Phillip Johnston / The Adventures of Prince Achmed review: silent film revived with music
Anna Madeleine www.theguardian.com anna-madeleine
Phlilip Johnston’s revival of Lotte Reiniger’s 1926 film is a beautiful reminder of animation as a live artform rather than a blockbuster children’s movie genre
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the Guardian
Animation as a film genre has expanded dramatically in recent decades with the Lego Movie and Frozen both examples of its domination of mainstream cinema. But while it has lost none of its ability to communicate fantastical and mythological tales, simplicity of storytelling has given way to highly rendered digital 3D effects.

American composer and saxophonist Phillip Johnston’s live music revival of the 1926 silent film The Adventures of Prince Achmed for Mofo festival is an unusual work for contemporary times, suggesting the possibilities of reducing animation back to its original components: images and sound.

Johnston has written several contemporary scores to accompany early 20th-century films. For this one, he plays the soprano saxophone accompanied by James Greening on the trombone, and Alister Spence and Casey Golden both on electric keyboards, playing live over a pre-recorded percussion track.

Considered to be the oldest surviving feature-length animated film, The Adventures of Prince Achmed was created by German film-maker Lotte Reiniger, who pioneered the technique of silhouette animation – using intricate cut-out shadow puppets shot frame-by-frame against thin sheets of lead – a method she used to create over 40 fairy-tale films.

It weaves together several different storylines from One Thousand and One Nights, and the resulting narrative is delightfully chaotic. Over five acts it tells a story of good versus evil played out between Prince Achmed and the ugly African magician, involving a magical flying horse, Princess Dinarsade, the demons of Wak Wak and the Princess Pari Banu, Aladdin, and a witch.

The pairing of live music with silent film enrich both, and bring new life to the archival footage. At the same time, you get a sense of stepping back in time – helped along by the venue, Hobart’s Theatre Royale, which opened in 1837 and is Australia’s oldest operating theatre.

Some elements link to contemporary animation, notably the character of Aladdin, now associated with Disney’s 1992 film. Hard as it is to disconnect from the idea of animation as a kids genre, Reiniger’s work is a reminder that it existed long before the cartoon aesthetics of large-scale production companies like Disney and Pixar.

The film is littered with traces of its own physicality: variations in colour, specks of dust, and flickering light. The bold silhouettes have simplified movements, and the simple power of positive and negative space create a flatness that transports scenes of celebration and ritual into compelling abstract patterns. The technique of metamorphosis – in which one shape tranforms seamlessly into another – plays out beautifully in a battle between the magician and the witch when they morph magically into animals.

Johnston’s soundtrack adds an extra dimension to the 2D-nature of the animation, with energetic jazz layered over the pre-recorded percussion track that builds up and flows through the film. While Johnston and Reiniger’s compositions are each complex in their own ways, they come together simply and beautifully, stripping animation back to its abstract qualities of light, shadow, image and sound.

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