tuesday, march 31, 2009
Orientalism and The Adventures of Prince Achmed
I wrote the following informal thing for my “Europe’s Vision of the Orient” class in fall quarter, and it might be interesting to people who have watched The Adventures of Prince Achmed by Lotte Reiniger (1926): “a pioneer feature-length animated film…a brilliant feature, a wonderful film full of charming comedy, lyrical romance, vigorous and exciting battles, eerie magic, and truly sinister, frightening evil” (says William Moritz). This is out on DVD with a press kit containing some good articles (PDF).
Update (April 3): There’s a review from 2002 that considers the women and stereotypes in the story.
Most of the existing writing about The Adventures of Prince Achmed just admires the film’s aesthetic and technical achievement, but this work also has an interesting place in the history of interpretations of the Thousand and One Nights. The animation is full of traditional Orientalist (pretty much racist) motifs too, but people still watch it for fun, probably conscious of the illustrated stereotypes but not concerned about them. These motifs seem unsurprising on a screen, partly because “most people today who have an image of the Nights or think that they know about the Nights derive that image and that knowledge from films” (page 225 of Robert Irwin’s great article A Thousand and One Nights at the Movies from 2004; reading it requires your university library’s subscription to Middle Eastern Literatures).
Prince Achmed is appealing because it matches an unusual technique to an exotic subject. The elaborateness of Reiniger’s cutouts produces a sense of the otherworldly, erotic, and extravagant — in other words, making a Thousand and One Nights story was a good opportunity for Reiniger to display her virtuoso skills in ways that didn’t make as much sense for an animation of Jack and the Beanstalk. Talking about Thousand and One Nights movies in general, Irwin refers to a “visual clutter of oriental knick-knacks” that “can be put to any purpose” (225), and Reiniger makes use of them. This styling helps reinforce the idea that the Orient is a place of strangeness and excess, which is part of how European (and European-influenced) popular culture maintains the “other” status of the Thousand and One Nights while its stories have been significant and integrated within European art and literature for hundreds of years.
Like Reiniger, artists in the 19th century reached to the Orient to add variety and interest to their art; they produced lots of paintings of imaginary half-dressed harem girls, which were somehow more suitable for polite company than paintings of half-dressed European girls.
Prince Achmed was also influenced by German Expressionism (see this snippet from a history of animation). In A Thousand and One Nights at the Movies, Irwin says:
Expressionist films…were ostentatiously designed films, which made great play with play of light against dark and the use of landscape and architecture to symbolise or express in a stylised fashion Man’s inner states…preoccupied with Fate and with the monstrous and the supernatural. It is easy to see how well this essentially German subject matter could be married to the stories of the Thousand and One Nights. (226)
Irwin mentions Prince Achmed explicitly when talking about Thousand and One Nights movies as “a showcase for special effects…think of the marvellously animated and delicate silhouettes created by Lotte Reiniger…this sort of film work is, in effect, using magic to create stories that are about magic” (231). In What the Shadow Knows: Race, Image, and Meaning in Shadows (1922), Alice Maurice analyzes a very different movie but has a useful interpretation of silhouettes: “can be distilled into the two categories most at odds in Shadows: elusive or illusory phantasms on the one hand, and immediately legible expressions of hidden truths on the other” (72). Maurice also notes that restaged Chinese shadow plays were popular in the United States in the 1920s (69), which would have reinforced Reiniger’s animation of an Oriental story.
Reiniger based her film’s plot on stories from a sanitized translation of the Thousand and One Nights for children, Andrew Lang’s Blue Fairy Book (according to Wikipedia), but she still included a lot of sexy parts, like the harem scene in the still above, and violence. This follows in the tradition of Thousand and One Nights translators modifying and reinterpreting the stories at will for different audiences. Reiniger’s audience seems to be mostly adults, but the story uses a lot of terrible stereotyped characters, common in children’s literature: the African witch, the Chinese despot, and a couple of delicate and mysterious Arabian beauties. Plus the love story has the princess resisting the prince but very quickly giving in. Irwin has something to say about that too: “Medieval Arab storytellers were always happy to include strong, bold and even violent female protagonists…[In modern Western films] the beautiful girl is at best a sidekick, but essentially she is man’s reward for coming through all those dangerous adventures” (228).
Reiniger maintains the recursive aspect of the narrative, putting a few stories within stories, but that’s not central to her retelling. This version of the Thousand and One Nights provides no outer frame story, so Reiniger acts as a kind of Scheherazade: a talented female storyteller, directing the team that produced the story. She doesn’t tell this story to actually save her life, but her work has kept her memory alive among people who appreciate film and especially animation, and at least somewhat among people who are interested in the history of the Thousand and One Nights.
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thursday, october 16, 2008
A map of three summers in the Bay Area
Here’s a book I made recently for my book arts class. I’ll talk about my other classes at some point too.
This is a tetra-tetra flexagon that folds open three times to zoom in from California to the Bay Area to San Francisco to the Mission/Castro area. A flexagon sounds fancy but it’s just one piece of paper cut and folded in a certain way — here are directions for making your own (it’s easy, but it helped me to see them in person first).
This map only covers what I know. I labeled the cities and neighborhoods that I’m familiar with, and I left areas blank if I haven’t spent much time there. (Except I left parts of the Mission/Castro blank because I’d gotten tired of tracing and painting.)
A darker yellow background means I’ve spent more time in that area. A darker orange freeway or street means I’ve traveled along it more often. Green means a park.
So, this book is a way to look at my three summers during college, focused on the past two summers because I couldn’t put the Sunset, the Mission, and the Castro together on one spread. If you fold up the map from its fully open state above, it tells a kind of story:
[4: Mission/Castro] I lived at 18th & Valencia in summer 2007 and 19th & Collingwood in summer 2008 (and 41st & Irving in summer 2006), and I spent a lot of time near those places. [3: San Francisco] I wandered around the city on weekends. [2: Bay Area] On weekday mornings I walked to the Yahoo! shuttle stop at 16th & Mission and rode to Santa Clara, and on weekday evenings I returned the same way. [1: California] At the beginning of each summer, I went from Santa Barbara to Los Angeles for a couple weeks since that’s my home, and then I went up to San Francisco. At the end of the summer, I returned from San Francisco to Los Angeles and then went back to school in Santa Barbara. I work part-time remotely from here.
An animation of reading the book, starting with it closed:
This book also ties in with the Flickr photo map of my summer photos and seeing the Bay Area from above when flying to New Jersey for a few days during the summer, when my grandpa was dying, which is the part of my summer that the map doesn’t reflect.
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monday, june 09, 2008
How UCSB got to be an ARPAnet node
A while ago, somebody told me that UCSB had been the third ARPAnet node. This is pretty cool, but I didn’t know how or why it happened. The first two nodes were at UCLA (with Leonard Kleinrock) and the Stanford Research Institute (with Douglas Engelbart), and my school doesn’t seem to logically follow.
Then a month ago, a person who helped UCSB connect to the ARPAnet, Larry Green, came to my college to tell us all about it. He was an engineer at UCSB from 1965 to 1977, and he led the team that designed the interface between the university’s IBM 360 mainframe and its Internet Message Processor, a piece of hardware that connected to the other nodes of the network. I found an old description of a podcast with Larry, but the images and the link to the podcast are broken, so here are some pictures from his slides (which he kindly emailed to the people who attended) and my memory of what he said. I liked his friendly presentation; he balanced technical detail with human stories.
First Larry talked about early computers and the beginning of the ARPAnet, including a look at the log of the first successful net connection (the third entry sounds like the student closing up in order to go home). This general history is covered in a recent Vanity Fair article and the National Science Foundation’s “Birth of the Internet” special report, but neither of those publications mention UCSB more than in passing.
Next Larry explained the important Interface Message Processors, which were these big heavy boxes that functioned something like routers, handling the information sent between the different kinds of computers at different campuses. They had lifting rings on the top for potential helicopter transport or lowering into ships — this was still a Pentagon-related project.
It came in handy that the first ones were ruggedized like that because UCSB’s IMP traveled from Los Angeles International Airport to Santa Barbara by pickup truck. UCSB had invested in this hardware because it already owned a mainframe computer and there were some interesting people messing around with it. Larry and his team worked to make the big IBM 360 computer and the IMP communicate with each other, and that allowed UCSB to connect to the ARPAnet in 1969. (Larry explained that the diagram of the first four nodes looks hand-drawn because it was made using a light pen.) His team ended up selling a dozen IMP interfaces to other organizations that owned IBM 360s, so that they could connect to the ARPAnet too:
The protocol that connected the IMPs to each other was called BBN 1822, and Larry explained this diagram of it:
Larry also showed us this cartoon ad that ran in Datamation and said that yes, most of the people working on ARPAnet at the time were middle-aged white men:
UCSB was involved with all of this partly because of Glen Culler, a math professor who was inspired by J. C. R. Licklider and saw computers and networks as a way to help expand human minds. He developed the Culler-Fried On Line System, which ran on 65 classroom workstations connected to the IBM 360, all designed for teaching math. Quoting from Larry’s slides, the system’s “technologies of interactive graphics and on-line time sharing were exciting developments and the reason that UCSB was selected as an original ARPAnet site.” UCLA and SRI had nice important research, but I like that we had a very early online education system.
The IBM 360, the IMP, and the workstations were all located in North Hall on campus, and one of our professors said we should go over there and poke around in the basement to see if we can find any forgotten remains.
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friday, may 02, 2008
Another dumb Wikipedia game
Find articles that have (or have had) self-referential warning tags.
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saturday, april 12, 2008
Wozniak visits the College of Creative Studies
Last week Steve Wozniak visited Santa Barbara and gave a talk at the Arlingon Theatre downtown. I didn’t go to that, but earlier that day he did a friendly question-and-answer session at my college because our dean Bruce Tiffney is great and wrangles that kind of thing sometimes. Wozniak seemed happy to talk about himself to a bunch of random kids; he fielded questions ranging from the Apple II memory layout to Segway polo. Here are some things he said, transcribed from the scribbles in my notebook so they might not be quite accurate.
As part of his introduction to himself, he said that he got in a lot of trouble in his first computer class in college for “abusing the system” — he ran every program he could think of on their one big computer, which single-handedly made his class go way over budget for computer use. Later he and his friend made a copy of the computer room key so they could sneak into it in the middle of the night to mess around.
Somebody asked what he considered his biggest mistake, and he said it was leaving out floating-point numbers in his early version of BASIC as a way to save time. Later Apple needed floating-point stuff for business applications so they had to license their GUI to Microsoft in exchange for it.
He was excited to talk about his Segways and explained that he has three: one at home for trundling about town, one in his car for trips, and one for Segway polo. He also liked talking about his pranks and mentioned that he once pretended to shave with one of his metal business cards on an airplane, weirding out his seat-mate.
The person who wrote an early version of Emacs for Apple computers (and wrote other famous things) asked for Wozniak’s thoughts on low-cost general purpose computing. The answer involved OLPCs and waving a Macbook Air around.
When people asked about hacking, he seemed to think they meant cracking. He told the story of how he once figured out Captain Crunch’s password by looking over his shoulder as he typed it.
Doug asked if his iPhone was jailbroken. He said that it’s not jailbroken right now, but it has been at various times in the past.
