Based on stories from "The Arabian Nights." A wicked sorcerer tricks Prince Achmed into riding a magical flying horse. The heroic prince is able to subdue the magical horse, which he uses to fly off to many adventures. While travelling, he falls in love with the beautiful Princess Pari Banu, and must defeat an army of demons to win her heart. The entire film is animated using the silhouette technique, which employs movable cardboard and metal cutouts posed in front of illuminated sheets of glass.
Scheherazade is also part of BSO’s Flights of Fantasy concert repertoire!
BSO concert-goers receive a $1 ticket discount by entering the promo code Symphony51 on the payment screen at Pickford’s online checkout or by using it in person at the box office. Discounts are also offered to anyone with a ticket stub from our recent February 1st concert.
The Adventures of Prince Achmed is a 1926 German animated fairytale film, written and directed by the womann director Lotte Reiniger. It remains the oldest surviving animated feature film. The plot is based on elements from several One Thousand and One Nights stories, such as Aladdin, Ahmed and Paribanou, and The Ebony Horse.
Prince Achmed features a silhouette animation technique that Reiniger invented by manipulating cardboard cutouts and thin sheets of lead under a camera, similar to Wayangshadow puppets. The original prints featured color tinting. Reiniger also used the first form of a multiplane camera in making the film, one of the most important devices in pre-digital animation.
Lotte Reiniger needed three years, from 1923 to 1926, to make Prince Achmed. Each frame had to be painstakingly filmed, and 24 frames were needed for every second of animation. Stars were made by holding a cardboard with small holes in front of a strong light, superimposed pieces of semitransparent tissue paper was used to make waves, and silver paper for moonlit water. For other movable backgrounds, which sometimes included the use of two negatives, they made different layers covered with substances like sand, paint and soap.
The Silk Road Ensemble accompanied the film with a live improvised performance on Western strings and instruments such as the oud, ney and sheng in October 2006 at the Rubin Museum of Art in New York, NY.
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