Movement in two dimensions : a study of the animated and projected pictures which preceded the invention of cinematography (1963)

Karagoz All life is controlled by the Master who remains behind the screen; Surely thou believest not that these httle figures move of their own free will? BAKI Itseems at first a far cry from the stylized figures and the heroic themes of the oriental shadow play to the farcical naturalistic show which developed in Europe. Even the simpler, more domestic, of the Far Eastern plays, such as Picking up the Jade Bracelet, appear to have nothing in common with rollicking pieces like The Broken Bridge, which became the stock play of both street and fashionable showmen in France and England. But a strong tradition of boisterous humour was nurtured in Turkey from whence there are many indications that it infiltrated into Europe. The shadow show is usually said to have spread to Turkey from the Far East through Persia, but the first mention of the art in Turkey occurs in the journal of the seventeenth-century traveller Thevenot. By this time any resemblance there may have been between the Turkish entertainment and the oriental convention had vanished, and the former had assumed a slapstick comic character and had taken the name of its principal figure, the clown Karagoz or Black Eye. He has a curious history. This merry Andrew, stupid, naive, more boastful than Punch, and wonderfully ready with his tongue, commemorates a worthy statesman called Qaraqusch who died early in the thirteenth century. The friend and counsellor of Saladin, he had a jealous rival, a certain Ibn Mammati, who lampooned him in a political satire. The squib 59