Photoplay (Jul - Dec 1921)

Tony Sarg and his "shadow box." The marionettes are silhouetted against the white sheet. The scene is from "The First Circus," one of the amusing "Almanac" series. Movies on Strings By TONY SARG EDITOR'S NOTE.— Tony Sarg has long been prominent among American illustrators, but it is very recently that he has transferred his artistic activities to the screen. Some years ago, Mr. Sarg became interested in a revival of the marionette theater, and produced plays of ancient and mediaeval origin in which puppets moved by strings were employed to unfold the story. In the course of his investigations he stumbled on the fact that 1800 years ago, in China, a form of moving pictures was in vogue through the means of shadowgraphs. This led Sarg to revive the shadowgraph through the medium of the screen, and the "Tony Sarg Almanac" was first projected in the Criterion Theater, Manhattan, with great success. Perhaps you have already seen the first three of the quaint comedies: "The First Circus," "The Tooth Carpenter" and "Why They Love Cavemen." THE art of the shadowgraph reaches far back into history. Many hundreds of years ago in China the most artistic form of the shadow-theater existed. Here the little figures, made of transparent buffalo hide and beautifully colored, performed wonderful Chinese fairy tales. In Java, the shadowgraph play is still being performed, and the play called "The Wayang," which runs in about twenty consecutive performances, is still the most popular kind of entertainment. Little is known of this strange screen theater of earlier days, and it was through an accident that I stumbled on the good fortune of being able to revive for America an almost extinct theatrical art. The "accident" was the inheritance of a large collection of wonderful mechanical toys, funny little performing dolls, quaint coaches and little bonnet shops and, most interesting of all, a weird French mechanical guillotine, which automatically performed the gruesome task of decapitating a pig, this pig being labeled "Louis Seize," the same unhappy monarch who lost his head in the French Revolution. This toy of mine is one of those which were sold in the streets of Paris during the reign of terror, and is perhaps 36 Sarg s marionettes as they look on the screen. This is one of the scenes from "The Tooth Carpenter, with a particularly agile marionette in the title role. one of the most interesting historical relics of that nature in existence. My interesting inheritance led me to continue collecting toys of every description, and with this collection, I naturally started a library on the same subject. In practically every book there was some reference to marionettes, and one writer lamented the "decay of the marionette theater" and expressed the hope that some day an artist and an enthusiast would revive this lost art. This I proceeded to do. Not satisfied now with the revival of the regular marionette, manipulated by strings, I decided to plunge into the revival of the shadowgraph marionette; and it was playing with these quaint figures which gave me the idea to substitute the little cardboard figures instead of using the tedious celluloid drawings usually employed in the making of animated cartoons for the films. I am able, in conjunction with Herbert Dawley, my associate in production, to average 100 feet a day, which ordinarily would represent 960 drawings in celluloid. It is naturally a very much cheaper process than anything hitherto employed. For the benefit of those who wish to know "how it's done": the making of the shadowgraph begins with a (Continued on page 114)