THE inventor The Inventor

It’s quite telling that Katja Raganelli chose the animation pioneer Lotte Reiniger as her gateway figure into German cinema’s past. Like Alice Guy-Blaché, she was prolific, and worked in all kinds of formats, including commercials and animated interludes for fiction features. More than Guy-Blaché, though, she was an inventor of forms and techniques whose genius was admired by the likes of Bertolt Brecht. It says a lot about film history that Reiniger remains still a specialists’ darling…