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Review in The Scotsman

Chinese Shadows: The Amazing World of Shadow Puppetry in Rural Northwest China

Film documentary by Frank Kouwenhoven and Antoinet Schimmelpenninck

Pan 9607 (DVD)

Five stars

We start with a travelling show, at which, while the drama is in progress, a cock is surreptitiously slipped behind the curtain, invisibly slaughtered, and its blood daubed on a sick baby's forehead when it too is posted backstage: thus are we are plunged into a world both sweetly ordinary and at the same time magnificently alien. We meet a puppet-maker first tanning the hide and removing the hair, before making his infinitely delicate incisions: few people make them like they used to in the old days, he sighs, as he starts applying his colours.

  There's snobbery too towards wooden marionettes, which only have one expression: what's valued here is a combination of vocal and manual dexterity, the aim being to breathe such life into the puppets that they become real characters. The beautifully-chosen Western piano music - which alternates with the sounds of the erhu fiddle, drums, and shawm - may seem a strange aural backdrop, but gradually you realise it's simply the homage of one very refined art form to another. A member of a blind musicians' group explains how they manage - one has a working eye, so he can watch out and keep time for the others.

  This apparently apolitical art-form got a hard time during the Cultural Revolution: a school teacher's voice drops to an instinctive whisper as he explains how Mao's young storm-troopers 'disrupted our culture' - thus does the film reveal how deep the fear is, even now, of saying anything which might be politically out of line. While one old puppeteer shows a class of ten year olds how to make them move (and one by one they have a go), at another school, when the children are asked what they think, a boy simply says 'I prefer watching television.' Let's hope this exquisite little film is seen by the powers that be in Beijing, and that they prevent this unique art-form from disappearing for ever.

Michael Church