THE BLACK AND WHITE THEATER BY PAUL VIEILLARD
The discovery of electricity had important consequences for shadow theatre.
In the early 1900s, the students of the École polytechnique in Paris displayed, on the occasion of the show offered for the school's annual festival, silhouettes representing their teachers. The creators of these shadows competed in the elaboration of the mechanisms. One of these students was named Paul Vieillard. Later he would engage in shadow play in his spare time. He appealed to his scientific knowledge and this is how his inventions contributed widely to the development of the technical possibilities of shadow theatre.
These are some of the innovations introduced by Paul Vieillard. Until then, the figures were kept close to the screen for a clear shadow. Paul Vieillard, however, preferred to keep them at a certain distance from the screen (as some Dutch shadow manipulators did) in order to obtain a larger image. That's why he focused his research on lamps and discovered that it was the 12-volt, 8-amp light bulbs that best met the needs of this experiment. Its configuration was like this: the shadows were about 25 centimeters from the screen, a little further away were the sets and finally, at a distance of 2 meters, the lighting. This included several different light sources, one of which provided the main lighting, the others providing additional light. Each of these lights illuminated a different part of the scene where the shadows came to life. By turning off one, he could replace the light from that light beam with another puppet and the audience wouldn't notice.
Once he had made the decision to manipulate the shadows at a certain distance from the screen, he could therefore move them away as well as bring them closer, and thus make them play at different distances from each other. In addition, it was now possible to project three-dimensional (and no longer flat) puppets that could be oriented in all directions.
Thanks to an extremely ingenious presentation, he brought out, as if by magic, a whole group of dancers on the screen.
For this he created white shadows: he took a cardboard, the projection of which covered the entire screen and cut out four dancers. With a simple projection of light, we saw ballerinas appear on the white screen against a black background. Then, with a second light source, we brought out eight dancers, and thanks to the lighting of a third light, there were twelve on stage... and so on. So he could make entire ballets appear on the screen. When all the lights were placed at equal distances from it, the dancers were of the same size; moving one of the lanterns closer gave the impression that the dancers were growing and, moreover, they seemed to be moving forward, while it was enough to move a lamp away from it to make it seem, on the contrary, that four of the twelve dancers were retreating.
To animate his dancers, Vieillard cut out the same character on two sheets of cardboard. In the first, one leg was pointing towards the ground, while in the second, the dancer raised one leg in the air. By covering the raised leg and the other in turn, he got a dance step effect. This effect, together with the musical accompaniment, helped to give the audience the illusion that they were attending a grand spectacle.
With the exception of his dancers, Paul Vieillard's puppets had relatively few mechanisms. He achieved music-hall effects by attaching a different colored Plexiglas cylinder to each light. By rotating the cylinder, the colors varied.
In 1910, Paul Vieillard and his Black and White Theater offered their first performance. He also participated in two films: l'Histoire, by Masson, and Voilà Montmartre, by Rasimi, in which he introduced sequences of the Grand Prix Caran d'Ache.
Vieillard contributed a lot to the technical development of shadow theater.
"Shadows and silhouettes". Hetty Paërl, Jack Botermans, Pieter van Delft. Chene Hachette Publishing
