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MOVEMENT IN TWO DIMENSIONS
buffalo hide with perforated outlines, with the images enclosed in a complicated ornamental setting. The flesh parts are cut away so that they appear shining white on the screen. During the performance two speakers explained the scene while as many as from eight to twenty persons moved the great silhouette slowly to and fro by means of two supports. Such spectacles were shown, as I have said, only at cremation ceremonies, and it is thought that they represent an early stage in the development of the shadow play, as did the whole method of presentation, with the recital or reading from the national epics taking the place of dialogue. The word Nang, it is interesting to note, which means leather, is the name by which the cinema is known today in Thailand.
Until recently there was a cumbersome form of shadow show in Java, the so-called Wayang Beber, which had much in common with the Siamese group scenes and which must have been rather like the European panoramas. It consisted of large sheets of cloth more than two yards long and about one and a half feet wide, on which scenes and figures were delineated with perforated outlines and painted. They were illuminated from behind and slowly unrolled from a wooden bar while the invisible dalang, or showman, gave a commentary in a monotonous voice to the sound of bell music. The theme was generally the story of a prince and his legendary adventures; it occupied about seven rolls and took one and a half hours to show.
But the most developed and characteristic type of Javanese shadow play, still popular today, belongs to quite a different tradition. Technically it seems to derive from Chinese rather than Indian example. The method of jointing the figures and manipulating them by means of rods is similar, though generally it is only the arms of Javanese shades which are articulated. And in all but this matter of technique they are a race apart: haunting, inhuman creatures with bird-like profiles, immensely long, attenuated arms, and strange fdigree decoration enveloping their lower limbs and encrusting their heads like flowering moss. Made of dried, smoothed buffalo hide, they look, when they are out of the hands of the dalang and when, as so often, their bright colours are dimmed by age and neglect, like shrivelled mummies or wizened bats intently awaiting the fall of darkness to spring into spectral life. Hanging motionless against a wall, or locked behind the glass of a museum case, they pulse with the same dynamic force as that which emanates from the similarly conventionalized Scythian bronzes or Celtic illuminations.
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