A year of waiting, 97 minutes in front of the movie screen, then some puzzlement. I pause by the exit of the auditorium to observe the reactions of movie-critics and the amusement- or perhaps edification-seeking audience as they inch to the lobby with blinking eyes. Faces show traces of struggle – something intelligent should be said – but the result is only an incoherent albeit confident collage of words: „Wow!”-s, „Gee!”-s, „Interesting!” „Avant-garde.” „This is Jeles!” „Aestheticising.” „Pervert.” „Why did I buy a ticket?” I am not surprised. It has been said (written down) many times that we have a conservative taste and don’t know how to cope with unconventional forms of expressions.
I have avoided the expression „originality” as the narration used in Joseph and His Brothers or the use of infra cameras is not original to fiction films – neither is shadow play. The uneasiness probably comes mainly from the fact that these auxiliary dramaturgical instruments and film techniques have central importance in Jeles’s film, which is indeed unusual. Infra cameras are important requisites of war movies in scenes of night reconnaissance and they are often used to create suspense like in the well known scene of Silence of the Lambs (Jonathan Demme, 1991) where Clarice (Jodie Foster), the detective is desperately looking for the perverted serial killer in a pitch dark cellar, while he can easily follow her movement with the help of an infra-device. Narration – also used by Jeles – clarifies the relationship between changing time planes of a film and has stronger emotional significance than a dialogue. Shadow play is often used to intensify excitement in expressive scenes of intense motion, for example in Shallow Grave (Danny Boyle, 1994) when David (Christopher Eccleston) chops up and buries the corpse of the flat-mate who had died of a drug overdose on the edge of a forest and there are numerous other examples. Joseph and His Brothers is therefore a technical and an intellectual challenge to the creator, to contributors and spectators.
What was given is an immensely rich but at the same time stubborn archaic language and a fragment of a story told in this language. Using this fragment, Jeles wrote his own Peasant Bible (it was published in Holmi, January 2000) keeping Thomas Mann in his mind. Moreover, an all-seeing eye was given which follows the physical and spiritual humiliation of a young girl. (According to the story it is not a device but an „angel”, a breathing, feeling, seeing creature – perhaps the spectator/us.) From time to time, frames of ethnographic silent films and old newsreels pop up on the screen. And finally there is the shadow play which is attractive but at the same time disturbing. How do all these elements fit together?
Shadow play is an unsophisticated, simple, audaciously succinct form of expression, which accompanies the story of this film and visualizes what is being said. In contrary to its siblings and inspirers – film, conventional theatre and dance theatre – shadow play requires uncompromising discipline and submissiveness from the actor. A role in a film allows greater latitude to an actor compared to theatre appearance: with the help of editing, mistakes can be eliminated but at the same time the direct control of the audience is missing. On stage, everything is instantly visible and perceptible, so a single blunder (an actor comes in at an inopportune time, mixes up directions, misses the rhythm of a dialogue) can spoil the whole performance, but at the same time the magic of continuous and simultaneous presence is given. Shadow play on film is an alloy of the two. Moreover, shadow is a cruel „material”: not a single movement goes unnoticed, while the actor has to keep the profile. But what is this „material” that András Jeles draws inspiration from?
The origin of shadow play is debated, but it is certain that around 2000 BC in emperor Wui-Ti’s China moveable puppets were used for shadow play in religious rituals and later in secular stories, where sacral functions were overshadowed but not excluded. These painted figures were made of thin donkey or cattle skin, eyes, mouth and garment were attached onto the solid black surface. They were moved with the help of attached sticks. These puppets were considered demonic figures because they didn’t cast a shadow because of the lighting and the extremely thin skin. Fixed puppets that were inventively „moved” with the help of smoke also made a demonic effect. Under the effect of the lighting, the smoke that enveloped the fixed puppet created an illusion that the figure was moving. Shadow play was known and played in many countries of the orient. (see footnote 1)
In Europe, shadow play was presumably known from the 8th century AD but it became widespread in the era of artistic, technical and scientific experiments in the 17th and 18th centuries. Making silhouette pictures was a social entertainment. It did not require any special skill only patience, so anyone could immortalize the profile of friends or family members. The denomination for such pictures comes from the name of Etienne Silhouette, finance minister of the French king Louis XV. (2) The craze for innovation brought along the emergence of the first drawing machines. The most popular of these was the pantograph, or under another name „the stork’s beak”. (3) It is a so called perspective-aid which makes it possible to follow lines of the silhouette of large objects – later of persons – on paper. The mechanical portrait made with the help of „the stork’s beak” is called physiontras (also for beginners!). Serious treatises were published on the topic of silhouettes of which Johann Caspar Lavater’s book, Essays on Physiognomy published in 1775–78 is most prominent. (4) Lavater wrote an illustrated dissertation on physiognomy, in which he states that making silhouette pictures is useful as it makes observations easier – since it shows only the bordering lines of a face – but at the same time yields exact information about the character of the depicted person. In the wake of this writing, hundreds of enthusiastic readers asked the writer to analyse their character based on their silhouette pictures. These were not necessarily self-made pictures, as at this time – similarly to puppet players and itinerant storytellers – professional silhouette makers were active at fairs.
In Hungary, professional silhouette makers appeared in the beginning of the 1800s. From the middle of the 19th century, the history of the genre is intertwined with the history of photography: silhouette pictures appear among the first enlargements and in the first decades of the 20th century, special photographic procedures like photograms open a new way for the development of this field. And film is still to come.
The first fully animated feature film in film history was The Adventures of Prince Ahmed made by Lotte Reiniger between 1923 and 1926. (I truly hope that a film theatre or a television channel will soon show this magnificent film that will amuse spectators of all ages). The Adventures of Prince Ahmed is an oriental tale performed with silhouettes. (5) In fact it is shadow play on film accompanied by magic and fantastic transformations of technical excellence. What is especially interesting is that the dynamics of the story is enhanced by colourful and (thanks to Walter Ruttmann) moving backgrounds. The figures are not solid black surfaces, their eyes and the patterns of their garments are visible. The silhouettes of the animated paper figures ruthlessly reveal every good or bad trait of the depicted characters. The mean sorcerer's back is crooked and his head is large, the contours of his body are as disordered as possible. The Chinese Emperor has huge almond-shaped eyes, while his well-fed sluggard figure takes after the sculptures of fat fortune-gods. Ahmed and his lover, Princess Peri Banu have proportionate bodies, their silhouettes are softened and mellow – they are positive characters. The good ones never appear frontally, their eyes and smiles (or rather grins) are not shown – in contrast with that of negative figures or of helpful unearthly creatures. The design of the scenes of different events builds on the spectators' fantasy: contours of huge lampions and pagodas represent the court of the Chinese Emperor, domes stand for Persia. The dwelling places of demons, kobolds and sorcerers are fantastic underground worlds. The images have no depth: spaces and buildings behind the events are seen as secondary or tertiary planes or surround the events in the same plane.
The starting point of the tale is a birthday celebration in the splendid court of the caliph. It is one of the most excellent examples of plane-management and the creation of illusion of space by the use of silhouettes when the royal household of the caliph proceeds to the foreground of the palace to take a look at the sumptuous gifts of subjects from nearby and far away. People in oversized turbans rush through the gates of the palace, they do not grow in size as they go through the gate and come nearer to the foreground. As they take their position in a semicircle in the courtyard – in fact in front of the building – the spectator has the impression that the buildings are floating above the turbaned heads. With this opening sequence, the place and time of the plot is specified in line with the traditional rules of tales – it goes without saying that neither of these are clear-cut since all tales take place "once upon a time" – while silhouette-play is established as the way of expression. Anything can happen in a tale in any way and therefore the audience accepts – as in our case – that objects behave and move in a different way from what the eye was used to. At the same time it is evident that what we see is not the shadow of real persons projected on a surface, since there is no distortion when the figures start to move.
Creators of The Adventures of Prince Ahmed chose their form of expression on the basis of the presumption that silhouettes recall images stored in our minds that were recorded in our childhood and will be remembered till the day we die. These images are so strong that they require no explanation. Moreover when drawing, one starts with the contours of the object or figure – that is one makes a silhouette.
After this brief overview of shadow play – that takes no pretence at being complete – we need to spend a few words on shadow play performed by actors in connection with Jeles's film.
Shadow players made use of the techniques and tricks later used in film art (changes in size, disappearance, speed on the screen) way before the appearance of film. The playful and learned audience of the 18th century would not confine itself to applauding professional actors, but made theatre itself. As far as they could, the enthusiastic amateurs created their own repertoire in which everyone could find the form of expression that best fit their abilities. (Just as dilettante silhouette-makers could realize their artistic inspirations in making silhouette-pictures.) Carmontelle, one of the fathers of the genre wrote dialogues for shadow plays to be performed in salons. In the second half of the 18th century, salon-theatres existed in which a white screen was stretched out instead of curtains. The audience saw a "projected" image of the actors who were acting between the screen and sources of light (candles). This is how theatre projeté was born. The first piece for shadow play came out under the title of Miraculous fishing in 1770. In its preface, the unknown author states that he would like to establish a new genre primarily for enthusiastic amateurs and for the entertainment of the audience. He gives detailed instructions to the future players and thereby lays down the basic rules for shadow-acting: in order to avoid distortions of size, the actors need to stay on a certain point of the stage, because in the projected plane they appear as dwarves if they approach the source of light or giants if they go too far away from it. They need to give special attention to always showing themselves in profile, otherwise they will be shown as a dark mass on the screen. The author reveals a couple of technical tricks as well, for example how leaping over the source of light will give the impression of flying. Professional theatres use shadow play from the turn of the 18th–19th century to create fantastic effects and for special tricks. Nowadays shadow play is used in dance theatres to surprise the audience.
It is not by chance that the making of silhouettes and shadow play became widespread in the 17th–18th centuries. In that time, people were more out for the interesting, the surprising and the curious than for details, high-fidelity or rules of perspectives. It is no coincidence either that Reiniger's Prince Ahmed was made in the decades around the birth of film art. The avant-garde were constantly experimenting with new ways of depiction by motion picture. Ahmed coupled the traditional way of silent film storytelling by inserts with unconventional forms of imagery. People of the present day are not willing to accept astonishing new stylistic devices. Jeles's film is a good example of that: it is not easy to handle, it is half understandable, half baffling. It is a difficult film with difficult images. Many have said after having seen the film that the shadow pictures make the film boring. However, I have the feeling that the film itself is not to be blamed for their boredom. When watching films, we are used to being told plots in easily comprehensible forms, we are used to receiving help in the form of dialogues, mimics, body language. If there is no sound to transfer dialogues – for example in the case of a silent film – exaggerated mimics, body language, inserts aid comprehension. Our senses have become somewhat dulled. It often happens that we know exactly what will happen in the next scene of a film because we get such unambiguous hints from the actors, accompanying effects and so on. This gives the spectator a comfortable feeling: well, I knew there was going to be a corpse behind the table, I knew that Mr. X. was to marry Ms. Y. at the end of the film. We have a possibility to identify ourselves with characters of the story. In Jeles's film, figures in the backlight seen and invisible at the same time: it can be seen if they are men, women or children, but they have no personalities, no specific characters. What is it? What happens to us? What is this whole thing aimed at? Viewing requires intense concentration, the text and the images need to be supplemented by fantasy. The film demands an intellectual effort paralleled by that of beholding an abstract picture: the beholder is free and at the same time forced to think independently. To put it simply: these images are unfinished, they require extra mental work and therefore increased cooperation from each viewer
Coupling a story told in an archaic language with shadow play is a witty and adequate solution (besides being cost efficient) to make the form fit the content. The Peasant Bible is a very personal but at the same time compact text. Therefore an imagery needed to be created that on the one hand illustrates the text with high fidelity but on the other hand avoids moralising or characterization. The text does the whole job: besides telling a story, it forms an opinion about Joseph's brothers, about Tamar and Israel. Through the quantity of images, the film gives the viewer an impression that each and every movement corresponds to a word being said. This impression is further strengthened by the strange experience that when recalling the film, a series of stills come to our minds – as a result of the special technique of shadow pictures – yet we are in no position to fully reconstruct a single still in our imagination (aside from pictures seen repeatedly on posters and in magazines). Contemporary dance performances and music pieces create the same impression. There's no improvisation, every scene is minutely elaborated and designed. While in a "traditional" film – or should I rather say in a film of conventional narration – there's usually a certain ranking between the creators – the performance of the director, the photographer, the decorative artist and of actors playing main and subsidiary characters are rated separately – in this film everything and everyone represents the same quality. No character can be picked since no one is recognizable – everyone is present only as a moving silhouette figure and not as an actor. As I mentioned before, this requires on the one hand self-denial on behalf of the actor, he cannot distinguish himself with either mimics or garments, with voice or even an unusual gesture as he needs to follow the rhythm dictated by the narrator. On the other hand shadow play needs physical concentration, since the actor needs to pay attention to maintaining the silhouette effect while keeping the right distance to other actors.
Anyone who has seen a shadow-play performance knows that – primarily because of the distorting effect – this genre does not make use of the third dimension: depth. In this film, it was possible to represent space on the pictures, since the spectator sees actors themselves in backlight and not their shadow projected on a surface and therefore moving backward and forward as well as laterally has no distorting effect upon the figures. Scenes of the film show characters in real, well-perceptible spaces in a way that foreground, middle ground and background are clearly represented. A sequence of the last third of the film shows the widowed and pregnant Tamar in the interior of a house in the company of infernal figures. We see the room through a door and a window in an even yellowish light. In the background there's the facade of the house "broken" by the window and the door, through which the surface of the wall becomes less homogenous. Inside, the movement of figures, their relative distance and the movement of the camera recording the scene make the depth of the picture perceptible.
However, perception of space is not always so clear-cut, what is more, there are scenes in the film where the depth of the pictures is completely eliminated for a shorter or longer time. In the first couple of frames of the film, the spectator is introduced to Adam and Eve, while in the next scene an angel with a trumpet is shown together with men, women and children rising from the grave. Space and plane are presented simultaneously in the picture just as reality is coupled with the miraculous events in this section of the plot. On the left of the picture the angel with a trumpet can be seen, on the right are outlines of tumbling gravestones. The camera "starts to approach" the depth of the picture and by this movement creates a feeling of space. Almost invisibly, the camera goes around the angel, "passes by" it, while the eye of the spectator perceives that the figure has a body of dimensions. As the gravestones get into the focus of the camera, the spectator becomes less secure in his perception of space and is faced with a delusion: gravestones turn from their upright position (they open up) one after another (seemingly) in planes behind one another. The spectator cannot be sure if the camera is still moving or has already come to a halt. The lid of one of the gravestones rises. It is a block and not a two-dimensional figure, while the resurrecting figures seem to be paper puppets moved by an unseen hand. We are exposed to a similar illusion when the mysterious man with the stick visits Joseph in the well. He approaches the edge of the well from far away to address Joseph. It is a curious play with perspectives. It is uncertain whether the camera shows the approaching man from below, from Joseph's perspective or frontally – in a way that the edge of the well is indeed parallel with the plane of the picture – and this is why the figure with the stick seems to grow above the edge instead of approaching and looking down into it. It is a play with planes and spaces as a result of which, the spectator is not sure if he sees a moving or an animated picture. Changing planes in front of light of changing intensity.
Through all these, the system is not destabilized, the tight frame of the pictures is unaffected. The latter gives the picture a compact, photo- or painting-like character (that drove part of the audience out of the auditorium and made the film boring for others). The spectator would like to range over the picture, but it is impossible, because there are no fixed points, no countenances, no mimics, no detailed objects, no secondary scenes, it is impossible to identify oneself with either the good or the bad. Just like in the case of Prince Ahmed, where the audience used to silent films needed to tackle a new imagery in one and a half hours, spectators (an audience that has been enchanted by motion pictures for a long time) of Joseph's brothers need to rethink and reinterpret everything that they had thought of film and images before. Anyone who watches Jeles's shadow pictures (not mentioning the B-plot filmed with an infracamera), becomes part of an intellectual game. I call it a game as it requires a certain effort, the spectator needs to break free from his usual trivial expectations. The film requires a new way of thinking about images and at the same time the narration that represents a very high literary standard will not allow for any flagging of attention. In return, the narration provides the audience with an unparalleled amusement (it is worth reading the written version) while the shadow pictures provide proof for the fact that their several centuries old role in image-based expression is well founded: the black surfaces defined by their contours possess of an incredibly strong expressive force, they are simple in their forms but extremely rich in their expressive potential – just like the Peasant Bible.
Footnotes
1. This topic is almost infinite, therefore here we have to confine ourselves to a short list: shadow play was known in Java, in Turkey where it was called kergöz, in Persia where its name was "night play" (sebhaz). Many think of India as the fatherland of shadow play, which is called sajánátáka in the local language and is thought – according to the view of the Hindu – to reflect the lack of meaning of life.
2. Silhouette amused himself and his company with making paper figures and perhaps it was his legendary thrift that induced the later generations to give the genre his name.
3. It was invented by a Jesuit, Christoph Scheiner, who used it for observations in astronomy from 1631. Later it was used primarily by map-drawers and industrial designers beside silhouette-makers.
4. The original title is: Physiologische Fragmente zur Beförderung der Menschenkenntnis und Menschenliebe.
5. Potsdam, 1923–1926. Inserts: Freddie Phillips & Edmund Dulac. Music: Wolfgang Zeller. Image: Walter Ruttmann, Barthold Bartosch, Alex Kardan. Cornelius Film.
The story in a nutshell: At the birthday celebration of his father, Prince Ahmed gazes at presents from all over the world. Among the wonderful surprises there's a magnificent horse, a present from the African Sorcerer, which is capable of flying like Pegasus. Ahmed heeds the urging of the Sorcerer and mounts the horse that takes him to the island of Waq Waq. There he falls in love with the beautiful princess, Peri Banu. When he wins the heart of the Princess at last, the African Sorcerer who had set out to find the horse, abducts Peri Banu and sells her to the Chinese Emperor. Ahmed overcomes obstacles to free his love with the help of Aladdin's magic lamp (!) and with the help of a strong, man-eating Ogress capable of transformations, who lives underground overcomes the African Sorcerer.
6. The force of expression of shadow play is well illustrated by the fact that shadow plays based on idioms were popular theatrical scenes.
