Look Again: Lotte Reiniger and Madhubala
Look Again: Portraits of Daring Women by Julie Lapping Rivera is an homage to exceptional, pioneering women working across centuries. In a series of hand-carved, woodcut and collage prints, Leverett-based artist Julie Rivera (American, b. 1956) highlights the lives and achievements of women who defied the status quo. Each print is accompanied by a poem, written specifically for the series, by local and international women poets.
Look Again is sponsored by the Community Foundation of Western Massachusetts
It was at the Waldschule school in Charlottenburg, Germany, where Lotte Reiniger (1899 – 1981) learned about “scherenschnitte,” the art of cutting intricate paper designs with scissors. This technique proved integral to the more than 70 animation films which she produced over the 60 years of her career— including versions of “Cinderella,” “Puss in Boots,” and “Hansel and Gretel.” Later in life, Reiniger developed a process of cutting figures from tin lead, adjoined by wire hinges, which allowed for her characters to adopt life-like movement on screen. Her films have a dream-like quality, blending eeriness and whimsy, that later inspired aesthetics employed by Disney and Tim Burton.
HINGED DREAMS
by Adin Thayer
“I now have one desire — to make films.”
Lotte Reiniger
A sorcerer thin as a rake with gnarled knuckles shakes them
at Prince Achmed as his horse gallops
across a shivering moon. A princess bird descends by an opal
lake and steps from her owl-soft plumage. Lotte’s life
is a story of stories told through thinly hammered lead.
Before leaving the land of the Fuhrer, her gifted fingers
woke, and a gift’s desire was the fuel for their burning speed.
These stories flew from the small scissors
in her hand and step by step she coaxed them
across an under-lit screen, still-shot by still-shot. By each
the world’s treasury of magic grew and the mind
of childhood was nourished. As is the life of any pioneer, hers
was a series of obstacles, money, loss, the post-war taste
for realism, and steadily she scissored through them,
and who would not, who found within herself so rare a gift,
to imagine metal into motion, to snip a crow into dipping across
the moon of her imagination or a princess into slumping
down for a century of sleep?
Madhubala (1933 – 1969), born Mumtaz Begum, was discovered by a film producer while she lived in a neighboring shantytown in India. Nicknamed “honeybelle” for her looks, Madhubala became an icon of beauty and tragedy in Indian society, acting in more than 70 films before her death at 36. Perhaps better known for her personal life, Madhubala attracted attention for her tumultuous relationships with co-stars. As recalled by the journalist, Nupur Sharma, “she lived a far more liberal lifestyle than most Indian women, with romance itself an act of subversion in a conservative society.”
Madhubala
by Libby Maxey
already half gone
making up the heart’s insufficiency
in bright, soft black
smile like color
as if the moonlight were real
black hair blushing
you ran here
on bare feet, a Bombay child
shoulders dancing
now pretend to rest
poise your chin in readiness
as if illumination
were your name
as if you were a spectral song
on gold water
as if this frame
and every flickering frame
made you full
About the Artist
Julie Rivera is inspired by the meditative practice of woodcut printmaking. She began her career in New York, working as a teaching artist with the Studio in a School Association, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Lincoln Center Institute. Rivera earned her MFA in Painting from Pratt Institute and her BFA in Printmaking from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. She is a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship recipient in Drawing and received grants from the New York Foundation of the Arts, the National Endowment of the Arts, and the Massachusetts Cultural Council. Rivera is a Leverett-based artist. She teaches printmaking at Smith College and at Zea Mays Printmaking in Florence, MA.
About the Poet
Adin Thayer, of Northampton, Massachusetts, won the Patricia Bibby First Book Award in 2021 for her book, The Close World (Tebot Bach, 2021). She has worked as a psychotherapist, a peacebuilder in eastern Africa, and a teacher at the Smith College School for Social Work.
About the Poet
Libby Maxey is a senior editor and poetry editor at Literary Mama. She is a winner of the Princemere Poetry Prize and the Helen Schaible International Sonnet Contest, and is the author of two poetry collections: Kairos (2019) and Indwelling (2024).
Photo of Madhubala: P. L. Santoshi (film director), Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Photo by Reiniger: N.N./Agentur Primrose Film Productions, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
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