With puppets, projectors and live performances, Manual Cinema creates surreal movies as the audience watches the process unfold. Video shot and edited by Eric Krupke
The black silhouette of a girl’s profile appears. Her eyelash blinks up, down. A white tear escapes. Her hand brushes it away.
Huddled around an overhead projector, Julia Miller and Drew Dir are manipulating paper cutouts of eyelashes, a tear and a young girl’s hand. Miller and Dir are two of the artistic directors of Manual Cinema, which combines projections with puppets and live performance to create a surreal cinematic experience.
“Drew’s the tear and the head, and I’m the mouth and the hand,” Miller told Art Beat before a recent performance of their show “Lula del Ray” at Artisphere, an arts venue in Arlington, Virginia. “It’s this dialogue that we’re trying to accomplish together, this single action or series of actions.”
Calling Manual Cinema “shadow puppetry” doesn’t do it justice. The final product is projected on the largest screen, above the human and puppet action. If you never looked down, it would be like watching a film, which is exactly their intention. But the layered theatrical process of creating the film in real time is also visible on the stage below.
“Puppet by puppet, we animate every single frame to make it look like it’s a movie,” said Sarah Fornace, another co-artistic director.
The puppeteers cluster around the glow of three overhead projectors. They lift and lower black paper flaps to block the light from the bulbs, cutting between the projectors like cameras.
Actors use the light cast from the projectors to create shadows on a smaller second screen. Since shadows can’t reveal facial expressions, the dip of a chin or the shrug of a shoulder convey the character’s emotions.
“I think we were all really interested in nonverbal storytelling because it gives the audience more space to put themselves into the story,” Miller said. “And that’s just something that’s an exciting challenge for us: to try and tell, through silhouette and music, these really detailed stories.
Analysis:
Movies are composed of various forms, it can come from big studios with astonishing computer effects, and it can also come from people who make live movies by lights and movements of objects. Many have the experience of forming silhouettes of certain shapes like puppy with their hands as kids, this form of movie can be traced back to hundreds of years ago before the real “movies” were born. In the movie theaters, there were many occasions when kids place their hands through the projector’s lights and form silhouettes on the screen, it recalled a subtle memory of many people’s childhood for movies and cinematic experience.
