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Puppet Stop Motion
An old and dusty theatre. Strange puppets are miming actors. The Director watches them without any interest. With one gesture of his hand, all the puppets go down from the stage. The only audible sound is the crackling made from the wooden boards of the stage.
The Director opens his bag and takes out an old play-script and a Tarot Deck. The tarots slip from his hands, falling on the ground. He picks up them with care. Only one card, not seen, falls between the floor boards and disappears.
The Audition begins.
The first puppet goes on the stage and starts its performance. The man doesn’t watch it. His attention is captured by the projector that rests, turned off, near him . The man suddenly turns it on and a blinding ray of light hits the puppet. The marionette stops its movements, frozen. A huge shadow appears on the wall behind it. The director’s eyes watches with attention inside that darkness. Shadow Puppets
The shadow seems to be breathing, growing, contractin. Grotesque figures are dancing inside the darkness, shadows inside the shadow. Two wicked women are fighting for the love of a deformed man. They are projection of the humanity desires, they live only following their instincts. The fight ends with a dead. A silent cry of pain dies in the darkness and the shadow vanishes, with its creatures.
Puppet Stop Motion
The Director takes off a card from the Tarot Deck.
The Lovers.
The dummy wakes up, steps down from the stage and receives from the man his Tarot Card. Its role. Now it will be Desire, Love, Despair. It is no longer a puppet or a actor, now it has become an archetype, it is a symbol, an abstract concept. Another dummy goes on the stage. Light. Shadow. Tarot card. The Wheel of Fortune. The symbol of Destiny, Past, Present, Future. Casting continues, someone receives a part in the drama, someone disappears in the projector’s light. Its shadow was too weak to contrast the light.
At the end every tarot card is given and every part is assigned.
The Director switches off the projector and goes on the stage to applaud the puppets sitting in the stalls.
An hysterical, loud laugh breaks the silence. From nowhere. The projector turns on by itself and its light pierces the man on the stage. He, to protect his eyes from the light, turns his shoulders against it. And he sees. On the wall. Huge, silent. His own shadow. It magnetically attracts he inside itself.
The Director fluctuates in this black void. Two cold, red, stars approaches he. They aren’t stars, they are two holes, opened on a different world. The man puts his eyes on the holes and sees a white room with a cardboard box in it. Inside the box, like toys, there are a paper cut theatre and few puppets. Inside the box there is his life.
The reality around him disappears. His hands are touching the cold concretet wall of the theatre, where his shadow was projected few seconds before. His hands, now, are puppet hands. He moves them, astonished, over his face. A paper mask covers it. He takes off the mask (that remembers his old human face). Under the mask there is a Tarot. His Tarot. The card that was lost at the beginning of the audition.
The Tower. Symbol of Fall, Vanity and Punishment.
With his new puppet face, he looks at the stalls, where his similar are applauding him, and he make a bow.
Real Life Action
Someone is keeping over his legs a cardboard box. It’s open and inside it there is a wooden mask that looks like a face of one of the animated puppet. A man (that looks like the human version of the Director stop motion puppet) stares at the mask, as if there isn’t anything else it in the whole world. Then he focuses his attention a long number, wrote on his strait-jacket. Suddenly he starts to laugh (the same laugh that was heard in the theatre) and looks up in to the camera. With a magician movement of his hands, he makes to appear a Tarot.
The Fool.
The man starts again to laugh, alone, in his own cell. |
