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

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MOVEMENT IN TWO DIMENSIONS vigorously drawn figures looked like animated pen-and-ink sketches rather than silhouettes. They were known as les ombres blanches. This silhouette art of the fashionable world was paralleled by street entertainments for the poor given by wandering showmen, like the one in Goethe's masque. These humble little shadow plays were much closer in spirit to the slapstick Karagoz shows than to the Montmartre spectacles, and their memory has been uniquely preserved in Mayhew's report of his interview in 1853 with a typical exhibitor of the Chinese shades in the streets of London. In this absorbing and most moving study the old showman speaks to us directly: 'The proper name of my exhibition', he says, 'is Lez Hombres or the Shades; that's the proper name for it, for Baron Rothschild told me when I performed before him. We calls it the Chinese show.' He goes on to tell us that the ombres chinoises had been seen on the streets for about twenty-six years, and he names three men who travelled, like himself, with their shadows: Thomas Paris, who 'was the first man that brought out the ombres in the street', 'a short stout man, very old', Jim Macklin, and Paul Herring. Macklin and Herring were both actors who probably went round with the shades when they had no work in the theatre. 'Paul Herring did excellent well with it, nothing less than thirty shillings or two pounds a night. He didn't stop long at it. . . . He only done it for a lark. He was hard up for money and got it.' Herring, whose real name was Bill Smith, played the part of Diolinski in Mazeppa at Astley's in 183 1 and later became a famous pantomime clown. One of the most popular of the street shadow plays, Cobbler Jobson, has been attributed to him, but Mayhew's showman, who never tells us his name, says he was the author of this piece, as well as of Kitty Biling the Pot or The Woodchoppers Frolic and Billy Button s Journey to Brentwood on Horseback and his favourite Servant Jeremiah Stitchem in want of a Situation, the last adapted from an equestrian turn first brought out at Astley's. The showman probably means that he adapted his pieces from well-known sources. Kitty Biling the Pot has much in common with Seraphin's Le Chat Voleur, and later on in his interview with Mayhew the showman admits that he took this theme from Paris. The Broken Bridge was inevitably part of his repertoire. 'I don't know who composed that,' he declares. 'It's too far gone by to trace who the first author is, but it was adapted from the piece brought out formerly at Drury Lane Theatre. Old ancient gentlemen has told me so who saw it, when it was first 78