A special program by Carlo Montanaro
A light source that illuminates a white piece of cloth is sufficient to recreate images, inserting between the two elements any material which, if translucent, can even be enriched with chromatic effects. Starting from Plato’s ‘cave’ and tracing the very history of mankind, the “shadows’ have even come to anticipate portraiture, predicting the advent of photography.
Historically linked to the Oriental tradition (not only Chinese, however) representations with silhouettes tend towards myth, finding an equivalence here in Italy in the Sicilian puppet theatre. Among the different materials used in the other part of the world the most common is leather, embellished with colours, including gold filigree. In Europe, this way of narrating through images finds its peak in Paris, at the end of the 19th century, in a Cabaret that soon became a meeting point in the Belle Époque period also thanks to politically intriguing hints, told with figures cut out in the pond. Le Chat Noir enters by right into Proustian Research, where Erik Satie is hired as a substitute pianist. Finding imitators and disseminating an increasingly widespread use of ‘shadows’, now made from paper and cardboard that soon became home entertainment for the young and the old. In addition, as such they cannot fail to intrigue the inventors of the last, definitive universal language, born at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries: the cinematograph. It initially experimented every possibility of entertainment, needing continuous stimuli that would possibly provoke curiosity and a smile. Over time it measures itself with the avant-garde movements of the 20th century, which modernised the very concept of art, leading to abstraction.
Shadows that succeed in creating both prototypes of stylistic mystery (e.g. in the German Expressionism of the 1920s) and a precise style fascinating and accomplished since, in 1919, a young German woman discovered that she possessed a particular skill in constructing a real alternative to the ‘cartoon’ by creating refined drawn (or cut-out and articulated) shadows. With few epigones, starting in 1919 in a fifty-year career, Lotte Reiniger (1899 – 1981) remains in film history as the undisputed queen of the ‘cinema of silhouettes’.
Les ombres chinoises, Segundo de Chómon (France, 1908, 3’)
De Chòmon, with Méliès first among the pioneers, and Cohl, is at the basis of the cinema of wonders and fantasy, and therefore a cinema essentially constructed with special effects. With a component of ‘step one’ or animation cinema, in whose infinite variety one can also give life to ‘shadows’.
Affaires de coeur, Émile Cohl (France, 1909, 4’ 40’’)
Émile Cohl, playwright, draughtsman, photographer, forerunner as ‘incoherent’ of the imminent artistic movements of the historical avant-garde, lightly touches the paradox of the imminent surrealism with great ironic lightness.
Das Ornament des verliebten Herzens, Lotte Reiniger (Germany, 1919, 4’ 44’)
A young apprentice actress, she overcomes downtimes of theatre by cutting out with scissors on black cardboard caricature profiles of her colleagues. An innate talent that could not fail to develop into a singular and striking professionalism lasting about fifty years. This is her debut film.
Ein Lichtspiel Schwarz Weiss Grau, László Moholy-Nagy (Germany, 1919, 6’)
One of the great artists/artisans/experimenters of materials and technology connected to the Bauhaus, first in Germany and then in America. Also intrigued with Cinema and Photography, he explores positive and negative rhythms.
Barcarole, Lotte Reiniger (Germany, 1922, 4′)
Lotte Reiniger, like other great experimenters, does not disdain publicity, but, above all, she mentions the implicit sweetness of the Serenissima (Republic of Venice).
Seeliske Konstructionen, Oskar Fischinger (Germany, 1927, 6′ 30”)
Fischinger, a great illustrator, uses animated silhouettes to show the world through a drunkard’s eyes
ABC in Sound, László Moholy-Nagy (Germany, 1933, 1’ 53’’)
The ‘optical sound’ of the cinematograph can produce surreal sounds by drawing them even from silhouettes.
Dada, Mary Ellen Bute (USA, 1936, 2’)
‘Dada’ is a nonsense word, just as the experimentation that it always evokes, even in America, where it is a woman’s taks to dare and produce harmonious abstract images of pure black and white.
A Night in a Harem, Lotte Reiniger (UK, 1958, 14’)
The silhouettes, aided by a research into sparkling music (Mozart, Il ratto dal serraglio!!) that induces colour, tell of mythical and distant times and worlds.
