22ii24
I started reading Puppet: An Essay on Uncanny Life (Kenneth Gross, 2012) and need some place to cache what I'm finding — text fragments, commentaries, outward links, videos...
This territory surely includes such stop-motion classics as Wallace and Grommit, the sheer wonder of Mirrormask, Punch and Judy, shadow plays in various cultures, and (without too much stretching) a vast array of graphic creations, including cartoons and caricatures and imaginary beings.
...which backs up to Caricature, a mode of presentation that has fascinated me since forever,
and Cartoon, another of the worlds which I inhabit.
Also closely related: Boffo: Nonsense, foolishness, and the comedic.
Some bits from Gross 2012:
...the madness of the puppet ... lies in the hidden movements of the hand, the curious impulse and skill b y which a person's hand can make itself into the animating impulse, the intelligence of soul, of an inanimate object...What strikes me here is the need for a made thing to tell a story, or become a vehiocle for a voice, an impulse of character — something very old, and very early. The thing acquires a life... (1)
...There is something in the puppet that ties its dramatic life more to the shapes of dreams and fantasy, the poetry of the unconscious, than to any realistic drama of human life. That is part of its uncanniness, that its motions and its shapes have the look of things we often turn away from or put off or bury... (2)
...certain aspects of puppet theter — its ardent indecorousness, its talent for metaamorphosis, its dismemberings of language and transformations of scale, its materiality, its commitment to giving life to the unliving, its negotiations with death and survival, kits love of secrecy and shadows, its literalness, its fundamental strangeness... a metaphor of human making, a form of life... (4)
...Puppets do not have thoughts, they are more like our thoughts, images of our thoughts, as if our minds were populated with remnants of the older, more clichéd stories that we manipulate and that manipulate us. (13)
Puppets also have often been asked to say things or show things otherwise not permitted... (17)
...they form a kind of secret society, for asll their bluntnedsds and openness of mien, that they are heroes and victims of as hidden history of resistance to church and state... (18)
Every puppet — from the cruderst Punch to the most delicate dancing marionette — has the potential for being at once devil and sorcerer, mocker and teacher. The puppet's power lies in its way of joining such diverse entities, in its ability to move quickly from one to the other, to join the trivial and the urgent, the commonplace and the magical, the human and the inhuman, as well as the living and the dead, impishness and violence. It seems to enter into the opposite poles of stories, always ready for metamorphosis. (24)
Shadow play (Wikipedia)
Karagiozis, Karagö
example
Wayang Kulit
Bunraku example
Bunraku Masters
Punch and Judy examples
Stan Winston Marionettes
Ricky & Doris
History of Puppetry
Copenhagen