Motion Picture Magazine (Aug 1921-Jan 1922)

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When the light strikes thru, carrying the colors with it to the screen, the effect produced is charming and most Chinese. Here was not only a touch of poetry for Tony Sarg's inspiration, but a very simple and practical device which could be copied and elaborated. The lesson in mechanics he has fully taken to heart. The poetry is, as he puts it, still "germinating." We are, he says, to hear from that later. A happy accident was the meeting of Mr. Sarg with Herbert M. Dawley. Major Dawley had just finished his series of animated pictures of prehistoric animals. He was full of ways and means of getting actual results for the screen. He was confident that he could "film" all the humor that Air. Sarg might crowd into the outline and movement of silhouettes. Together, they threw themselves into the work with the enthusiasm of bo\rs determined to dig to China, only it was China that they started with. Broadway was their goal, and from Broadway the wide world of motion picture houses. That it was really the world they intended to reach, and not just English-speaking countries, is evidenced by the fact that there are no "balloons" coming out of the mouths of the actors, filled with words to point the drama. It is pantomime pure and simple, wedded to humor. It is hard to realize the tremendous difficulty involved in getting an idea over in pantomime. Ask a deaf and dumb man. Ask an analytical actor. David Warfield said to Tony Sarg : "Old man, you've given us actors something to study." The method of making these motion silhouettes, when described in a casual sentence or two, sounds absurdly simple. Cut from black cardboard animals and human figures, make them jointed, place them near to, and behind a screen, manipulate them amusingly, photograph them with a motion picture camera, and there you are. And yet, Tony Sarg and Herbert Dawley go about with the air of men who are moving mountains. "Suppose," says Major Dawley, "you were required to spread the movements you go thru in a very busy one and two-thirds minutes over an eight-hour day — would you know just how it was done?" An honest answer to this must be an unequivocal "No." In the role of photographer, he is able, in a hard day's work, to put his two-dimensional puppets thru an amount of action which takes just one and two-thirds minutes to enact on the screen. This is, of course, race-horse speed, when compared to the meagre results that the maker of animated cartoons has to show for his daily output. One and two-thirds minutes on the screen would represent, for him, about sixteen hundred drawings on celluloid, at least two months' work. But he has this advantage : he can have a comfortable meal and a smoke, go back to his job, review what he has done and recapture the spirit of it. With motion silhouettes, the poses which have been photographed are tightly locked away in the camera. The photographer must not only be capable of a minute analysis of action, of vivisecting movement, but he must bring to it a nerveracking intensity of concentration. Major Dawley has another complaint to make against his work. He insists that he no longer hears his friends when they speak, so intent is he on noting how they lift their hands and wag their heads. There are moments when the Sarg silhouettes depart from shadowgraph limitations, and take on, in effect, a third dimension. This is when the paper actors turn. One waited, perhaps, to catch them at it, to see them become a mere edge. But, no — they make the turn naturally enough. This is done by the device of combining drawings with the figures. The result is a puzzle motion picture : Find where the figures leave off and the drawings begin. Tony Sarg has given his pictures depth of perspective after the manner of French shadowgraphers. He uses oiled paper of varying thickness, and for the heavy shadows several layers superimposed. All this has led him into an exhaustive study of what has been done in shadow work in Egypt, Java, Siam, Turkey and France, with the result that, captured by the ancient art, he has determined to produce a real shadowgraph drama, something to be actually seen and heard, and not distributed broadcast by the motion picture camera. From the interest which Mr. Frank Buhler and Mr. Riesenfeld, both powers in the motion picture world, have evidenced in this venture, one is tempted to jump to the conclusion that it will come into being in a motion picture house. Of one thing we may be certain : it will reflect the past. But Mr. Sarg has not determined whether it will be Javanese, Siamese, Chinese or French in spirit. If it be Javanese, it must, to have a wide appeal, be greatly modified, for the shadowgraph figures of Java are startlingly grotesque to the W'estern eye. The arms, for the purpose of exaggerated gesticulation, are made almost twice the natural length. Really, the little creatures hardly do more than suggest human beings. Like the Chinese figures, they are made of buffalo hide, and are also tinted, but they are moved, as a rule, by delicate rods of horn rather than bamboo. Their successful manipulation is not only a matter of practice, but dramatic sense as well. The shadowgraph man of Java, who speaks for his little men and women, must have a flexible voice, and temperament. And what gentle heroines he has to present to his public ! Anjasmara, for example. "She was the virgin in the house of Pati." She has a most beautiful write-up in a Javanese poem, which Helen Haimen Joseph quotes in her "Book of Marionettes." "She was truly queen of the accomplished, neat and charming in her manner, sweet and light in her gestures. She never neglected the five daily prayer hours. She was sprayed with rose-water. Her body was hot if not anointed every hour. Everyone who saw her loved her. She had only one fault. Later, when she married, she could not endure a rival mistress. She was jealous." There was the makings of drama ! In Siam, the creators of shadows are content to follow somewhat more closely the lines of the human form, but their figures are examples of extreme elaboration, so closely and finely perforated that when performing before a light, they suggest little beings bejeweled from head to foot. And this light often comes, in Siam, from a carefully placed bonfire. The Turks love shadowgraphs, which they make rather crudely of camel skin. They have used them for centuries, for the expression of the last word in vulgarity. They are happy to see thrown on the screen a hunchback, a dwarf or an opium fiend, 88 .AGE