ARTS

Independent Film Society offers ³Puppetry in Film²

by Raphael Martin

Last Monday, the Oberlin Independent Film Society presented an evening entitled "Puppetry in Film." As usual, IFS relished the obscure and the under-viewed in its programming for the evening; the six shorts that were screened varied in their accessibility and quality level.

The evening opened with German filmmaker Lewis Klahr's short Pony Glass (1997). His puppetry was reminiscent of the stop-time pieces that Monty Python used in their television series Flying Circus. Klahr's animation has a more fluid and graceful feel than did Python's animation.

Immersed in a 1950s aesthetic, coifed men in sharkskin suits and smoking pipes floated across the screen as Frank Sinatra sang about kissing him as you left him. The screen filled with a style most similar to decoupage art, a style that uses magazine and book illustration cutouts pasted tightly next to each other to form a larger image. A contemporary example of decoupage can be viewed in the Smashing Pumpkins' liner notes to their double CD Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness.

The 50s sensibility that Klahr set the audience up with took a surprising twist. The rosy, good-natured images of the beginning gave way to highly pornographic ones of the same fifties characters engaging in extremely sexually explicit acts. These images were of a certain shock value, yet it was difficult to understand what to make of them. The point that Klahr seemed to be making- that deviant behavior lurks in all the places we don't think of- is a dated one. Klahr's repetitive fascination with challenging morals of the fifties against those of the nineties got just that- repetitive.

Particularly effective though was Klahr's color compositional skill. The visuals were balanced, with color images complementing the black-and-white images. Klahr gave the characters speech bubbles filled with random text bleeding out of the bubbles. As they talked, which was signified with an increase in volume of the music on the soundtrack, the bubbles floated away and disappeared. These fluid bubbles lent the work a gauzy, ephemeral feel - characters' speech disappeared as soon as it was uttered.

The music of Pony Glass's deeply affected the tone of the film as a whole. The mild croonings of Frank Sinatra gave way to the emotional brilliance of black opera singers Paul Robeson in the second, and Leontyne Pryce in the third and final section.

The next two films, Babel Town (1992) and The Red Book (1994) were both made by New York artist Janie Geiser. Highly claustrophobic and visually dark, Geiser's work also suffered for the same reasons that Klahr's did; namely, a lack of forward motion in the story line. Non-linear, non plot-based story telling is perfectly fine, but a filmmaker/puppeteer needs to have some sort of direction. Without direction, the audience begins to yearn for real life celebrities and less for hackneyed Pinnochios.

Geiser told Salon magazine in a recent interview that another of her short puppet-based animations, Secret Story, "arose as a response to several beautifully decayed toy figures from the 1930s that were given to me as a gift." This quotation could not be truer for the two Geiser works that IFS presented.

The puppets that Geiser used were marionettes, with relatively simple constructions. The marionette girls all had a spectral, blank quality to them as if they were possessed by a force which quietly marched them around to observe odd scenes. In Babel Town, one of the characters glided through a storm of chairs made out of thorns while another passed through a shower of scissors which looked like a troop of synchronized swimmers. The last moments of the film had the two girls arriving at the tower of Babel, then knocking it down.

Other puppet films included in the evening were two by German puppeteer Matthew Müller: Altair and Alpsee. Both were forgettable, except for the bizarre image of milk overflowing from a table in Alpsee. This bovine-inspired scene may represent the repetition of our lives, not to mention the repetition of Müller's grating images.

The puppetry showcased by IFS would make Julie Taymor proud. Even if the works spotlighted were less than consistently fascinating, the three artists shown Monday do a lot for smashing the stereotype that puppetry is only for children.

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Copyright © 1999, The Oberlin Review.
Volume 128, Number 3, September 17, 1999

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