Banu and defeat the demons of Wak-Wak. He manages to rescue Pari Banu, but the demons seize their ruler feeling betrayed by her.
Achmed forces the last demon fly him to Wak-Wak, but he can only open the door there if he has Aladin's lamp (yes, in German we write him with just one d).

Act 4.
Achmed saves Aladin from a monster, but is distraught to hear that the lamp is gone.
Aladin tells him the story of how a strange man promised him Dinarsade for a wife if he fetched the lamp for him from a cave. Aladin ends up prisoner in the cave, but finally discovers the magic of the lamp which brings him home and lets him build a palace overnight. The Caliph gives him Dinarsade for a wife, but one day she, the palace, and the lamp are gone, taken by the sorcerer, and Aladin is to be executed. He escapes and ends up in Wak-Wak where Achmed has found him.
The witch arrives and by request of Achmed and Aladin summons the sorcererto fight him. They change from one animal shape to the next until the witch defeats and kills the enemy.

Act 5.
The demons want to make Pari Banu jump off a cliff. Aladin tries to release the spirits of the lamp, but the demons take it from him. The witch takes the lamp back and releases the good spirits to fight the demons.
A multi-headed demon grabs Pari Banu and Achmed attacks it chopping off his heads which grow back as two for one. The witch uses the lamp to prevent that.
After the victory over the demons, Aladin's palace comes floating through the air. As promised, the witch keeps the lamp and bids them goodbye for their travel back to the "Land of the Mortals".
Aladin finds Dinarsade in the palace which takes them home where the Caliph welcomes the happy couples.

It seems some people found this plot very confusing, especially if they weren't able to understand the intertitles. There is a version with English intertitles on DVD and BluRay and there is a version with English subtitles on YouTube, but it's not only stretched, it's also missing the beautiful original score by Wolfgang Zeller.
I watched the movie here on YouTube.

As you can imagine - after all we are in the 20s - there are Orientalist tropes. It makes me wonder how someone would avoid that best today without just abandoning such a project completely. Serious question. What do you think?

They might research the topic for a more appropriate portrayal of cultures - for example it has been pointed out that Pari Banu's outfit in China reminded more of India - and they might avoid obvious stereotypes and exaggerated portrayal of people's looks and behavior - something Reiniger actually acknowledged in later work.
Would it make sense, though, for something so clearly based on One Thousand and One Nights, to leave out nationalities completely? Or just some of them? Turn the story into something completely new with just elements from the stories that inspired it?

There is more to the film than meets the eye, however.
A bit about Lotte Reiniger first. She was only 23 when she started making the movie. She had been cutting silhouettes - "Scherenschnitte" as we call them in German - since she was a child and it must have been amazing for her to have this project financed. She was also a lover of fairy tale stories and in her work you can find many more of them, also European ones.
Her views were socialist although she didn't utter them as openly as for example her husband Carl Koch with whom she worked on most of her projects.
I read two long articles about "The Adventures of Prince Achmed", one in English by an assistant professor of literary science, one in German by a former professor of art history, both of them noting how Reiniger tried to encourage diversity within a dreamy fairy tale setting even if it unfortunately relied on orientalistic stereotypes and caricatures. The keywords are eroticism, homoeroticism, and female empowerment.

To be honest, the men in the film are not very likeable.
When the sorcerer wants to take Dinarsade for the flying horse, not her father steps in, but Achmed who then promptly gets distracted by the flying horse himself. That's why the sorcerer gets captured, not because of Dinarsade.
The Caliph stays quite inactive.
Achmed is a voyeur and kidnapper.
Aladin gets Dinarsade because of the magic palace.
Let's not even talk about the Chinese Emperor and his favorite.

After Achmed gives back her feather costume, Pari Banu decides on her own free will to follow him (it would have cut the film quite short if she had kicked him and flew off instead). She rejects and fights the Chinese Emperor.
Most powerful, however, is of course the witch. They would all have been pretty lost without her.
Poor Dinarsade doesn't get any chance to shine.

Regarding the homoeroticism, Reiniger knew a lot of homosexual men and women from film and theater in Berlin and she actively aimed to portray homosexuality differently from how it was done in Germany at the time, as something casual and natural.
I didn't have any expectations when I watched the film and have to admit that I was surprised at first at the sensuality and desire shown throughout the movie although some of it was within an orientalist stereotype.

The movie was like getting just a glimpse from outside into a fairy tale world which of course had a lot to do with the way the characters move.
Even though I had watched a video of Reiniger showing the process first, I didn't see actual cardboard cutouts in the film thanks to that flowing movement, but characters, only in a more artistic, dreamy way than if there had been real humans.
Of course the effects helped a lot, too. Light effects, water, fire - it was really interesting to hear Reiniger talk about how they created some of those effects.

It's definitely a film worth watching, not just because of the impact it had although it's of course amazing to know that such a young woman was one of the pioneers of animation.


Sources:
1. Die Abenteuer des Prinzen Achmed (in German). On the Lotte Reiniger website
2. The Art of Lotte Reiniger, 1970 | From the Vaults. On: Youtube - Channel "The Met"
3. Im Gespräch mit Lotte Reiniger (in German). Ausschnitte aus "Die Frau hinter den Schatten: Lotte Reiniger" von Brigitta Ashoff. 1980. On: YouTube - Channel "V.S.-Produktion"
4. Lilith Acadia: 'Lover of Shadows': Lotte Reiniger's Innovation, Orientalism, and Progressivism. In: Oxford German Studies 50(2), 150 - 168 (only available via licensed access)
5. Barbara Lange: Die Abenteuer des Prinzen Achmed (1926). Ein cineastisches Experiment (in German). In: Animationen: Lotte Reiniger im Kontext der Mediengeschichte. Tübingen 2012 (reflex: Tübinger Kunstgeschichte zum Bildwissen, Bd. 5)
6. Scott Nye: Scott Reviews Lotte Reiniger's The Adventures of Prince Achmed. On: CriterionCast, September 27, 2013
7. Fritzi Kramer: The Adventures of Prince Achmed (1926) - A silent film review. On: Movies Silently, October 13, 2013