Shadow and Substance: Reiniger’s Cuts Her Own Capers

Harriet Margolis

Lotte Reiniger’s silhouette-animated Carmen (1933) prefigures later cinematic attempts to challenge popular patriarchal narratives by rewriting them in revisionist feminist modes. This chapter traces how Reiniger, a pioneer in , reinterprets the Carmen narrative so that Carmen herself takes up the position of subject rather than object of her own story, while the male characters—don José and Escamillo, and even the bull—become the objects of her gaze that can only react to her desire and her control. In this revisionist take on the story, Reiniger provides us with an unusually happy ending to the story, as Carmen and Escamillo ride off together at the end. Reiniger’s reworking is paralleled by the musical accompaniment of Peter Gellhorn. Although Reiniger herself claimed to be apolitical, aiming above all to charm through her animation, the chapter elaborates the different ways in which her Carmen functions as feminist comedy, in which the delicacy of her silhouettes ultimately cannot disguise the strength of a woman to undercut patriarchal values.

Animation Female gaze Gellhorn, Peter Music and film Parody Reiniger, Lotte: Carmen

Defying the tragic fate that Carmen usually meets, Lotte Reiniger’s Carmen (1933) rewrites her story, ending on a happy and comic note. This time, Carmen literally removes herself into a better situation, her physical strength and dexterity as well as her sexual powers overwhelming the males she encounters, human and bull alike. From a male point of view she may still seem to be a dangerous femme fatale, but since this version is her story as she might tell it, we can forget about don José’s desires. As a result, no one dies. Once Carmen nimbly escapes don José, her would-be assassin disappears from the picture, his story taking a back seat to hers. Short and deceptively simple, Reiniger’s Carmen marries music with silhouette figures in a film that one could easily dismiss as enjoyable but slight, but which, seen in the context of tellings of the Carmen story and in Reiniger’s own time, takes on its own interest. It isn’t just that Reiniger playfully marries ‘high’ and ‘popular’ art forms (opera, on the one hand, and cinema, on the other);1 she also changes point of view. Carmen is now not just nominally but also structurally the protagonist, and don José is no longer her victim but simply a means to an end. Needing to escape don Jose, Carmen 62 Harriet Margolis subdues the bull in the ring: at a time when Picasso’s Minotaur was terrorizing men, women, and horses alike, Carmen merely looks at the bull and he bows. When Escamillo finds himself bested by her on his own ground, the bullring, he at least has the sense to join her, graceful in his defeat. The change in perspective in conjunction with the change in tone allows Carmen to reject the nineteenth century and embrace the twentieth. It does so insofar as it rejects the sort of romanticism in which the male hero can lament the tragedy of his fate while his female counterpart dies: meanwhile, with a twentieth- century self-awareness of power struggles between males and females,2 it also rejects the traditional mythological relation between Zeus and Europa, on the one hand, and the Minotaur and humans, on the other. Playful as it is, it not only engages with the earlier Carmen vehicles, but also with the work of some of Reiniger’s more serious contemporaries such as and Pablo Picasso. Although significantly shorter than Bizet’s opera, Reiniger’s Carmen manages to be amusing, charming, beautiful, and satirical as well as parodic. Her version is also revisionist, especially as regards her jaunty presentation of male/female relations. Although there is no external evidence to suggest that Reiniger considered herself a feminist, ‘her female characters are especially lively and original, displaying wit, sensuousness, and self-awareness’ (Starr 1999: 348). The parody is clear from Reiniger’s title, subject matter, and soundtrack: the satire exposes male heroics at the expense of female lives. In offering such a different ending to the story from that to be found in either Mérimée’s novella or Bizet’s opera, Reiniger carries her film beyond parody to challenge patriarchal narrative imperatives. Although Reiniger (1899-1981) made experimental shorts while working ‘within the avant-garde milieu’ (Wedel 1999: 202), primarily she took as the subject of her films ‘fairy tales, myths and opera librettos’ (Strobel 1999: 16). Reiniger herself said that fairy tales were a path to truth, that she ‘love[d] fairy tales […] I believe more in the truth of fairy tales than the truth in the newspapers’.3 Reiniger matured in a Germany increasingly threatened by forces that would wreak havoc on her world. She was, by all accounts, a non- political person who enjoyed the escapism of her chosen material. Her films in general are non-threatening and amusing, technically breathtaking and visually charming. While she did not publicly confront Nazi policies, from the mid-1930s she and her husband preferred to live in England. Her friends, among them the wealthy banker Louis Hagen and the French filmmaker ,