Holy cow! Puppeteers will know exactly why I just flipped, but I’ve found a video of Hansjürgen Fettig demonstrating his puppets. I’ve used his book as one of my puppet building bibles for years and seen the figures in exhibition but until this moment have never seen one in motion.
Oh. My. God. I have never wished to speak French more than I do right now.
Edited to add: Juliette Wade, linguist and SF writer, has just sent me a transcription of the video. Why? Because she is made of awesome.
Transcription/Translation of Hansjürgen Fettig Video
Puppet #1 (standing man):
Well, it’s a marionette with a long rod, and he can move for example like this, he can turn his head, and when he moves his head also the body moves itself, like that, and walking works like this, it’s a [room of air?] and I can hold it here from the bottom, and even, I can make it lean. On this side, I can make it lean. I put it back, here, and he walks with [elegant steps?], he turns his head like that. One can take the arm, with a **pige/tige,
[back view of puppet rod] Here you can turn it, but you can make it better, to make it easier, to move. The legs, they [come off] like that, with a snap, and then you put it back, like that. Right now, you can lean it, you can put your hand underneath, op op op op op, and then you put it back, and you can raise one leg, here, or the other. But it’s a question of exercise [practice]. That [the fabric under the feet], it’s not expensive, you can find it easily. But we’ll take another thing… [music]
Puppet #2 (man’s head):
Here we see the color, how to color, and this here is the side where you start. These are balls of cardboard; here it’s hidden with some paper with wall glue for wallpaper, and here I’ve stuck on using white glue, some sand for birds, very fine, it gives a surface that is good for the camera, or the [veri?], of course, because here you see the mark that it takes on with the camera, for television, that doesn’t work. [turns to the back] And that also no. But if you put that over the top, it gives a surface that is good. And the movements, they are like this. He can lean, you can hold it here and he can turn his head, he makes movements that are sufficient.
Drawing #1:
You have different possibilities for sticking them together.
Puppet #3 (female head):
I’ve taken normal glasses. I have a friend who’s an optician. He gives me the old models that he cant’ sell; it costs me nothing. And this is a head for putting into the figure, and moving. You can do something, what you want. And these are pipes that are cut in half, and I’ve glued it back with cardboard on top, to have a base. And if you look underneath, you can see that these are still geometric things. Also that is geometric [pointing to back of head], it’s part of a half egg. And the other thing [other side] is the other part of this egg, and you can stick hair on top of it. And the pipes make the eyes. With me, you never see eyes. Because eyes that are fixed, with the pupil and all that, they rest in their position. Here you have shadows that work toward the fantasy already. It’s a trick that I –
Puppet #4 (hooded head)
And if you take this one, it’s also very simple. I’ve taken here an egg, I’ve divided it in half, afterward I’ve stuck on top of it a piece of cardboard, and I’ve stuck it back together a little, a little divided, in this direction, it’s not exact. And here you get a line, and if you turn it like that, you get another figure/shape. More or less that. And from the side it’s more or less [friendly?], and from the front like that. The eyes are shadows. I do nothing else.
Drawing #2:
And it’s that, a cut piece, like that, a pipe that passes over, and you see here inside, what it’s like on the inside.
Back to Puppet #4: [showing the back] It’s a little **contreblaque? for the part, and the rest, I can take for the second, for the next figure that I’m going to make. And it’s still geometric shapes. With a large in place. There’s a large, a smaller. The smaller, it’s flat, and rounded. One more time rounded, but larger. Which is to say that you always have to change roundness, size, to have difference.
Puppet #5 (old woman’s head):
And here I’ve made the base (a little) in white. And this gives me just a sign where I can stick the hairdo. With some fabric or something that can pass …[unintelligible]… and here you absolutely have to keep the shape.
Drawing #3:
And if you look at the construction. You have a half-egg here, a half-egg over there, they’re placed on a total egg, directly on top. Here it’s a half-ball; this is an irregular half of an egg, and here I have a piece of tube. It’s a nose that I had around, I recovered it to make this… [music]
Puppet #6 (workings showing):
So these are plastic materials, they’re tubes of plastic, you can take it down, and this, this supports the shoulders. The shoulders are suspended also with thingies like this, inside. Now, to drive. You take that in your hand, you go like that. You turn, as you wish, it turns [the same?] if you like, and you take it like that, you lean it as you wish, and the shoulders move. The arms are suspended from here, and it’s simple to do. But me I prefer the other, it’s simpler.
[Other voice] How is it attached, here?
Here? [he shows it close up] In fact it’s easy to show, this is just for the shoulders, and the head is held up by this. I try to – there you go. You pull it out, you pull the manipulation, it’s a little tight, and there you go. Here you have the system, it’s for hanging curtains, in a van for example, it’s a spiral of metal [asi?], a wire [asi?], and it’s for stabilizing things that move. This part [drawing] is held up, here in the middle, and there, you have a prefabricated **caraban, it moves like this.
[showing puppet] If I hold it here, it makes movements like that. And the whole thing turns inside the figure.
Puppet #7 (headless workings):
I wanted to find the means to move the entire body. It works like that. And from the front, it’s like this. If I turn it over there, and here like that, I can turn just here the shoulders, and I can make contramovement, and it’s all snapped. Snapped here, snapped there, buttoned here, and in the middle I’ve got another thing that keeps the position. But the length, you have to try. That, you can’t know in advance. Each figure, it’s a different thing, for the distances. But this is old, the legs aren’t the best, they’re a little primitive. Anyway, I make them better, but it shows the system very very well.
End.
He’s just describing what he’s doing. “You can lift one of the legs… and the other. You can make it bend forwards and backwards. You can make it walk, like so… For television, the white color will work but the yellow will not… An optician friend of mine got me these glasses.” Nothing earthshaking.
For a puppeteer, this is the equivalent of saying, “Jules Verne is just describing what he’s doing.”
“First I take out a fresh sheet of paper…” Doesn’t matter. He’s freaking Jules Verne.
I see what you mean. Still, his actions are, on the whole, a lot more eloquent than his language. He’s speaking a very basic French, with lots of, “you put the thingy in there, like that, see?” and “you can move him this way and that way, and make him walk and lift his arm with a stick.” The cool take-away I got from the video is that he never makes eyes with glass and pupils and all that stuff (I’m translating loosely) because they’re fixed and artificial. Creating clever shadows gives the illusion of real eyes. He also sprays the skins of the puppets with fine sand before he paints them, “to make the camera happy.” There’s a lot of “This is half an egg and this is part of a sphere and this is a cone”–all of cardboard, I gathered after a while.
OK, now I really wish we lived in the same city. I could sit and translate and you could tell me what it all means.
I wish we lived in the same city for all sorts of reasons.
Also, I just got extremely lucky because a friend has sent me a transcription!
I’ve seen this video before. Didn’t understand the words then, didn’t understand it now. The mechanisms still looked cool anyhow. 🙂