A Visual Analysis of Film Historical Metadata by Sarah-Mai Dang and Christian Laesser
About the project
Aesthetics of Access. Visualizing Research Data on Women* in Film History (DAVIF) (2021—2026)
The research group "Aesthetics of Access. Visualizing Research Data on Women* in Film History" (DAVIF) (2021–2026), funded by the Federal Ministry of Research, Technology and Space (BMFTR), investigated how metadata shape our understanding of film history, with a focus on women in early cinema. Through both theory and practice, we examined how data can help us make the global contributions of female filmworkers to audiovisual media culture more visible. In doing so, we also identified gaps and blind spots in metadata collections and thus in film historiography.
Data visualizations played a central role in this research process. To this end, we drew on the metadata of our project partners, the DFF – Deutsches Filminstitut & Filmmuseum and the Women Film Pioneers Project (WFPP). The Graphics and Multimedia Programming Group at Marburg University supported us with technical expertise and practical implementation. We also worked closely with media designers and software developers – in this case with Christian Laesser. This project on Lotte Reiniger is the third collaborative data visualization of our research group, following “Explorative Datenvisualisierungen” (2025) and “Women Film Pioneers Explorer” (2021).
Through the exploratory application of data visualizations, we aim to contribute to the critical discourse on scholarly knowledge production in light of the increasing datafication of cultural heritage – that is, the creation and use of data in archival, curatorial and historiographical practices.
For further information about the research group please visit our website: https://uni-marburg.de/Q85oo.
Web Search
What do we know about Lotte Reiniger?
Lotte Reiniger (02.06.1899 – 19.06.1981) was a pioneering filmmaker whose work left a lasting mark on early cinema. She created more than sixty films, the vast majority of which have been preserved. She is best known for her hand-animated silhouette films but also contributed in many other capacities to numerous productions (Guerin and Mebold 2016). Her aesthetic, inspired by Art Nouveau, Expressionism and shadow play, continues to influence film culture to this day (Marschall, Bieberstein, Schneider 2013).
Her best-known work is The Adventures of Prince Achmed. The film is celebrated as the world's first full-length animated feature film and thus a milestone in film history. It was released in cinemas in 1926 – more than ten years before the Walt Disney Studios released Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs in 1937. Today, Reiniger remains one of the few women of the silent film era who are still widely recognized by film scholars, historians, and cinephiles.
What can the internet tell us about Lotte Reiniger?
Blind Spots
If Lotte Reiniger was such a pioneering filmmaker, why isn't she as famous as Charlie Chaplin?
Reiniger, Ruttmann, and Richter
Reiniger's technical, aesthetic, and theoretical achievements were only marginally appreciated by her contemporaries. Siegfried Kracauer, for example, classified her work as that of an outsider. Colleagues such as Viking Eggeling, Walter Ruttmann, and Hans Richter, with whom Reiniger worked closely, prevented (consciously or unconsciously) her from being perceived as one of their own (Guerin and Mebold 2016).
Despite her extensive body of work and her successes during her career, which spanned from 1916 to 1981, most film enthusiasts are probably more familiar with the names Ruttmann or Richter. In addition to the focus on content, one reason for Reiniger's lack of recognition in professional circles may lie in the typical degradation of women's achievements through the feminization of craftsmanship. Ironically, it is precisely these achievements that have made Reiniger unforgettable as a pioneer of animated film (ibid.).
Women in Film History
From the numerous books and articles on women in film history, we have learned that women have had a significant impact on film production all over the world from the very beginning of film history. Women have worked and collaborated globally, not merely in North America and Europe but also in Latin America, Asia, and the Middle East (Gaines 2004). Thanks to the WFPP and other feminist online platforms, we can search for all the many trailblazing women who have shaped film culture. Their contributions, however, continue to be marginalized.
That is why we must not only tell different stories, but also tell them differently (Dang 2020). This has become a major concern of feminist film historiography (see for example, Hill 2016, Smyth 2018, Bell 2021.)
Data in Film History
In view of the increasing production and use of data in the course of digitalization, the goal of feminist film historians to increase the visibility of women’s work has taken on a new urgency. Through the production, processing, and dissemination of data, blind spots in a research field such as feminist film historiography can be maintained or amplified, but also minimized. Access to and critical reflection on data are therefore among the greatest challenges for film and media studies scholars today (Dang 2023).
Against this backdrop, this data visualization examines the filmhistorical metadata in databases, which play a central role in the research of women in film history.
Metadata
What can metadata tell us about historical narratives?
What is metadata?
In the course of the datafied turn, the increasing datafication of cultural heritage, metadata increasingly determine whose stories can be told and which ones remain in the dark.
Put simply, metadata are data about other data, such as the name of a director or the year of a film production or information about the size and creation date of a digital file. Metadata help to structure information and facilitate the identification, management, and retrieval of objects.
Since metadata are created and used by humans, their individual experiences and values are written into it. Through categorization of people and objects, metadata are involved in knowledge production processes. They contribute to ideas about the artifacts they describe. Inevitably, certain values and perspectives are emphasized while others are ignored (Bowker and Star 1999). Thus, metadata can be viewed as part of an “indexical regime” (Fickers 2024), which has a decisive influence on our research and analysis capabilities.
Following this line of argument, metadata not only provide information about collections or facilitate research in archival holdings. They can also serve as a source for understanding the social and political contexts in which they were created. Thus, the epistemological, methodological, and political significance of metadata in audiovisual media culture needs to be further explored.
What can metadata tell us about Lotte Reiniger?
In order to better understand how film historical metadata influence film historiography and how they are shaped by different archival premises and practices, we conducted a comparative analysis of metadata on Lotte Reiniger in three different databases:
- Wikidata
- DFF – Deutsches Filminstitut & Filmmuseum
- Women Film Pioneers Project
Step into the world of data analysis!
Job Titles
What can job titles tell us about women in film history?
The following metadata analysis focuses on the professions under which Lotte Reiniger is listed in different film historical databases. Looking at job titles shifts the focus from the privilege often granted in film history to the individual author/director and reveals a more complex, collective conception of film production.
In addition, job titles are highly interesting because they provide information not only about a person's work, but also about their social status, values, and the hierarchical structures of a society (Moeller 2019). Furthermore, job titles in databases can be used to observe how ambiguities and contingencies in film history manifest themselves.
Datasets
The comparative analysis is based on three different datasets on early cinema: 1) the Women Film Pioneers Project (WFPP), 2) the DFF – Deutsches Filminstitut & Filmmuseum, and 3) Wikidata. The datasets contain information on people and films these people have worked on.
The WFPP dataset was enriched with filmographic data based on the WFPP profile texts by Pauline Junginger. It was then structured in collaboration with software developer Andreas Raddau and made available in a specifically developed relational database.
Both the WFPP and the DFF datasets were then merged, cleaned, and enriched with data from Wikidata by media designer Mika Schories as part of a previous case study, Explorative Datenvisualisierungen (2025).
Further information on the datasets (including links to the processing scripts and the original datasets) can be found here (in German): https://davif-datavis.online.uni-marburg.de/femfige-archives.html.
For pragmatic reasons, we slightly adjusted the film titles and production years for this job title analysis. Please notify us if you discover any errors or inconsistencies.
What can Wikidata tell us about Lotte Reiniger?
Like Wikipedia, Wikidata belongs to the Wikimedia family. With more than 100 million entries in around 300 languages covering a seemingly endless range of topics, the platform is currently the largest and most popular international database on people, objects, and events. Wikidata acts as a collaborative hub for open metadata. The data is generated by users on a voluntary basis and made publicly accessible under a CCO license.
Wikidata functions not only as a knowledge graph that links all data internally, but also as a transinstitutional network. The platform interacts with international organizations such as UNESCO, subject-specific databases such as the Internet Movie Database (IMDb), and commercial applications such as Google Search. In addition, Wikidata is increasingly being integrated into AI applications. This makes it all the more important to recognize that even participatory platforms like Wikidata are subject to power dynamics and marginalization (Ford and Iliadis 2023, and thus cannot be considered complete (Heftberger and Duchesne 2025).
31 films by Lotte Reiniger are listed in Wikidata, including a documentary about her from 2012.
Embedded Films & Media Culture
Where films by Reiniger could be found on the internet, we have embedded them here. We are aware that these are not necessarily original versions. The primary aim here is to give a first impression of her work. In addition, the videos reflect internet search as it is commonly conducted in everyday media practice, including by film and media studies scholars.
Films are part of a living media culture: their circulation across various media, institutions, and countries, as well as their constant evolution, are inherent to them. Films are distributed, reproduced, and altered; they are censored, re-edited, dubbed, archived, reconstructed, restored, digitized, and re-screened. Their formats and contexts of reception are constantly changing, and with them, their respective perceptions and meanings. Therefore, our knowledge of film history must also be continually questioned and reoriented.
Step into the world of Wikidata!
Now let’s look at the other two databases: the DFF and the WFPP!
Let's take a look at which films are included in the other two datasets to see what is missing from Wikidata!
Let’s take a look at how she is represented in the other datasets!
Let's take a look at how the distribution looks like when we compare the job titles attributed to the various films!
Let's take a closer look at these differences in the next visualization!
Conclusion
As our search for Lotte Reiniger has shown, film historical metadata are highly heterogeneous. They are by no means coherent, standardized, or neutral, but are shaped by technological infrastructures as well as by people's beliefs and decisions. To understand their specific meaning, we must investigate their provenance, thus the conditions under which they were created and used (Dang 2025).
Databases cannot provide a nuanced picture of Lotte Reiniger's work. They necessarily reduce complex political and cultural circumstances through processes of categorization. To understand the complexity of women's contributions to film history, we must engage with multiple sources and apply a broad range of methods and perspectives — in addition to data-based approaches.
Data visualization is not just a tool for analysis, but a means of engaging more closely and critically with film historical metadata. Visualizations can foreground processes of selection, reduction, and interpretation, while pointing to the epistemological uncertainties and situated knowledges embedded in the data. Working with data can reinforce power relations, but also counteract them. It can enable us to rethink or even redefine film history as a site of plural perspectives and political responsibility. In this sense, data visualizations are not just research results, but ongoing, reflective, and collaborative historiographical practices — ones that require active care and contextualization of the data that shape our understanding of film history.
Critical Note
When studying Lotte Reiniger’s work today, it is important to note that some of the films she worked on contain racist elements, such as blackfacing in Der fremde Fürst (1918). Similarly, the silhouettes of Black people in Die Abenteuer des Prinzen Achmed (1923–1926) can also be interpreted as exoticizing and racializing due to their stereotypical portrayal. Dealing with discriminatory attributions or representations poses a general challenge when working with historical films or film historical metadata. This challenge is exacerbated by the increasing digitization of cultural heritage, in which knowledge is created, shared, and transformed digitally and online — by researchers, students, archivists, general users, and big tech companies.
How we can deal with these transformations ethically, legally, and academically is one of the most pressing questions of our time. Projects like DE-BIAS or initiatives like the Special Committee on Research Ethics (SCRE) of NFDI4Memory discuss and explore how a critical approach to cultural heritage data could look like. These visualizations contribute to this debate by revealing missing data and historical contingencies that invite critical reflection.
Lotte Reiniger's artistic legacy can be viewed today in the permanent exhibition "Lotte Reiniger – The World in Light and Shadow" at the Tübingen City Museum.
Suggested citation
Dang, Sarah-Mai and Christian Laesser (2026): Searching for Lotte Reiniger: A Visual Analysis of Film Historical Metadata. Berlin: oa books, https://lotte-reiniger.oabooks.de/. https://doi.org/10.64942/1357XNPP3
Contact
This visualization is part of my ongoing research on cultural data, power structures, and historical narratives. Therefore, questions, general inquiries, and comments about this project are very welcome: kontakt[at]sarahmaidang.de.
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