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THE SPHINX II: MOSES LEADING HIS PEOPLE OUT OF EGYPT FROM A SHADOW PICTURE BY AMÉDÉE VIGNOLA

prey, whereupon the placid ducks and geese again swim over, and the curtain falls.

There are a score of other little plays like "The Broken Bridge" adroitly adjusted to the caliber of the juvenile mind. In an English collection may be found a piece representing a succession of appalling episodes supposed to take place in a haunted house; and in a French manual for the use of youthful amateurs may be discovered a rudimentary version of Molière's "Imaginary Invalid" to be performed by silhouettes with articulated limbs. Here again we perceive the inaccuracy of the term "shadow-pantomime," since most of the figures are not articulated, and, being motionless, are deprived of the freedom of gesture which is the essential element of true pantomime. Moreover, they are all made to take part in various dialogues, and this again is a negation of the fundamental principle of pantomime, which ought to be wordless. Here the French term "Chinese shadows"

is more exact and less limiting than the English "shadow-pantomime." It is perhaps a pity that the old-fashioned term "gallanty-show" has not won a wider acceptance in English.

The little pieces due to Séraphin and his humble followers in France and England, devised to amuse children only, were simple enough in plot, and yet they were sufficient to suggest to admirers of this unpretending form of theatrical art plays of a more imposing proportion. M. Paul Eudel, the art critic, has published an amply illustrated volume in which he collected the fairy pieces and the more spectacular melodramas composed by his grandfather in the first quarter of the nineteenth century, in the dark days that preceded Waterloo. And in the third quarter of the nineteenth century, in the dark days that preceded Sédan, M. Lemercier de Neuville, relinquishing for a while the Punch-and-Judy puppets which he called pupazzi and which he had exhibited in a succession of gentle caricatures

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of Parisian personalities with a mildly Aristophanic flavor of contemporary satire, turned to the familiar Chinese shadows of his childhood and devised what he called his pupazzi noirs, animated shadows. He has issued also a collection of these little pieces with a full explanation of the method of performance, and with half a hundred illustrations, revealing all the secrets of manoeuvering the little figures. Indeed, Lemercier de Neuville's manual is the most ample which has yet appeared; and it is the most interesting in that he was at once his own playwright, his own designer of figures, and his own performer.

As the grandfather of M. Eudel had been more ambitious than Séraphin, so Lemercier de Neuville was more ambitious than the elder Eudel. And yet his procedure was precisely that of his predecessors, and he did not in any way modify the principles of the art. All he did was to elaborate the performance by the use of more scenery, of more spectacular ef

fects, and of more numerous characters. He introduced a company of Spanish dancers, for example; and he did not hesitate to throw on his screen the sable and serrated profile of a long line of ballet-dan

cers.

He followed Eudel in arranging a procession of animals, rivaling a circusparade, many of them being articulated so that they could make the appropriate movements of their jaws and their paws. And he paid special attention to his silhouette caricatures of contemporary celebrities, Zola for one and Sarah Bernhardt for another.

Then the Franco-Russian draftsman who called himself Caran d'Ache made a new departure, and started the art of the shadow-pantomime in a new career. He called his figures "French shadows," ombres françaises, and he surrendered the privilege of articulating his figures so that they could move. At least he refrained from this except on rare occasions, preferring the effect of immobility, and relying mainly upon a new principle not before

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employed by any of his predecessors. He made a specialty of long lines and of large masses of troops, not all on the same plane, but presented in perspective. He chose also to forego the aid of speech, and his figures were silent except when some officer called out a word of command, or when a company of Cossacks rode past singing one of the wailing lyrics of the Caucasus, as melancholy as the steppes.

One of the most attractive items on his program was a representation of the return of vehicles and equestrians from the Bois de Boulogne in the afternoon. Some of the figures were merely characteristic types sharply seized and outlined with all the artist's masterly draftsmanship, and some of them were well-known personages easily recognizable by his Parisian spectators: De Lesseps on horseback, for example, and Rochefort in an open cab. These successive figures were simply pushed across the screen one after another, each of them as motionless as a statue, the men fixed in one attitude, and the legs of

the horses retaining always the same position. This absence of animal movement was, of course, a variation from the facts of life, like that which permits the painter to depict a breaking wave or a sculptor to model a running boy at a single moment of the movement. Yet this artistic convention was immediately acceptable, since the spectator received a simplified impression, and his attention was not distracted by the inevitable jerkiness of the limbs of the men and beasts.

Caran d'Ache's masterpiece, however, and it may honestly be styled a masterpiece, was not "The Return from the Bois de Boulogne," but his "Epopée," his epic evocation of the grand army of Napoleon. Single figures, like the Little Corporal on horseback and Murat and others of the emperor's staff, he projected with a fidelity and a veracity of accent worthy of Detaille or even Meissonier. Yet fine as these single figures might be, they were only what had been attempted by earlier exponents of the art, even if they were

A HUNGARIAN DANCER (FIG. 1)

more impressive than had been achieved by any one of his predecessors. These single figures were necessarily presented all on the same plane, and the startling and successful innovation of the Franco-Russian draftsmanship was his skilful use of perspective, a device which had not occurred to any of those in whose footsteps he was following. Even Lemercier de Neuville had presented his ballet-dancers in a flat row. What Caran d'Ache did was to bring before us company after company of the Old Guard, and troop after troop of cuirassiers, the profiles diminishing in height as the figures receded from the eye. He attained to an effect of solidity and even of immensity far beyond anything ever before achieved by any earlier exhibitor of shadows. He succeeded in suggesting space and of manoeuvering before the astonished eyes of the entranced spectator a vast mass of men under arms, marching forward resolutely in serried ranks to victory or to death.

M. Jules Lemaître, the most openminded of French dramatic critics, and the most hospitable in his attitude toward the minor manifestations of theatric art, has recorded that this Napoleonic epic of Caran d'Ache communicated to him not only an emotion of actual grandeur, but also the thrill of war itself. He declared that "by the exactness of the perspective preserved in his long files of soldiers, Caran d'Ache gives us the illusion of number and of a number immense and indefi

A HUNGARIAN DANCER (FIG. 2) This explains the mechanism of the shadow picture shown in Fig. 1.

FROM A SHADOW PICTURE BY
LEMERCIER DE NEUVILLE

nite. And by the automatic movement which sets all his troops in action at once, he gives us the illusion of a single soul, of a communal thought animating innumerable bodies, and thereby he evokes in us the impression of measureless power. . . . His silent poem, with its sliding profiles, is, I think, the only epic in all French literature." And those who are familiar with the other French efforts to attain to lyric largeness, and who have had also the unforgetable felicity of beholding Caran d'Ache's marvelous projection of the Napoleonic legend, will be prepared to admit that M. Lemaître has not overstated the

case.

What the Franco-Russian artist had done was to reveal the alluring possibilities placed at the command of the shadowpantomimist by the ingenious employment of perspective; and there remained only one more step to be taken for the final development of the art to its ultimate capacity. This was the addition of color, and this step was taken by an associate of Caran d'Ache in the exhibitions given at the Chat Noir-M. Henri Rivière. Color could be added in two ways. In the first place, the outlines of lanterns and of battle-flags could be cut out, and slips of appropriately tinted paper could be inserted

in the openings, so that the light might shine through. This relieved the monotony of the uniformity of the sable figures, and added a note of amusing gaiety. But this was an innovation of very limited scope, and it could have been earlier utilized in the flat figures of Lemercier de Neuville, for example, if he had happened to think of it. Far wider in its artistic possibilities was the second of M. Rivière's improvements. For the ordinary lamp which cast a steady glow on the white screen whereon the profile figures appeared he substituted a magic lantern, the painted slides of which enabled him to supply an appropriately colored background. Then he went further, and employed two magic lanterns, superimposed, and these enabled him to get the effect of "dissolving views" whereby he could vary his background at will. The immediate result of this ingenious improvement was that the artist could at will bestow upon his shadow-pantomime not a little of the richness of color which delights our eyes in the stained glass of the medieval cathedrals.

M. Rivière was not only an inventor, but he was also an artist gifted with imagination, and his imagination suggested to him at once the three or four themes best fitted for treatment by his novel apparatus. One of these was "The Wan

dering Jew," another was "The Prodigal Son," and a third was "The Temptation of Saint Anthony," all legends of combined dramatic and pictorial appeal. Yet the most effective of all the experiments in this new form was due not to M. Rivière himself, but to the collaboration of two of his disciples, M. Fragerolle and M. Vignola. This was the "Sphinx," in which the artists most adroitly combined all the advantages of the original flat profiles, and the long files of figures in perspective such as Caran d'Ache had employed, with varied backgrounds due to the aid of the magic lantern first utilized by M. Rivière. Of all human monuments no one has had so marvelous a series of spectacles pass before its sightless eyes as the Sphinx, reclining impassive at the edge of the desert at the foot of the pyramids. Race after race has descended into the valley of the Nile and lingered for a little space, a few centuries more or less, and departed at last. Conqueror after conqueror has come and gone again; and the Sphinx has kept its inscrutable smile.

M. Fragerolle composed the music and the words of the stately chant which accompanied the exhibition of the figures passing before the backgrounds, due to the pencil and the palette of M. Vignola. By the aid of the magic lantern, the gigantic

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