Tag: Lotte Reiniger

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This Film Is More Than 100 Years Old

Seven Chances (1925)

Seven Chances is a silent comedy from 1925, directed by and starring Buster Keaton, and based on a 1916 play by Roi Cooper Megrue.

Buster Keaton is a stockbroker who must marry a woman (any woman) before 7 o’clock this evening if he wants to inherit $7 million, which also seems to be the only way he can avoid financial ruin and possibly jail after “accidentally” committing some sort of massively fraudulent crime.

After annoying his sweetheart by revealing the machinations of the film’s plot to her, Buster has only 7 hours to find a new bride, and retreats to the local country club to chat up and proposition 7 local women, with a complete and unsurprising lack of success.

Luckily everything eventually spirals out of control and Keaton’s character finds himself caught up in an ever-escalating nearly 20-minute long chase scene that begins with him trying to outrun an army of potential brides in the middle of the city and ends with him being chased down by a mountain by hundreds of ten foot boulders. I assume this sequence wasn’t in the original play (although I’d quite like to see it if it was).

It’s an incredible ending, though, especially after the fairly sedate and ever so slightly boring first 40 minutes have lulled you into a false sense of security.

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Notes

1. I watched this on Mubi, although how long it’ll be on there I don’t know.

2. But you can’t take screenshots of films on mubi for some stupid reason, so I had to capture them from this version on youtube instead.

3. The first two-thirds or so of this is unfortunately marred by constant racist interruptions.

4. Which kind of under cut the charm of the whole thing to be honest.

5. The final 20 minute action sequence really is astonishingly spectacular though.

6. And almost entirely racism free.

7. Which is a bit of a relief

8. The first few scenes in this are filmed in early technicolor colour, too, which is nice (although then it reverts to Buster’s usual beautifully shot black and white)

9. There’s a real dreaminess to mid 20s technicolor films that I love.

10. As seen in The Black Pirate

11. An actual 100 year old film which I’ll review next week sometime hopefully

12. Doing this website’s only job on time for once

13. (1926 seems to be a good year for films, because I’ll get to watch The General and The Adventures Of Prince Achmed too)

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Film Information

Title: Seven Chances
Director: Buster Keaton
Year: 1925
Duration: 1 hour
Watch: youtube

Categories
This Film Is 100 Years Old

Cinderella (1922) / The Secret Of The Marquise (1922)

Cinderella (or Aschenputtel) is a short film from 1922, directed and animated by Lotte Reiniger in her signature paper cut outs and shadow silhouette style. It’s beautiful.

An adaptation of the traditional Cinderella story (unsurprisingly, given the title), this includes almost everything you could want from such a thing: evil mothers, grotesque sisters, wonderful transformations, beautiful costumes, dancing, surprisingly horrific mutilations, and even an exploding step-mother.

(Also there’s a nice example of the perils of outdated old language usage changing the entire meaning of the piece, when poor old Cinderella isn’t allowed to the party because she’s a “slut”.)

Lots of early cartoons seem to start with a sequence showing the artist drawing a characters before they magically come alive, and this has a nice variation on that with a pair of magical scissors cutting blank lumps of paper into shape, which I liked a lot. And as ever with Lotte Reiniger’s work is the sheer expressive artistry of it all.

The Secret Of the Marquise is also from 1922, and it seems to be unique (as far as my inexpert knowledge of Lotte Reiniger’s career can tell) in that it’s been reversed/inverted, so that the cutouts are in white and the backgrounds in black, which gives it all a nice ethereal air. It’s only short (2 minutes or so), but it’s as charmingly animated as ever, and whhen I watched this I was assuming it was another one of Lotte Reiniger’s fairy tale adaptations, so the reveal of what the Marquise’s secret actual was was unexpectedly funny, like some long lost 1920s Reeves and Mortimer sketch.

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Notes

1. I watched this on various BFI collections (Cinderella is on the Lotte Reiniger Fairy Tales collection DVD, and The Secret Of The Marquise is an extra on The Tales Of Prince Achmed blu-ray).

2. But they’re also on youtube, which is where, as usual, I grabbed the screenshots from. The Secret Of The Marquise is exactly the same as the disc version, while Cinderella has music on youtube, and also maybe a clearer picture).

3. I’ve reviewed a couple of Lotte Reiniger’s other films here before: Der Fliegende Koffer (1921) and Das Ornament des verliebten Herzens (1919).

4. I don’t know why I gave them the German titles and these the English ones but I did so there.

5. Also I liked both of those just as much as I liked these probably.

6. Lotte Reiniger also made a version of Sleeping Beauty in 1922, but I can’t find any versions of it anywhere so is presumably lost. Although it might just be that my cursory Tuesday afternoon searching skills are off.

7. She remade that, and also Cinderella, in the 1950s, but that’s a long way beyond the scope of this website.

8. (But it’s good I liked it).

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Film Information

Title: Cinderella
Director: Lotte Reiniger
Year: 1922
Duration: 12 minutes
Watch: youtube

Title: The Secret Of The Marquise
Director: Lotte Reiniger
Year: 1922
Duration: 2 minutes
Watch: youtube

Categories
This Film Is 100 Years Old

Der Fliegende Koffer (1921)

Der Fliegende Koffer (The Flying Suitcase) is another lovely Lotte Reiniger papercut animation, telling the fairy tale story of a princess imprisoned by her father in a tower to prevent a prophesied curse, only for her imprisonment to be the cause of that curse (this is why time travel is bad).

Anyway, the moral of the story is never imprison your daughter in a tower.

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Notes

1. I watched this on Blu-ray (it’s an extra on the Adventures Of Prince Ahmed video).

2. But got the images from this version on youtube.

3. The disc version is music-less, if that makes any difference.

4. But I think I preferred it that way.

5. Another Lotte Reiniger film, Das Ornament des verliebten Herzens, was the very first thing I ever reviewed on here.

6. Which is nice.

7. I would have reviewed more if I could find any trace of the ones she’s supposed to have made in 1920

8. But I couldn’t, unfortunately.

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Film Information

Title: Der Fliegende Koffer/The Flying Coffer/The Flying Suitcase
Director: Lotte Reiniger
Year: 1921
Duration: 8 minutes
Watch: youtube

Categories
This Film Is 100 Years Old

Das Ornament des verliebten Herzens (1919)

Das Ornament des verliebten Herzens (or, The Ornament of the Lovestruck Heart) was the first film made by the wonderful Lotte Reiniger, who’s most famous for The Adventures Of Prince Achmed (1926). She was only 19 or 20 when she made this.

Das Ornament des verliebten Herzens is only 3 minutes long, and, unsurprisingly, quite simplistic in style (no scrolling images, nor any backgrounds yet), but it’s still lovely. Like most of her films, it’s all animated using paper cut-outs to create silhouettes, and I’m always amazed at how expressive her characters are purely through their movement.

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Notes

1. This isn’t on any of my Lotte Reiniger DVDs, so I watched this on youtube.

2. This version is soundtracked by the composer Jennifer Bellor, although originally it would have been silent, obviously.

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Film Information

Title: Das Ornament des verliebten Herzens (The Ornament of the Lovestruck Heart)
Director: Lotte Reiniger
Year: 1919
Runtime: 3 minutes
Related Articles: Lotte Reiniger (wikipedia)