‘Among the great figures in animated film, Lotte Reiniger stands alone. No one else has taken a specific animation technique and made it so utterly her own. To date she has no rivals, and for all practical purposes the history of silhouette animation begins and ends with Reiniger. Taking the ancient art of shadow-plays, as perfected above all in China and Indonesia, she adapted it superbly for the cinema.

‘She was born in Berlin to cultured parents, and from an early age showed an exceptional and, it seems, self-taught ability to cut free-handed paper silhouettes, which she used in her own home-made shadow-theatre. Initially she planned to be an actress, studied with Max Reinhardt, and used her skill at silhouette portraiture to attract the attention of the film director Paul Wegener. He invited her to make silhouettes for the intertitles to his films Rübezahls Hochzeit (Germany, 1916) and Der Rattenfänger von Hameln (Germany, 1918).

‘Wegener introduced Reiniger to a group of young men who were setting up an experimental animation studio, the Berliner Institut für Kulturforschung, headed by Hans Cürlis. One member of the group was the film historian Carl Koch. In 1919 she made her own first film for the institute, Das Ornament des verliebten Herzens (The Ornament of a Loving Heart). In 1921 Reiniger married Koch, who designed her animation studio and became her producer and camera operator until his death in 1963.

‘From the first, Reiniger was attracted to timeless fairy-tale stories for her animations. Aschenputtel (Cinderella) and Dornröschen (The Sleeping Beauty) (both 1922) were among her earliest subjects. The avant-garde artist and filmmaker Hans Richter, a lifelong friend, wrote of her that “she belonged to the avant-garde as far as independent production and courage were concerned,” but that the spirit of her work harked back to an earlier, more innocent age. Jean Renoir, another close friend and passionate admirer of her work, described her films as a “visual expression of Mozart’s music”. Indeed Mozart, and other operatic themes, often provided her with subjects, as in such films as Carmen (Germany, 1933), Papageno (Germany, 1935), Helen La Belle (1957, drawing on Offenbach) and A Night in a Harem (1958, drawing on Mozart).

‘From 1923 to 1926, Reiniger worked with Carl Koch, Walther Ruttmann and Berthold Bartosch on her most famous work, The Adventures of Prince Achmed, often credited as the first full-length animated film. Financing for this project was provided by a young Berlin banker, Louis Hagen, who had seen and admired her previous work. When inflation attacked the Deutschmark in 1923, Hagen had converted some of his money into film stock which he then offered to Reiniger to make a feature-length film on any subject she chose. He also built a studio for her above the garage of his house in Potsdam.

‘After completing Prince Achmed while still in her twenties, Reiniger never again attempted a feature-length animated film; for the rest of her sixty-year career she concentrated on shorts, mostly of one or two reels in length, and on sequences to be inserted in other people’s films. (She also co-directed, with Rochus Gliese, a part-animation, part-live-action feature, Die Jagd nach dem Glück (Running After Luck) (Germany, 1929), but it was a commercial and critical failure.) When funding ran short she would resort to book illustrations or commercials. As early as 1922 she made Das Geheimnis der Marquise (The Marquise’s Secret) for Nivea skincare products.

‘Altogether Reiniger made nearly sixty films, of which some forty survive. Her technique, already amazingly accomplished in Prince Achmed, gained yet further in subtlety and balletic grace during the Thirties in such films as Harlekin (Harlequin, 1931) and Der kleine Schornsteinfeger (The Little Chimney Sweep, 1934). The delicacy and fantasy of fairy-tales suited her intricate, imaginative technique, and they make up the bulk of her output.

‘After the Nazis seized power Reiniger turned her back on Germany, “because I didn’t like this whole Hitler thing and because I had many Jewish friends whom I was no longer allowed to call friends”. In December 1935 she and Koch came to England where they made The King’s Breakfast (1936) for John Grierson and other films for the GPO Film Unit. She also contributed a shadow-play sequence to Renoir’s La Marseillaise (France, 1937).

‘At the outbreak of war Koch was in Rome working with Renoir. Reiniger joined him there and worked as his assistant on La Tosca (Italy, 1941, completed by Koch after Renoir quit Italy in haste) and Una signora dell’ovest (Italy, 1942). At Christmas 1943 they reluctantly returned to Berlin to care for Reiniger’s sick mother. Her only film during the war years was Die Goldene Ganz (The Golden Goose, 1944). Many of the original negatives stored in her Potsdam studio were destroyed by a hand-grenade blast. Luckily prints existed elsewhere and it was possible to reconstitute the majority of her films, including Prince Achmed.

‘After the war, the couple took British citizenship and settled in the Abbey Arts Centre, an artists’ estate in north London, where they set up Primrose Productions along with Louis Hagen Jr, son of the Berlin banker who had financed Prince Achmed. This was the most intensely productive period of Reiniger’s career: in two years she created a dozen films for American television, all adapted from classic fairy tales by the Brothers Grimm, Wilhelm Hauff, Hans Christian Andersen and from the One Thousand and One Nights. The Gallant Little Tailor (1954) was awarded a prize, the Silver Dolphin, at the Venice Festival.

‘After Carl Koch’s death in 1963 Reiniger made no films for ten years, becoming a near-recluse. But her films were enjoying a revival, and in 1969 she was invited to visit her native country for the first time since her emigration. This led to a rediscovery of her film works in West Germany and to late recognition: in 1972 the artist was awarded the Filmband in Gold and in 1979, on her 80th birthday, she received the Bundesverdienstkreuz (Order of Merit).

‘In the early 70s Reiniger was persuaded to embark on a lecture tour of North America, where she described herself as “a primitive caveman artist”. Inspired by the warmth and affection she encountered, she resumed work, and in her last years made two films for Canada, including the exquisite The Rose and the Ring (1979) from the story by Thackeray. This, her penultimate film, showed that her 80-year-old fingers had lost none of their magic. Reiniger’s final film was a very brief short, Die vier Jahreszeiten (The Four Seasons, 1980), made for the Filmmuseum Düsseldorf the year before she died.’ — Philip Kemp

 

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Stills

 

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Further

Lotte Reiniger Website
Lotte Reiniger @ IMDb
Lotte Reiniger @ Animation World Network
‘The Groundbreaking Silhouette Animations of Lotte Reiniger’
‘TEN YEARS BEFORE DISNEY’
‘Animation: Reiniger’s Prince Achmed’
‘The Adventures of Lotte Reiniger – the early years of film animation in Germany’
‘Listen to Lotte Reiniger and Rebecca Sugar Discuss Animation’
Lotte Reiniger page @ Facebook
‘In the Shadows: Lotte Reiniger’
‘On the master animator Lotte Reiniger’
‘Figuras de cine: Lotte Reiniger’
‘How can we understand Lotte Reiniger’s fantasy fairy-tales in context?’
‘Forgotten but not gone’

 

____
Extras

The Art of Lotte Reiniger

advertisement for Nivea skin care by Lotte Reiniger, 1922

Priceless old footage of Lotte Reiniger speaking about her method

Lotte Reiniger im Stadtmuseum Tübingen

 

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Quotes

“I believe in the truth of fairy-tales more than I believe in the truth in the newspaper.”

“Film is movement. It’s the combination of curves and diagonals that gives ballet and animation their sweet tenderness and their striking directness. Even with primitive materials, one can work small wonders.”

“Hands are practically the only way to show a silhouette figure’s emotions. Without all five fingers, it’s not so good.”

“I do make a point to include animal silhouettes because in animation films, man and beast are on the same level, which would be impossible on a theatrical stage. In my research, I’ll spend hours at the zoo, then return to my studio. Sometimes I will get down on all fours to imagine what it would feel like to be a particular animal.”

“I love working for children, because they are a very critical and very thankful public.”

“Walt Disney’s animations obey the rules of perspective, fooling the eye to see three dimensions. I am skeptical of Disney and his factorystyle, over-technicized productions. Our films may be more modest, but they bear a more individual mark. I feel that the stark black figures in our films stimulate audience imagination more than lush colors.”

“Deutsche Filmzeitung [the Third Rech trade journal] disparaged my films as romantic and unrealistic. In a private conversation, I was told, ‘We need healthy produce for the German people. What you make is a caviar in which we have no interest.'”

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At work

 

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16 of Lotte Reiniger’s 59 films
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Cinderella (1922)
‘It all begins with a pair of scissors cutting out Cinderella from a piece of black card before placing her into the world of the story. In many shots, the action is vignetted by jagged edges, reminding us of the sharp edges that have crafted the materials of this tale. Animation is already well suited to fairy tales, which have provided story material for Reiniger, Jiří Trnka, Ladislas Starevich, Ray Harryhausen, Jan Švankmajer and that Disney bloke (Disney also released a cartoon of Cinderella in 1922, and a feature film of the same story in 1950, four years before Reiniger’s own remake). Animation allows the construction of a completely fabricated fantasy space that is bracketed off from the real world, evoking the enclosures of memory and imagination (though I might argue that Disney’s approach was less to do with evoking the imaginative and ephemeral experience of fairytales, and more about reshaping those tales in order to fit into the house style of his company). Animated figures provide archetypal rather than definitive renderings of fairytale characters, and particularly in Reiniger’s monochromatic stories, the images allow space for the viewer’s imagination to fill in the gaps.’ — Dr. North

the entire film

 

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The Adventures of Prince Achmed (1926)
‘Paul Shallcross, who today played the lovely score he composed for the film, gave an excellent introduction as to why the film has historically been revered as a landmark: the youth of the director, the painstaking mode of animation involving cardboard silhouettes and thin sheets of lead which took three years to complete, how each frame was lit from below and photographed from above using layered backgrounds one painstaking frame after another, how famous avant-garde figures such as Walter Ruttmann, Berthold Bartosch and Carl Koch worked on the film etc. But personally, I always thought there was a reason why silhouette films never took off. It always felt too much like a successful attempt in gaining maximum expressivity from a limited vocabulary; and why bother? The images are delicate and pretty. The story, from the Arabian nights and featuring Aladdin, his lamp, witches, sorcerers, dragons, warriors and princesses — and a setting ranging from the Middle East to China — is exciting and involving. But why not tell the same story using a greater visual vocabulary that allowed more movement and a greater range of expression? Today I got my answer.’ — Notes on Film

the entire film

 

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Der scheintote Chinese (1928)
‘A bit racist (a lot racist), but stunningly animated. The story is actually very strange (though more or less normal for a fairytale), and I could not parse any clear moral from it (though there’s nothing say it’s a fable). Perhaps I need to think on it more, or perhaps I missed something while drooling over the silhouettes.’ — letterboxd.com

the entire film

 

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Galatea: The Living Marble Statue (1935)
‘The Greek legend of Pygmalion and Galatea get the Lotte Reininger silhouette treatment in this lovely and funny adaptation of the old Greek myth. Pygmalion falls in love with his statue of a beautiful woman and his prayers are answered: she becomes a live woman — in this case she transforms from part of the painted background into one of Reininger’s silhouette figures. But Pygmalion, who has conventional ideas of how women should behave, finds that his creation has different ideas of what she wants….

‘Lotte Reininger’s silhouettes may be difficult to follow, since the aesthetics involved are different from standard movies: but the beauties of her details and her sense of humor should be enough to draw you in, should you be fortunate enough to see them.’ — Dangerous Minds

the entire film

 

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Papageno (1935)
‘An example of Lotte Reiniger’s animated music films based on opera, PAPAGENO is filled with impeccable attention to detail. Papageno, a bird catcher from Mozart’s “The Magic Flute,” idles away the time with his avian companions, fights an undulating snake, and finds love and family happiness through delicate and delightful visuals that parallel the rhythm and expressivity of the music.’ — The Criterion Channel

the entire film

 

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Puss in Boots (1936)
‘I was perhaps too hasty in bemoaning the stiffness of Reinige’s animation. It’s been a long time since I watched Prince Achmed, but I bet it’s much the same, a part of the silhouette style she uses. When I first watched Prince Achmed, everything about the style infused me with awe. As I watched this, the continuing of that stiffness prompted vague memories of the same, so I think I just needed to reacquaint myself. The combination of shadowplay and beautifully sketched backgrounds remains delightful. My other thought is how much I like trickster characters. Puss in Boots is a beautiful example of a trixter whose cunning is used in defense of the meek, or the working man, or the maltreated. It’s not a perfect fairytale telling–there’s no effort given to making anything more if than its bare bones, so the princess is just a reward, for instance–but the crux of it is a poor young man being aided in gaining power and resource. It’s couched in medieval trappings, but there’s a socialistic idea that can be scratched out if you try.’ — letterboxd.com

the entire film

 

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Mary’s Birthday (1951)
‘It’s no accident that the villains in this 1951 English children’s animated short about proper hygeine swarm suspiciously like the Luftwaffe during the London Blitz that happened a decade earlier: the film was made by Lotte Reiniger, the German-born filmmaker who fled from the Nazis (not Jewish, she understood the implications for artists) in 1933 and eventually settled permanently in England. The specter of war is still very much present in this otherwise idyllic-looking little film. There’s also something vaguely forward-looking and existentialist in the grooming habits and postures of Bertram, who is literally lord of the flies in this plotline. Some have interpreted the working-class accents of the flies & germs with Labour or with the union-organizing movement. There is a distinct association of caste and accent with heroism in this. Really interesting little trove of memes here.’ — Thimble Wicket

the entire film

 

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The Magic Horse (1953)
‘An untrustworthy old man – a magician – presents a ruler with a magical mechanical horse that can fly through the air. And the Caliph’s son wants to take a ride. The innovative German animator Lotte Reiniger created this evocative 10-minute film in 1953, using silhouette paper cutouts and stop-motion animation.’ — Deceptology

the entire film

 

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Thumbelina (1954)
‘Hans Christian Andersen’s Thumbelina told the tale of a tiny girl grown from seed to be a companion to an old woman, Reiniger has her Thumbelina born spontaneously and magically from a flower, beholden to none but herself.’ — Letterboxd

the entire film

 

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The Sleeping Beauty (1954)
‘”Once upon a time in a beautiful castle lived a king and a queen who were very happy.” This fairy story beginning soon tilts to the macabre and grotesque when the castle falls into its 100-year sleep, awaiting the arrival of the young prince. The Grimm brothers’ story stirred animator Lotte Reiniger deeply as a child, when she burst into tears at missing a cinema screening of an early version.’ — BFI

the entire film

 

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The Grasshopper and the Ant (1954)
‘Reiniger’s films often synchronize animated motion and music. The Tale of the Grasshopper and the Ant (1954) uses this synchrony (and Mozart) for dramatic emphasis. The opening sequence features all of the forest animals dancing to the grasshopper’s melodies, recalling dance numbers from slightly earlier American animations and musicals, such as Disney’s Fantasia (1940). Reiniger uses music specifically and sparingly, using only a few instruments to describe the mood of overall movement and for individual characters. Musical scores are very important to the dynamic force of cartoons, and The Grasshopper and the Ant self-reflexively plays with that importance, begging a comparison between the necessity of storing food as winter approaches winter to the need for music and dance as supporting life at a feeling level. Compare this to Disney’s The Grasshopper and the Ants (1934), both for form and for message.’ — Critical Commons

the entire film

 

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The Frog Prince (1954)
‘The Frog Prince was one of several adaptations of Brothers Grimm fairytales that Lotte Reiniger made in London between 1953 and 1955: others include The Gallant Little Tailor, Hänsel and Gretel, Sleeping Beauty, Snow White and Rose Red and The Three Wishes. Here, the frog’s regal status is clearly indicated by his tiny crown, though in all other respects he’s presented in well-observed and convincingly amphibian form, leaping optimistically after the princess in the belief that she intends to honour her part of the bargain that they struck when her beloved golden ball fell down the well. The more complex narrative elements are generally downplayed (the prince casually explains that he’d been changed into a frog, without saying who was responsible, or what he’d done to deserve it) in favour of a series of highly visual set-pieces, including the ball’s slow descent into the well (the background becoming a watery shimmer) and the frog’s dance on the dining-table.’ — Michael Brooke

the entire film

 

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Aladdin and his Magic Lamp (1954)
‘One of the first films that Lotte Reiniger made for Louis Hagen’s London-based company Primrose Productions, Aladdin and the Magic Lamp was made with US television screenings in mind – hence the narrator’s American accent. Like its companion-piece, The Magic Horse (1954), it develops themes (and recycles some footage) from her groundbreaking feature The Adventures of Prince Achmed (Die Abenteuer von Prinz Achmed, Germany, 1923-6), where the Aladdin story formed a minor subplot. Reiniger’s silhouette technique is particularly well suited to this Arabian Nights atmosphere, the harsh brightness of the desert settings and the Middle Eastern architecture naturally offsetting the foreground characters. The depth of the cave into which Aladdin descends to find the lamp is effectively conveyed via a blend of stalagmites, stalactites and seemingly endless creepers, and the fact that the lamp, when lit, can’t quite illuminate every corner. Later, when Aladdin is trapped on the storm-tossed sea, Reiniger layers the waves so that their translucency relates to the threat that they pose: they become increasingly dark as the storm gathers pace.’ — Michael Brooke

the entire film

 

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Hänsel and Gretel (1955)
‘Reiniger’s Hansel and Gretel varies slightly from the Brothers Grimm original, particularly at the end. She herself would probably have loved to adhere to the original and would have had the witch burn in the oven, but the producers, having emigrated from Germany, regarded this as a taboo so shortly after the Holocaust, even for a silhouette film. Symbolised by the witch’s cane, evil is destroyed, which can be regarded as an unambiguous symbol – by no means an accident on the part of Lotte Reiniger.’ — The BFI

the entire film

 

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A Night in a Harem (1958)
‘Newlyweds traveling by hot air ballon are stranded when their balloon crash lands in the desert. Arab soldiers tie the groom to a palm tree and abduct his bride. She is taken to the Sultan, who locks her in his harem. The groom befriends a lion who leads him to the Sultan’s court. He attempts to rescue her, but is captured himself. At the last minute, the couple escapes when the balloon miraculously reappears.’ — Animation Resources

the entire film

 

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Aucassin and Nicolette (1975)
‘This is one of Lotte Reiniger’s very last animated silhouette films, and is certain to charm. It has a different flavor from her main body of work, which was of course in black and white; this is in bright 70’s color, with plenty of ‘sunshine’ hues, for a sparkling fairytale effect, though this is a romance and not a fairy tale. The young lovers in this medieval tale are exquisitely rendered, and the colors mostly derive from layered tissue paper; the effect is quite delicate. As a Canadian production, it was issued in both French and English versions, though I’ve found the French elusive.’ — IMDb

the entire film

 

 

*

p.s. RIP John Barth. ** Misanthrope, Hey. It sounds like he needs to immediately cut these suitors off and say he’s involved/taken and to get lost. It sounds like the context you guys move in is pretty randy. Anyway, awesome about the weekend, and how are you going to spent the mini-windfall? ** _Black_Acrylic, Hi, B. Yesterday was a mess, so today’s the PT is going to uplift me finally. Yeah, like many of the really good, original writers, Lawrence and the mainstream were/are fated ne’er to meet, I strongly suspect. ** Conrad, Don’t expect a lot from the Pinault show. Bits and pieces. Nice about the ongoing teaching and your pleasure therein. That’s grim about the decaying education system here. Coming from the US where education is a disaster, the smartness of French kids has always been very heartening. Yes, the 7038634357 track is in the film, playing over the end credits. It’s from his early work. ** Ника Мавроди, Hi. I don’t even know who Christopher Lasch is. Theoretically, yes, I think you’re right. ** Charalampos, Well, you can’t believe everything you read these days to say the least. It wasn’t the work that made the publisher cancel it, it was Lawrence himself who was a very, very difficult person to deal with. I don’t know where ‘More at 7:30’ is now. I know Kevin Killian was trying to get it published at one point, but Kevin died, and now I don’t know. The novel excited me because it was like his first two but tremendously more ambitious and brilliantly written. Greetings from my place. ** alex, Hi, alex! Great to see you. Cool that his books are accessible, and I hope they give you something. I know the name Cindy Lee, but I don’t think I’ve heard them. I’ll go find ‘Diamond Jubilee’, thank you. How are you, my friend? What’s going on? ** Steve, I think some of those presses I admire would be interested, yes. I think it’s pretty undeniably incredible. The problem is I have no idea where the mss. is or who’s in charge of it. As I mentioned above, Kevin Killian was trying to get it published, and I don’t know what happened there. I only have a print out of the novel from way back, and, apparently, it was revised after the version I have. I’ll write to Dodie Bellamy and see if she knows who has the mss. ** Justin, Oh, do come. It’s a really pretty and cozy city, easy to be in as a visitor. And I’m happy to show you around. Glad you liked LYB’s work. Strong name, and, boy, a strong personal character too. Unfortunately a little too strong for most people and maybe even for himself. ** Darby🥖, I needed a baguette, so thank you. Nice book haul indeed, Mental food for days. Yeah, I did freelance writing for a long time. I know about Medium, and, yeah, that might be way to go/start. I wish freelance writing paid as well as it did back before the internet, but it’s drastically less lucrative, although you can make some money that way. I was/am Contributing Editor to two magazines, Spin and Artforum. I think they put me on my masthead because they thought it would look cool for them since I’m sort of a known quantity, but, otherwise, I’d guess you start by writing for them, and then, if that goes well, maybe they ‘move you upstairs’? I should say that, at least in my case, being a Contributing Editor didn’t pay anything. It just meant I could suggest things and writers to them in an official way. You don’t need a degree in journalism, or at least I never got a degree in anything. That image did load, and, in fact, I was looking at pix of that creature just the other day. Very likeable, no? ** Harper, I don’t think you’ll regret it, no. Gluck and Bellamy are great, highly recommended. There’s that anthology ‘Writers Who Love Too Much: New Narrative Writing 1977-1997’ you could start with if you want. You should read what excites you whether the author is long dead or a teenager, you know? That doesn’t matter. But it is interesting and inspiring to read writers working with fiction or poetry at this point in those forms’ development, or I find it to be. Anyway, you’re not overthinking it, but then I overthink a lot, and that kind of pays off maybe. ** Matt N., Hi, Matt! I remember you, of course, of course. I think Braithwaite would be well worth your time. Okay, another Bernanos that I don’t need to place on my massive must-read pile, thank you. I’m good, mostly finishing Zac Farley’s and my new film, and I just finished putting together a short book of short fictions. Reading … lots. Uh, just yesterday I started reading a novel, ‘Rave’ by Rainald Goetz, which I’m really liking so far. What are you reading du jour, and what’s generally going on with you and yours? ** Uday, Hi. My concept or game plane, especially with the Cycle, was to have its characters and narrative exist in a, yes, airtight, as you put it, world. I decided that’s the only way the novels would work how I wanted them to. So, I wanted everyone in the novels to be the same or slight variations on the same person, and myopic as a result. So that’s why female characters and characters who are differentiate-able by such factors as race are employed rarely and very strategically. I didn’t want the characters to assess or judge each other based on anything other than their imaginative or sexual or emotional interests/needs. In other words, yes, that’s deliberate, and that’s why. The real Ziggy has not had a very happy life. He was in prison for a while, and, the last I heard from/of him, he’s living homeless on the streets in Eugene, Oregon. He was always a bit of a survivalist-type person, and I think he just followed that instinct, and that’s where it has taken him. Um, I don’t know what the majority of people who comment here look like, and I don’t think I’ve imagined their looks. Maybe I have some vague idea/guess in some cases based on what they write, but I don’t really think about that. So, no, I guess I just see them as mysterious people who I only know through their words. Including you! ** Right. I thought I might press some sweet, odd, innocent beauty on you today via the animations of Lotte Reiniger. Hope it’s a pleasure for you in some way. See you tomorrow.

* (restored)

 

‘I met Lawrence Braithwaite only once, at a now-legendary writing conference in Buffalo in 2001, where many of the so-called “New Narrative” writers – Dennis Cooper, Robert Glück, and Kevin Killian among them – had gathered. Braithwaite was short – 5’4″, or, as he was fond of saying, as tall as his idol, reggae legend Lee “Scratch” Perry – and wore a long football jersey that hung nearly to his knees. A black patch covered his right eye (“Lord Patch” was one of his aliases), and a blue toque covered his bare scalp. He chain-smoked and charmed some of his fellow writers with a funny riff about black and Latino porn stars.

‘Later, that charm turned to menace when he interrupted a panel discussion called “Talking Dirty: Sexual Politics, Pornography, and Desire,” ranting incoherently, irrationally, about the racism of the conference’s organizers. When his tirade was over, he stormed out of the room. In his semi-autobiographical 2000 novel Ratz Are Nice (PSP), Braithwaite describes himself as a “SWOT” – a street tough, someone who’s excessive in force, relentless, even brutal – and the self-portrait seemed largely accurate.

‘Braithwaite died last July at the age of 45, an apparent suicide. He had hanged himself in his Victoria, B.C., apartment. According to police, he had been dead for at least four days before his body was discovered by a neighbour. Many of his friends and literary acquaintances didn’t even hear of his death until about a month later, reading about it on a blog maintained by San Francisco writer Dodie Bellamy.

‘Canadian literature has produced precious few genuine subversives, and Braithwaite – black, gay, working-class, a drug user – was perhaps the most subversive of them all. Though he was barely known outside the small-press community, he wrote two of the most daring novels ever produced in this country: Wigger and Ratz Are Nice (PSP). Both books are composed in an invented patois, an ecstatic, deliberately confounding fusion of street slang, porn, typographical trickery, and song lyrics. Hip-hop, dub, heavy metal, reggae, and, above all, punk dictated his rhythms and sensibility. His priorities weren’t plot and character, but speed and disorientation. He invited comparisons to transgressive writers like Céline and William S. Burroughs. He spelled Canada “kkkanada.”

‘“His work … was very atypical of Canadian literature,” says Arsenal Pulp Press publisher Brian Lam, who published Wigger in 1995. “It spoke more to American literary circles.” Indeed, Braithwaite found his most ardent support among the likeminded New Narrative writers, a coterie of innovative, largely gay writers concentrated in San Francisco and L.A. Kevin Killian considered him a “grand novelist with the sweep and technical bravura of Faulkner, Toni Morrison, Günter Grass, the Joyce of Dubliners, or someone like Don DeLillo.” Of Ratz, Dennis Cooper wrote, “Lawrence Braithwaite’s writing is so original, gorgeous, propulsive, and alive that it almost seems to reinvent fiction before your eyes.”

‘Braithwaite was born in Montreal in 1963, the youngest of four children. More inclined to visual art as a younger man, he studied film at Dawson College and then, improbably, spent 12 years as a clerk in the Canadian military, stationed on bases in Nova Scotia and B.C. “If I was to guess why,” says his older brother, Jack Braithwaite, “it was to get closer to our father.” (The senior Braithwaite was an airport manager and former pro baseball player who had also served in the armed forces.) According to Jack, a labour lawyer in Sudbury, Lawrence was discharged on permanent disability after an accident in which he broke his leg in several places. (Braithwaite claimed the disability was the result of constant beatings.)

‘In 1993, Braithwaite began to focus more on his writing, and one of his stories appeared in Arsenal Pulp’s Queeries: An Anthology of Gay Male Prose, the first anthology of its kind in Canada. He then settled in Victoria, where he wrote his three books – the last of which, More at 7:30 (Notes from New Palestine), remains unpublished – and eked out a somewhat mysterious, resolutely uncompromising, existence. His friend, Robert Garfat, the owner of Victoria bookshop Dark Horse Books, affectionately called him a “fringe-dweller.”

‘Braithwaite had attempted suicide at least once before, as a teenager, soon after the death of another older brother, Joey, in a bike accident. Jack ascribes Lawrence’s subsequent anger to the loss of his beloved sibling. “[Lawrence] was a very nice, sweet young guy,” Jack says, “but after [Joey’s death], he just had a great difficulty dealing with society.” Jack recalls several conversations over the years, long late-night phone calls where Lawrence monologued about various injustices, occasionally quoting Kant and Joyce. “He spoke in paragraphs, with footnotes,” Jack says, laughing. “But he was intellectually intolerant of others, and nobody lived up to his standards. Ultimately, it didn’t even matter if I was on the other end of the line or not.” Every call ended the same way, with Lawrence asking Jack for money. When Lawrence died, the brothers hadn’t seen each other in nearly two years.

‘Toronto writer Derek McCormack was at the Buffalo conference with me and met Braithwaite as well. The two stayed in touch, and Braithwaite asked for his help in finding a publisher for More at 7:30. The relationship faltered when Braithwaite repeatedly asked McCormack to send money; he was too broke, he explained, to even afford paper on which to print out hard copies of his book. (McCormack was too broke himself to help.) Around the same time, Alana Wilcox, senior editor at Coach House Books, read an early draft of the novel and encouraged Braithwaite to send a revised manuscript. After several interactions with him, however, she was reluctant to go forward – their phone conversations were, in her words, “difficult.” The manuscript never materialized.

‘“Lawrence constantly felt he was intentionally being kept down,” Garfat says, “because of his race or his disability or because he was gay. And I can’t deny that there must have been some of that; we do live in a prejudicial society.” But Braithwaite was consumed by his paranoia, alienating even those who were most sympathetic to him. Lam describes him as a “tremendous talent,” but in the same breath stresses how badly he treated people. (The two hadn’t spoken in years.)

‘Aaron Vidaver, a Vancouver poet and activist for whom Braithwaite had written book reviews, says, “He had problems with just about everybody.” So much so that Vidaver even doubts that Braithwaite was a suicide. Investigating the death on his own, Vidaver discovered that Braithwaite had numerous genuine enemies – notably, drug dealers and a violent ex-boyfriend – and had recently been involved in altercations so threatening that, uncharacteristically, he called police for protection.

‘“But the problem with Lawrence,” Vidaver says, “was that often his friends couldn’t tell the difference between his paranoia and real threats.” There was no suicide note, explains Vidaver, and, most unusually, Braithwaite’s cherished German shepherd was left chained up outside his apartment for several days before his body was found [sic]. Vidaver is certain that had Braithwaite planned a suicide, he would have made sure the dog was cared for first. The police have concluded their investigation, but the coroner continues to work on the case.

‘Jack, however, notes that Braithwaite died on July 14, the anniversary of his brother Joey’s death. “He never got over it,” Jack says. “But I think he was also tired of fighting the good fight. He always called his own shots, even at the end of the day.”’ — Jason McBride

 

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Further

Lawrence Yitzhak Braithwaite @ Wikipedia
‘Pull Your Ears Back’, Lawrence Braithwaite
‘TURNTABLE INTERROGATION TECHNIQUES’, by Lawrence Braithwaite
lord patch (dub) @ myspace
‘In Memorium to Lawrence Braithwaite’
‘Suggestive reading: Lawrence Ytzhak Braithwaite’s Wigger’
LYB @ Revolvy
‘Ratz Are Nice (PSP)’ reviewed @ Quill and Quire
‘Poisoned Haggis: On Irvine Welsh and Lawrence Braithwaite’
Lawrence Braithwaite @ goodreads
Book” Biting the Error’
Derek McCormack on LYB’s novel ‘Wigger’
LYB @ DC Guerrilla Poetry Insurgency
Buy ‘Ratz Are Nice (PSP)’

 

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2 music tracks
by LYB

“Just A Sect For Whiteboys In Afrika”

“London bomb sensation (hoffman sub dub the samo samo) lord patch vs david patrick”

 

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3 poems
by LYB

 

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Braithwaite
by Joe Clark

 

In a previous lifetime, I excerpted the only experimental novel I ever found interesting: Ratz Are Nice (PSP). Read the excerpts out loud, in any dialect you wish.

No one is going to write a Kathy Acker–manquée biography of its author, Lawrence Ytzhak Braithwaite (no relation). They’re both dead, but this may be the news to you in Braithwaite’s case. It was to me.

Self-evidently this gay black Forces vet from Quebec killed himself – the form of demise the culture demands from eldergays and anyone who does not or cannot pay his own freight. I’m not next, but somebody will be, and fuck-me pumps in size 13 will prance on our graves.

I am Shields-compliant (also Paglia‑) in that I cannot deal with novels, a Victorian form even in science-fiction camouflage. I am somehow a dozen pages into Black Deutschland, which title Braithwaite could have lived. Pace Brottman, sometimes the movie is better; it is much more interesting to listen to authors interviewed by an eldergay intellectual Jew, a triple tautology.
 Ratz Are Nice is barely a novel, more of a cultural positioning statement, said culture being “co-opted” and on the verge of extinction (Doc Martens “de‑recontextualized”).

In donning the Black persona, symbolized through the silver jacket, Brian finally does what everyone has been attempting to do throughout the book. Brian is killed – his soul is killed, through that burden of the weight of the Black youth – the Black persona, that persona of deglamoured oppression. He has achieved the goal of being Black but he is unprepared to handle something that the Blacks are raised to deal with through centuries of struggle – you’d suppose.

It took decades of uptight, rule-governed severity and utter yet abject correctness to get to a point where I ate Braithwaite for breakfast. My culture is on the verge of extinction. I memorized the spatial location of his books at TRL, now the only remaining copies (if they go he does), and sat there reading them, pulled apart by booth of my wide finger tipped hands.

I ate fucked-up prose for breakfast. “Last Exit to Victoria”:

…as a child I was told that not knowing the alphabet will cause illiteracy. It’ll send you into a drugged-out gangland life of white-trash nightmares and corner-boy peddling to homosexuals, who are professional players, obsessed with age and willing to drag it and you into emptiness. That in knowing the letters, I’ll know that they assemble to construct various images that become words. Words are the narrative transformation of the images. Printing a page of unbroken words is like a fresh tattoo. It captures a moment/place, sentiment and period. It orchestrates the body in motion as it flexes to move a pen/​strike at a key/​form a fist/​lift a drink or move to a rhythm. The words become the unspoken intertextuality of ethnic, racial and cultural metaphoric speech. The meter of casual dialogue = a rhythm/noise/visual bass, a soundtrack to a post-literate train of thought. […]
Slayer is for the fury and speed and violence that the book has. Deathmetal is the living desire of the neo-redneck burnout. It’s all going after the sport of brutality – the art of hurting someone. The walking jokes, with targets on their backs…. The only violence is the way the words appear on the page, marked by the slashes that connote rhythm of speech and interrupted thought. They are like semicolons = / the // are colons and so are the = signs. Sometimes the – move out to separate speech – someone takes lead//does a solo.

Nobody wanted someone this difficult and “intersectional” in the wrong way. Crocodile tears:

Lawrence Ytzhak Braithwaite. It’s incredibly sad news. I hadn’t heard from him in years. There was a time there when we were corresponding regularly. He had a novel, an opera, I believe he called it, and he asked me to help him find a publisher. I did what I could – it wasn’t much, but editors did see it, and loved it, but the publishing deals fell through, for reasons I don’t know. Our friendship kind of fizzled out – he wrote to me and asked if I could send him money. I had no money. I would have sent him money if I’d had it. He was a handful, but he wrote beautiful, beautiful books. Beautiful, original books. Bless him.

I got a piece of mail today… from the government of Canada. It is addressed to the Estate of Lawrence Braithwaite. It is the first I knew of his passing. Lawrence lived in my basement suite for three years (’02–’04). He was garrulous, inventive, argumentative, not a great listener, highly intelligent and a disaster as a housekeeper.
He had this big German shepherd dog named Heindrich who went everywhere with him. I had a dog too so we had plenty of opportunity to chat.
I had him up for dinner several times.
Lawrence was a very interesting character.

Can you imagine being a black anglo Quebecker saddled with the name Braithwaite, redolent as it is of token tragic-mulatto Radio-Canada TV personalities? Basically every black person in Quebec de l’époque presumptively had the name Braithwaite. I’d leave too, but not to Afghanistan, and I sure as shit wouldn’t pick Victoria, B.C., where the only other gay black male is halfway to a decathlete, handsome, winsome, smart, a dense pack of muscle with ten inches uncut and the luckiest white bf. Everybody wanted him. He’s the minimum ante you need to survive as a non-Amaechi gay army of one.
Put enough ones together and you get a real army. Not sufficient for Braithwaite – but it’s early in my process, and all I can save are the animals I don’t eat or wear, not every wayward soul you or I didn’t know we cared about till he died. Early in my process, but it’s happening.

 

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Book

Lawrence Ytzhak Braithwaite Ratz Are Nice (PSP)
Alyson Books

‘This Victoria, British Columbia, author’s second novel is one of the riskiest books yet from Alyson, publisher of cutting-edge gay titles. (His excellent debut, Wigger, appeared in Canada in 1994 and, unfortunately, received almost no critical notice.) It is difficult to read, with typographical symbols and codes, forward slashes, idiosyncratic spelling, acronyms and self-invented slang meant broadly to indicate the radical and transgressive nature of the voice serving up the narrative: “Wot’z Sparker’z subjet: Killer//ras enuff to be on that tree of life of hiz n hiz familiez’, buddiez absorb’n light.” The unconventional text follows several mods, skinheads, hardcore punks and other socially dissonant young men on the streets of Victoria. Sex is a connective tissue among them all, and–amid the drugs, drink, slam dancing and violence–there are even quixotic expressions of tenderness and love. Neo-Nazis mix dangerously with racially mixed punk scenesters; the protagonist, Edison, is a black skinhead. Edison describes the rivalry between two gangs that form the core of the culture called PSP (Pure Street Punk). These guys aren’t straight, but neither are they gay, and their edgy sexual mutability underscores their daily lives in the musical, social and emotional zones of PSP. Fearlessly experimental and antiestablishment, Braithwaite’s story is too disjointed for clarity; the lives of the punk boys get tangled up in a knot rather than interconnect expressively. This is a tough read, but hardcore, punk rock kids and souls sympathetic to the down-and-dirty street lifestyle may recognize something meaningful in all the distortion.’ — Publishers Weekly

‘Ratz Are Nice (PSP) is incredibly good. Lawrence Braithwaite’s writing is so original, gorgeous, propulsive, and alive that it almost seems to reinvent fiction before your eyes. Novels just don’t get any more exciting than this one. It gave me hope.’ — Dennis Cooper

 

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Excerpts

Flücky seemed to be able to forever look without changing physical appearance to fit comfortably anywhere with anyone’s fantasies.
He’s yammering and yelling the parts to YDL’s Skinhead88 – really loud and does a bitch about a vespa. Flücky waz a scruffy and noivus dude. He kept hiz hair at a length btwn these onez here and not the otherz. He waz a bit more posh in hiz selection of dress. Hiz sharkskin waz tailored to his train of thot. A special night it waz not – he just favored it sometimes – when he got a call to go out, hang wid the crew. Flücky was a bit ridiculous.

-Why are homosexuals always so obsessed by everything-
Chubby walks toward me. I thot he waz going to try and stomp on me. But then battyboichailz never do anything without a group involved and they don’t like to get their hands dirty. That’s why they have those Skin wanna be/SA types = Q-patrol/marching up and down the street.

The possibility of Elie going to school without getting the crap kicked out of him/was next to nil…. He was condemned to an existence filled with disjointed signifiers//​schizoidNigger/chimp/mallrat. The biggraçoons in the white collar hood thumped him blindly/​mad eyed bruiser/​detestation of the little retard. A nigger and an idiot is, too much, close to the truth than could be handled.

I always figured it like this…your average joe normal–casual–battyboichail–are peds man. They wont ya/​when you’re starving/​on the street/​they wont ya – it’s all control. They go weekend hunting looking for ruffboichail’z. They wontz to be quickened… I Edison basically loseout 3 ways.

So he met him…
You should haf seen hem he waz a beauty/areal lil’-darlin in blk stingy brim, new harry and a snorky pair of old oxbloods…. He jus sits by himself n readz n drinks til his crew shows up – a book, hez got always spread eagle, pulled apart by booth of hiz wide finger tipped handz. Hiz face pulled into it. I wont to go over n talk to him, alot, but I never got the noive….
It was amazing. Why doez he look at me like that, real sweet, wid thouz big blk eyez n that smoik.
I saw him the other day wid that gutter Skin, Eddy, sittin ontop of a newsbox on the street. Jus starin down at me. He’s too rude. He’s too stackt – what a neck, such a smile. He’s got lips, up close, that could stop a speeding train. So soft, I could use my mouth n finger to meet it and leave myfist to hold my heart.
It’s fun to see all of it go down. It waz, whatelse could happened wid thoze 2 – wot goez on inside…
He couldn’t even come over and say hi wottup. How long could I keep readin that fukkin book…. He waz caught, somtimez, starin back, but he don’t come over or say hi…. Iz he goin with that bonehead?

 

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-I LIVE LIFE ONNA TILT,
MUFFAFOOKCA!!! KNOWLEDGE PHET!!!-

So he had issues. …and this lil wigga at the food bank, day before last, was hassling him for 60¢ for a likkle fake point of uppertunity that he had alledged to have fronted him. He waited every lunch hour on the lawn inna ramble of garbage bags, sleeping bags and karate kicking prison toned grads who had made it from the juvi to the pensive state higher learning institutes — tummies as tight as a ripple chip practicing the fußball kicks — aiming their strikes at the street corner cams, they would knock out for the common wealth, while hoping to hook up or peddle their trade with a bwai pimp who went by the name of Jimmy the K. It was Jummy the K who walked around with a pimp cup, woht he got at a micky ds, which he had glued shellacked gummy bears, polished glass, bamma rubies and latino figurines he all got from the gumball machines at the mall.
…and it was Jimmy the K woht was giving Assassin hassles for the .60¢. Jimmy the K approached him as Assassin did his dance wave, bending his ankles side to sway, dipping his hands into his empty pockets for change that was long gone, since last xmas, and swept My tar with his peepers, and the edges of the sidewalk beneath him, for a dropped fatty butt to roll a slut with.
pphhzzzzt!

…and he said ‘where’s my money b@tch’ or something like that woht you’re suppose to say from a downloaded skit and he cackled something bout Assassin being a ‘rip off artist’ or something and Assassin said this and that and that he didn’t ‘owe him shit’ after sayin “woh” or something and questioned the entire integrity if the issue and the credibility of the dastardly wigger — which Jimmy the K feeled that he had to now defend, and all that street cred sitiation, which seemed a lot more important than what a media hooper would give a fookc about on any given channel or press.
So was it time to swang? a woh/woh? Woht time was it? was it time for a knuckle up? awo, wanna juggle, wigga? too early to handle your liquar?
-muffafookca-
b.u.t. nada, the chins kept their wiggle and the hands remained untransformed into knuckles and the crowd never really gathered and the street reverands never came out to settle. All woht got done was a crizkid, who use to be a sk8er, who made graf typos all over the downtown core, come running up to the Jimmy/Assassin with two triple “A” batteries in his hand and says;
-Don’t make me restrain you… Pphhzzzzt!- which the horse throat bettys with broken pagers pointed and chuckled at that.
-I come get my shit tomorrow…you’re my fookcin bitch-
says Jimmy and stroles back to the garbage bag fortress under the tree and chats it up with bearded chick with a dick.

-WOh/WOh!!! Am I foockin Citizen!!!!!?-
The chase was to fly the bird to the mystery god. Woht’s the lesson of the day? Calculate. What does the math say of the bolts of energy to the ratio of the falling body subdued. The bus stopped and so did Assassin’s heart after the jakes came with the 8th 50,000ths’volt to the corpus = …and the coroners report read, “oh well”.
{8 cops} 〈 Heart stop x the 8th blast?
Do the math…hakim

 

 

*

p.s. RIP Marian Zazeela. ** Conrad, Hi, Conrad! How’s it? We often seem to be in the same cultural space without knowing it. Interesting. I loved the 7038634357 piece, like I said. I liked the first maybe ten minutes of Mark Fell/Rian Treanor, but then I thought it became a total mess. I missed Saturday, but The Friday concert was great. Phew, Aaron Dilloway, and Marc Baron were all fantastic. I’m glad you liked the PdT shows. I need to go see their current ones. I haven’t seen much art that blew me away. The Pinault show has some good things, especially the Fischili/Weiss sculptures, but it’s mostly just a rich guy showing off his purchases. The Lafayette Anticipations show is only okay, not so great. I’m curious about the Heavy Metal show at the Music Museum. Nothing amazing so far. You good? Things good? Happy world beyond Easter to you, pal. ** Tosh Berman, Ah, you had ‘Alice’. It wasn’t really even a game per se, or a strangely built one. Interesting re: the earthquake. I remember that. We just had a couple of cracked windows and major bookshelf tipping and spillage. Thanks, Tosh. ** _Black_Acrylic, Hey. PT2 is up on my agenda for today. Panting. I remember ‘Billy Liar’. It’s strange how strong the UK was in film during that era. Really so many of the best films came from there. Nowadays it seems pretty dreary. Lots of ‘intelligent’, well-mannered movies but the daring things are very far and in between. You could s the same thing about the US too, btw. ** Bill, Hi. He did very interesting work. Those were the days when games were an actual art form, very experimental at times, and those games were even widely played. Very different than now. 7038634357, who’s an extremely cool guy, said yes to us using his track, so we’re very happy. I don’t know ‘Impaled’. Hm, dare I? I’m of the opinion that his photos and collages are a lot better than his films. ** Steve, Oops, feel better, man. I haven’t seen the making of ‘Kids’ doc, but I am curious to. The things the young guy in ‘PGL’ recounted from his stint in Clark’s film are actually shocking. Like ‘lucky he’s not prison’ shocking. Everyone, Here’s Steve: ‘For Artsfuse’s April “Short Fuses” column, I reviewed the climate change-obsessed new album by Montreal band FYEAR. (Scroll down the page to “jazz.”). ** Nika Mavrody, It was indeed. ** Gramski 😘, Hi, thanks. You underestimate our film’s non-conformity relative to the conformity that big festivals want from films that they accept. Sad world. But we’ll see. 2025, gotcha. Well, missing the Olympics is probably to your residency’s benefit. But, yeah, come over and do the pure Paris. With a cupcake in tow! Thanks, hugs. ** Harper, Yeah, it just seems like you’d regret if you don’t go, and surely it will result in some kind of colourfulness re: your depiction of ‘him’. Do tell how it was/went, yes, thanks. Games back then were really different. The form hadn’t settled into the fighting/hunting/war-like genre it is now. There were seriously strange games. Here’s a post about my favorite games of that era if you’re curious. Big up! ** Mark, Hey, Mark. A monthlong birthday, very nice. Someone else here just saw Laurie Anderson, but I think in SF. Lord Byron, interesting. Yeah, I can see the value of that dive. DL Alvarez is an old pal of mine from the Queer Punk days and even prior. Super nice guy. I’m good, so close to the film’s finish line I can … I was going to smell it, but it doesn’t have a door, so … see it. Good to see you! ** Justin, When we meet and have an inevitable coffee or something, I’ll spill the beans. I never keep journals. Well, I did as a young teen, but my nosey alcoholic mother found where I hid them and read them and sent me to a psychiatrist, so I stopped. I guess ‘I Wished’ has a journalistic aspect at times. Anyway, thank you. What are you up to? ** Darby🥙, Hey. I do remember that, yes. I don’t know ‘Beyond a steel sky’ but I think I’ve heard of ‘Sanitorium’. I’ll see if I can find some evidence. 90s computer games were like art, really, at least compared to what 90+% of games are now. You not being dumb is a huge given, my friend. I don’t think you mentioned that stuffed animal stash before. Nice. Gosh, I hope weed doesn’t stay in the system that long. Doesn’t seem like it would. Oops, good luck. Weed makes me totally paranoid, and I stay far away from it. I’m definitely more easy going than austere. I’m shy and a little reserved sometimes, but I am never ever austere. I can’t imagine you being austere? ** Uday, I like video games. I don’t know, they’re so absorbent. That is really amazing about your mentor having worked with Nina Simone! Whoa! I saw her live once back in the late 60s, and she scared the hell out of me in the best possible way. There was a real Ziggy. He was a young friend of mine. He called himself Ziggy after some comic that used to run in newspapers called ‘Ziggy’, not after Bowie. I sort of based the character on my friend, although I changed a lot of things, because I adored him even though he was a complicated boy, and I based it on him pretty much because I knew if the character was him it would be a sympathetic one because he so was himself. So, I did try/hope, I guess. I’m happy he made you feel stuff. ** Right. I’ve revived an old spotlight post about Lawrence Yitzhak Braithwaite’s second novel/novella because it’s wonderful and so little known these days. Lawrence’s best book was his third, ‘More at 7:30’, which has never been published. It was supposed to be the first book in my old Little House on the Bowery imprint, but Lawrence was so extremely difficult to deal with as a person that the publisher refused to let me put it out. I don’t know what’s happened to that manuscript, but someone should put it out because it’s really brilliant. Anyway, ‘Ratz Are Nice’ is excellent, and here’s hoping it’s of interest to y’all. See you tomorrow.