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MASKS 187
Such films do not give form to life — they give life to forms.
Good visual stories in which the characters are dolls or drawings are not 'literary', because the story does not begin with the invention of a plot but with the devising of the shapes of the visual beings who are to act in it. Their appearance already tells a story. The fairy-tale quality of such films is determined in the first instance by what the characters look like, not what they do. Visual imagination is what inspires and weaves these stories. The visual fairy-tale world which they open to us is in the main a world of shapes different from those in our own world. Here are not miracles enacted in our world, miracles which infringe the laws of our own world. Rather we are given a glimpse of another world, a world in which other laws run and other shapes are normal, a closed world in which everything happens according to rule, only that the rules are not the same as in our world.
For this reason such puppet stories must develop logically from the shape and nature of the actors. It would be out of keeping to make dolls play human parts. Dolls have the fate of dolls : if the china shepherdess tumbles off the mantelpiece, she must break to pieces and the leg of the lead soldier must melt if it falls into the fire. This is what makes such a story conform to its material.
The same applies to silhouettes. The power which rules their destinies is not psychology, not even optics, but a pair of scissors. If the story evolves smoothly from their form, then it is not literary'; and strictly speaking this would be the true 'absolute' film. The adventures of forms come to life have a severe logic of their own. In it cause and effect are determined by the law of form and not by the laws of nature. If one of the characters attacks another with a paintbrush and paints a hump on to its back, that character will, alas, be and remain a hunchback. And if the silhouette of a man wielding the silhouette of a pair of scissors cuts out of the silhouette of rock the silhouette of another human being, he will have created a partner equivalent to himself and in the silhouette world this is no miracle, because in the world of silhouettes the normal way of coming into being is to be cut out with a pair of scissors. So everything has happened in accordance with the