Lotte Reiniger
By Julie Lapping Rivera
Lotte Reiniger
unique print: woodcut with collage
12" x 16"
$450
Available
With Artist
unframed
“Hinged Dreams" by Adin Thayer
“I now have one desire — to make films.”
Lotte Reiniger
A sorcerer thin as a rake with gnarled knuckles shakes them
at Prince Achmed as his horse gallops
across a shivering moon. A princess bird descends by an opal
lake and steps from her owl-soft plumage. Lotte’s life
is a story of stories told through thinly hammered lead.
Before leaving the land of the Fuhrer, her gifted fingers
woke, and a gift’s desire was the fuel for their burning speed.
These stories flew from the small scissors
in her hand and step by step she coaxed them
across an under-lit screen, still-shot by still-shot. By each
the world’s treasury of magic grew and the mind
of childhood was nourished. As is the life of any pioneer, hers
was a series of obstacles, money, loss, the post-war taste
for realism, and steadily she scissored through them,
and who would not, who found within herself so rare a gift,
to imagine metal into motion, to snip a crow into dipping across
the moon of her imagination or a princess into slumping
down for a century of sleep?