The mechanisms of Life

A few weeks ago, I was at a book festival in Lyon which gave me the opportunity to visit the Lumière brothers museum. The Lumière brothers were pioneers in early cinema . The museum is located within old family house which oozes with lumps and twists of Art Nouveau, its peacocks, flowers and butterflies nestled in green ceramic blobs like creatures in a swamp. There was a model of the house inside the house- I ran excitedly towards it-oh! A childhood disappointment: the architectural model instead of a doll’s house, the insides empty and illuminated, the windows and doors not openable.

There were magic lanterns, zoetropes and early cameras on display. There was one that looked exactly like, and was modelled on, a hunting rifle.Others looked like miniature woodstoves, gothic dollhouses, lamps. There were sewing machines on display which the Lumière brothers took apart to see how the mechanisms worked then applied them to moving images ( I wrote a story inspired by this years ago )

The brothers’ marvellously slapstick films were on display: a man who climbs up a ladder, Romeo style to see a woman, is captured in a canvas sack on his descent, a child who steps on a garden hose to stop the water the annoyance of a gardener. I haven’t been enjoying a lot of cinema recently, or going out of my way to go to the cinema and these primal films were refreshing.

Louise Lumière also invented pincer like prothetic hands in 1916 for soldiers, the massive scale of injury and mutilation from new war technology unseen by humanity before. Glass eyeballs, prosthetic legs, metal cheeks, new hands, were needed.

I also visited a small puppet museum. It was early in the morning and I was the only one there. The puppets were all crammed in a basement room with buttons here and there which made them move, more jangly and less life like without humans hands to manipulate them . I was the largest thing in the room. There were recognisable ones- puppets of Thompson and Thompson ( I deeply loved the Tintin comics as a child), Minnie Mouse and other childhood celebrities, Lyon’s Guignol, a 19th century character in a black leather hat. There was an element fish woman, cardinals unknown to me and a painterly cat. I’ve always loved puppet props- their little breads and pots, too big for a dollhouse, too small for a human, somewhere in between. Here there were wine bottles, little barrel organs, painting supplies grapes, and novelty fridge magnets reused as puppet items.( I do not think there is much of an industry for making props for puppets) For me, these possessions always made puppets more lifelike, seemed to have some mystical power of their own.

In Kenneth Gross’s marvellous book Puppets: an Essay on Uncanny Life he notes that the scale of puppets and the world of their theatre are “smaller than life, shrunken or reduced doubles of a human world, easier thus to manipulate, to arrange and rearrange,” and this smallness is “ a bit mysterious, often as frightening or vulnerable as it is enchanting.” Cinema too, plays with our sense of scale. The cinema viewer has two choices: smaller than life or larger than life, but rarely to scale. The small screens are getting smaller and the big screens are getting bigger.

There is an apocalyptic feeling to knowing “The puppet theatre is one in which the cast of a whole epic drama might fit in a small box or bag.” The sun dying, one imagines, will be like falling into the darkness of a cloth bag, or perhaps my death, or yours, will feel like that too.

Puppets can be made of almost anything, and it can be delightfully ambiguous as to what is a puppet and what is an object a puppet possesses. Alone in the museum, I got spooked, not by the puppets ( I have some in my bedroom, a cheap Italian Pinocchio and a suited frog with a broken foot ) but the spaces they inhabited- the painted backdrops and slices of houses, and the things they possessed.