Virtual Refrigerator - Paper-cutting from the Past

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Welcome to another edition of the Virtual Refrigerator! Thank you for joining me and my co-hosts for our weekly art link-up. We all cordially invite you to add your link sharing artwork that's on your Virtual Refrigerator and then hop over to the other blogs and admire what's on their Fridges too!

Well, at my house art has sort of been on hold lately. Kennady has been trying to focus on finishing up as much schoolwork as possible for the end of the year, and this week especially our time has gone towards preparing for the commencement exercises for Landon, which will take place this evening. So I wasn't too sure what I would feature on my Virtual Fridge today, until I sat down at my computer this morning and found this on my Google home page:

Just as it was supposed to do, the Google Doodle (use the link to see the animated doodle) intrigued me so that I wanted to find out a little more about the person or event that inspired it. Today would have been the 117th birthday of Lotte Reiniger, and if her name doesn't immediately ring a bell for you, you're probably not alone. She was a German film director who pioneered a style of animation using a series of thousands of photos of  paper-cut silhouettes to tell the story. She produced a feature-length silhouette film in 1926 - The Adventures of Prince Achmed - which was about a decade before Disney's Snow White, although it's Disney that gets the credit for the first full-length animated film. Reiniger also produced the full-length Dr. Doolittle in 1928, and worked on other full-length productions. She created dozens of animated shorts for children, and some animated advertising films. Sadly, when Reiniger fled Germany for England in the 1930s, she was unable to bring her original negatives with her, so the few modern prints available of her films are copies of copies, and much of the detail and quality is lost. I made this playlist of some of the Reiniger films I found on YouTube:

(The Mirror article about the Doodle honoring her has some excellent information and pictures, and this article at Animation World Network goes into more detail about her art and influence.)

So today I am showing some of our (very simple!) paper-cutting projects previously featured on the Fridge. A long time ago we first tried Chinese paper-cutting. (See Virtual Refrigerator - Chinese Paper-cutting)

And then more recently, we tried two types of Polish paper-cutting, wycinanki and gwiazdy. (See Virtual Refrigerator - Polish Paper-cutting)

wycinanki

gwiazdy

Also from a long time ago, we tried our hand at Papel Picado, a paper-cut decoration traditional in Mexico. (See Virtual Refrigerator - Papel Picado)

I find it fascinating that paper-cutting is a folk art in so many different cultures. The German form is known as Scherenschnitte, as you may have seen in the titles of some of the Reiniger films on YouTube. And if you've ever made paper snowflakes with your kids, you've participated in this old folk art as well!

I'm glad my diversion with the Google Doodle this morning led me to some delightful animation and gave me an idea of something to share on the Fridge today!

Now it's your turn! Join us by sharing your art posts here on the Virtual Fridge!

  

Grab a virtual magnet and add your link here to share your child's art or your arts and crafts how-to posts. Please visit the other blogs and admire what's on their Virtual Refrigerators!

An InLinkz Link-up

This post is also linked to the Art in Our Homeschool Round-up on the Homeschool Review Crew blog.

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