Jan Švankmajer’s Don Šajn (1970): Puppets as intimate objects

Introduction

Intermediality in Don Šajn

Don Šajn makes clear that the filmmaker holds a special fascination for the puppet form – marionettes and dolls alike. ⁴ Švankmajer’s use of puppets sets it apart from puppet films in the strict sense of the word. Don Šajn engages strongly with the art of puppetry, but the puppets are not puppets in the phenomenological ontological understanding of the word. They are actors playing puppets in life-size theatrical settings (see Figure 1). In this respect, the film takes a different approach compared to the wonderful films of Jiří Trnka a Czech filmmaker as well. The latter uses object animation techniques to animate puppets cinematically. In Don Šajn, the theatrical aspect is highlighted, with the masked actors playing the puppets. Moreover, the performances are caught on film, with object-animated elements added. Clearly, the film works intermedially, drawing a number of performative arts together. The films by Trnka share this intermedial approach, but in a different direction. Painting and graphic design, for example, form stronger influences here, which are interwoven with popular media impacts, the art of puppetry and cinematic traditions. Dance is of major importance as well, missing in the concatenation of performative arts influences on Don Šajn. Trnka’s films show the artist’s background in illustration ⁵ as much as Don Šajn reveals Švankmajer’s training in puppetry and theatre. ⁶ Notwithstanding the differences, the films by Trnka and Švankmajer share a decisive engagement with the puppet as a medium of expression. Solid facial expressions, for example, are distinctive of Trnka’s use of puppets. Neither lip synchronization nor eyebrow movement are employed. Instead, cinematic means such as lights, camera angles, music and puppets’ gestures are used for narration. The solidification of the face – which is evident in Don Šajn as well – draws the films closer to the traditional art of puppetry, especially wooden puppets like marionettes. At the same time, the cinematic elements are highlighted; where the face denies expressivity, cinematic means and their narrative quality are emphasized and in this way a variety of communicative channels flow together.

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Figure 1.

The marionette actors Don Šajn and Jester on stage in Don Šajn (1970). © ATHANOR Film Production Company, Llc. Reproduced with permission.

Yet, this article would like to go a step further. Addressing the phenomenon highlights not only the remarkable event of the confluence of different arts. ⁷ The idea brought forward here is that discussing the phenomenon can benefit from approaching it from the angle of engagement – in the case of Don Šajn, the marionette. Intermedial phenomena realize the convergence of a variety of micro rhythms interacting with each other. ⁸ How is the confluence to be pictured in concrete terms?

Puppetry, as will be shown, emphasizes three aspects: simplicity, naiveté and communicative flows between inside and outside worlds radically called into question. The latter is rooted in the paradoxical positioning of the puppet between inertia and acceleration. As Henryk Jurkowski (2013b: 196) explains in The Acting Puppet as a Figure of Speech:

The iconic value of the puppet is usually manifested on two levels. The first includes all the iconic signs (material, hair, facial expression or the lack thereof, costume and so on). The second has a virtual character, which is the capacity of movement, defined by the puppet’s material and construction, as it is to be exploited by the manipulator.

The conjecture of the iconic and the virtual character of the puppet, according to Jurkowski, is inseparably intertwined with the trope of the oxymoron:

Oxymoron is the figure of speech by means of which contradictory terms are combined so as to form an expressive epithet such as ‘black sun’, ‘cruel kindness’ and, last but not least, ‘living object’. When combined with the appearance of life, supplied by movement and voice, the material puppet is an oxymoron. (p. 197)

The ontological ambiguity radically calls into question any attempt to feel and understand this state. This, however, allows the discovery of new ways of access – and an understanding of the relationship between knowing and feeling anew. Engaging with the puppet form does this, as its characteristic simplicity and naiveté breaks communication down to basic terms: the communicative flows between inside and outside worlds.

Approaching the question of intermediality, thus, means to take these aspects into consideration; it entails finding a descriptive image that brings the paradoxical positioning of the puppet and its characteristic perspective on a confluence of different expressive modes. The poignant image would have to concern a shell-like configuration that encloses a soft space to be protected – an intimate place. This space or hub, as it will be referred to in the following, is not singular, but multiple with each mode connected to the other by channels that allow communicative exchanges to take place – micro rhythms intermingling and operating at different speeds and locations.

The configuration described is reminiscent of polyps and their life-form. ⁹ Like polyps and in fact the masked actors of Don Šajn, puppetry encloses an intimate space that connects to and communicates intimately with hubs of adjoined media: theatre, cinema and object animation. While the communicative flow between inside and outside worlds is radically called into question in the puppet form, other medial angles appear in a similar light, connected to each other. The film’s engagement supplants and translates the puppet problem to the conjoined media and by extension to understanding and feeling itself (metaphor). Intermediality in the understanding put forward here describes foremost exchanges and interchanges between inner and outer worlds that emerge in the communication between multiple partners.

The tale of Don Šajn: Puppetry, theatre and cinema

The tale is based on the famous Don Juan myth, adapted frequently by Czech puppet players in the early 18th century. ¹⁰ A brief synopsis of the plot underlines this. Don Felipe and Doña Maria are in love with each other, but Doña Maria is promised to Don Šajn, Don Felipe’s brother. Deeply hurt, Don Šajn kills first his father, Doña Maria’s father (Don Avenis) and finally his brother Don Felipe. Don Avenis’s ghost appears, foretelling Don Šajn that he will be damned at midnight. The descent into hell that awaits Don Šajn is curiously doubled, interweaving a theatrical and a filmic version, invested emotionally very differently.

The narrative construction of Don Šajn is characterized by simplification and overstatement, as the synopsis suggests. ¹¹ Iconic values that position the use of puppetry in Don Šajn firmly within traditional approaches include ‘clear intention, simplicity, potential stylisation and the introduction of symbols, with a structure founded on “pure” action and expressive gesture’ (Jurkowski, 2013a: 20). ¹²

Accordingly, the wooden masks that the actors are wearing appear oversized and stylized in Don Šajn, like the abrupt staccato rhythm of their movement. For most part of the film, the characters’ expressions are characterized by exaggeration. The same applies to the characters’ motivation. Don Šajn kills his father, Doña Maria’s father and his brother without much explanation, where the obsessive impulse to kill originates. Don Šajn’s rage is bold and furious. The sense of immediacy and boldness reduces the motivation of the characters: Don Šajn kills because he kills, Don Šajn’s father mocks because he mocks, Doña Maria loves because she loves, etc. The tendency to simplification appears apt to the puppet form and the minimized world of the puppet theatre. It exteriorizes emotions, as the puppet itself is not able to feel it and act upon it. It is the puppeteer transferring emotions and actions in his or her movement and voice. The act of transferral invites overstatement. The actual incapability of the puppet translates to its virtual appearance. Between actuality and virtuality, the puppet is irrevocably caught between life and death. The resulting sense of tragedy pitches the puppet world’s frame towards boldness and swiftness. A body of flesh and blood moves and feels differently from a body made of inert material. Accordingly, the puppet’s vocal and bodily expression always already disclose the discrepancy of the puppet’s double state of existence in between actuality and virtuality, in between life and death: ‘their almost magical potential for life paradoxically conjures the sensation of death prior to their theatrical lives which will end in death’ (O’Pray, 1988: 345).

In addition, the puppet form exhibits an unsurpassable sense of profoundness in its display of emotionality. ¹³ The puppet’s dramatic life, its virtuality, stands in stark contrast to the actuality of its dead body and features. Imagination enables an improbable leap of dead material to lively and lived matter. As Eileen Blumenthal (2005: 11) explains in Puppetry. A World History:

They can be gods, idiots, or worms. They are able to nurture children or terrify adults. They survive indefinitely without normal biological aging but also can die and come back to life again and again. Whenever someone endows an inanimate object with life force and casts it in a scenario, a puppet is born.

The divine aspect of the puppet emerges in relation to the puppet’s virtual supremacy and actual inferiority compared to man’s existence. It represents a strong Other, a ritualistic Other that grants protection and undermines self-assuring and self-knowing immersion. Pondering between life and death, between knowing and not knowing, between object and subject, the puppet withdraws self-assuring aspects of experiencing worlds as whole, conclusive, intuitive and immersive. On the other hand, the ritualistic power of the puppet reinvests the fragmented, disenchanted experience of worlds with immersive, intuitive qualities, granting the puppet protective and magical powers. The godlike quality of the puppet is manifested not in its superiority, but rather in its inferiority, in its simplicity. The symbolic naiveté of the puppet’s configuration allows human failure to be brushed effortlessly away, the resetting of human fate with the lightest gesture imaginable. This is where the firmness and affirmativeness of the puppet comes in. Puppets hold strong protective powers that stabilize and affirm. Švankmajer (1994b: 35) is well aware of that as he explains:

Puppets are firmly fixed in my mental morphology, and therefore I keep returning to them in my creative work as something which, for me, represents a certainty in relation to the outside world. I usually resort to them at moments when I feel threatened. Thus, I make my own Golems that are designed to protect me from the pogroms of reality.

The puppet acts superior, where it submits, which places it outside the world but also outside history. The symbolic naiveté leaves the marionette untouchable and inconsumable, placing it somewhere in between longing, belonging to and distanciation.

Don Šajn knows how to engage uniquely with the puppet’s simplicity, placing it between divinity and foolishness, as the film allows different communicative channels to intersect with each other. O’Pray (1988: 345) observes that the film exhibits a greater emotional depth for ‘the successful blending of Švankmajer’s film techniques with a traditional marionette tale’. In other words, the film appears emotionally truer because it uses puppets. The following statement by Švankmajer (1994a: 20) is in a similar vein:

I prefer the wooden hand with blood coming from it as it expresses the idea of metamorphosis and cruelty. It is a stronger image than a real hand, just as a puppet’s expression is stronger than an actor’s.

Puppets as intimate objects, as the title of the article suggests, pursue this question: how does the paradox of the puppet allow the creation of a deep sense of intimacy, even more authentic and profound than the expression of a living and livable body? The puppet form’s tendency towards simplification and overstatement exteriorizes emotional investment. Emotions like rage, love and fear, and the resulting movements and actions are applied externally. However, the moment of externalization gives rise to ramification, as it seems possible to multiply the paradoxical tension between actuality and virtuality. The marionette’s paradoxical positioning translates and resonates through its theatrical and cinematic virtualization. O’Pray’s remark clearly suggests this. The blending of Švankmajer’s cinematic and theatrical techniques with the puppet’s expressivity allows the creation of a deeper sense of the intimate space that puppetry inheres and which translates and interacts with the hubs of the other modes of expression – along the solidifying shell of an exoskeleton.

Respectively, the communicating tubes respond to puppetry’s characteristic tendency towards simplicity and overstatement. When the life-size marionettes of Don Felipe and Doña Maria appear on stage, they expose the story, in a nutshell: how they deeply love each other, how Doña Maria is promised to Don Šajn, the brother of Don Felipe and how they plan to marry in secret at the ninth hour (see Figure 2). In addition, Don Felipe’s first lines pre-emptively foretell his death by the sword of his brother Don Šajn, with blood gushing out, when he says:

Doña Maria and Don Felipe are deeply immersed in their feelings and do not notice Don Šajn watching from the auditorium. Although the two characters do not realize his presence, the viewer is quite unexpectedly made aware of him:

The film highlights the hermeneutic phenomenological tension between detachment and attachment in this scene: two characters grossly immersed, while a third character literally looks on from the higher ranks of the auditorium – an effect which is intensified by intercuts picturing the organs that bear witness (eyes and ears) and the betrayal, with a hermeneutic phenomenological tension building between cinematic acts of distanciation, emotional streams of immersion and being caught in the act.

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Figure 2.

Still from Don Šajn(1970), showing Don Felipe and Doña Maria in a loving embrace. © ATHANOR Film Production Company, Llc. Reproduced with permission.

While bold expressive gestures and simple motifs determine the narrative flow, the film finds specifically cinematic terms to pick up on the double state of the puppet. This seems particularly true for states of intensified emotionality. In a wonderful scene, Doña Maria rushes to the stage because she believes Don Felipe is waiting for her. While she is heading towards the stage, as a puppet would swiftly and determinedly do (and most of the time does so in the film), the filmic translation unexpectedly wanders off. In response to her exuberant joy, the film pictures her in swift, displacing cuts outside the theatre, running through the garden, ecstatically driven by the joy to see (and marry) her loved one. The joyous excess of this scene instigates a variety of wonder that only cinematically wandering off can achieve. On the grounds of these cinematic acts of translation (responses to the intimate space of puppetry), the viewer is enabled and encouraged to get into contact with the fascinating and irritating effigies, to get in touch with their paradoxical double state of existence.

This is particularly evident in Don Šajn’s descent into hell at the end of the film. As has already been intimated, the scene is curiously doubled: two descents are intercut, one showing Don Šajn running through the wood (a real wood outside the theatre) and one with Don Šajn sitting calmly on the stage, reflecting on the events that have taken place. Accordingly, Don Šajn’s subsequent death is pictured differently. In one ending, Don Šajn falls into an anonymous grave in the wood, covered by leaves. In the other, a theatrical mechanism carries the marionette underneath the stage, showing again close-ups of the puppet’s eyes and ears in the rhythm of the solemn chimes of a bell. When Don Šajn runs, driven by angst through the woods, the immersive experience is foregrounded. The ending is quite cinematic, as it avoids distanciation. At the same time, the strong emphasis of emotionality that the cinematic ending exhibits, with Don Šajn’s feeling of angst foregrounded, lacks the capability for reflection. The theatrical ending masters this ability. On its own, though, the capacity to reflect – divorced of feeling – is at risk of moralizing in an overstated way. Allowing different experiential modes to converge highlights the double-edged nature of understanding itself. Feeling and knowing are intertwined in this – the puppet form epitomizes this, as interior and exterior worlds are given the space to resonate in new ways. Švankmajer’s fascination with puppets is rooted in this predilection.

Communicating vessels: The role of object animation in Don Šajn

Communicating vessels, as André Breton (1990[1933]) understands them, allow communicative exchanges to take place between segregated realms, between states of dreaming and waking, between the exterior world of facts and the interior world of emotion. ¹⁴ The image refers to a scientific experiment with the same name, where gas passes from one side to the other: a passing back and forth epitomizing reciprocity and interchangeability. However, the imagery offered in Breton’s book is richer. It speaks of ramification, of capillary tissues opening multiple channels of communication between sides: ‘The role of this tissue is visibly to assure the constant interchange which must take place in thought between exterior and interior worlds, an interchange requiring a continual interpenetration of waking and sleeping activity’ (Breton, 1978: 71).

The exchange takes place not between sides, but multiple participants – part-takers yet to be discovered. Reciprocity fades in view of curiosity: which communicative partners are to be revealed in the thickness of things? Breton (1990[1933]:139) compares the thickness to fog, which compels surrender. The partners are not known or imagined, yet. One has to immerse oneself, give oneself entirely, in order to get into contact with the Other. Only the immersive experience of letting go allows one to see and feel the ramification in the tissue of the thickness of things. Feeling and knowing submerge in this respect. As Breton writes in Communicating Vessels (1990[1933]: 139), the thickness is ‘immediately sensible when I open my eyes’. Immediacy does not equal transparency. Surrender means to renounce any expectation in the direction of feeling and knowing. Travelling back and forth between sides presupposes this. It expresses: ‘These things I love, how should I not also hate them for hiding all the others from me so cruelly?’

Communicative vessels thus describe rather a conjunctive mode with different voices and rhythms overlapping. Feeling and knowing one communicative channel (thickness) means to lose touch with another. This is why points of entry and exit – like the eyes and ears in Don Šajn – become important. Communicative vessels trespass realms in the act of communication and thereby interrelate them.

Within the communicative flow, object-animated elements take the role of enchanting the film’s world, as when the theatrical setting springs magically to life, candles flow on stage, stage sets magically unroll, or a puppet’s face is being sliced off. The magic of the film resides very much in scenes like these. Simple objects are endowed with life by animation techniques, theatrical objects that belong to the marionettes’ world. Using the technique sparsely and in conjunction with masked performance as a prime source of the puppets’ movement highlights the power of enchantment. The rhythms emerging in relation to object-animated sequences represent one of the subsystems responding to puppetry as a main frame of reference, albeit a quite important one.

The opening sequence of the theatre coming to life presents a good example. The film begins with the camera moving into the resting space of the theatre. The viewer is led through arches and corridors to the heart of the theatre, the auditorium. When the camera finally reaches the dark space, the mood of the film changes. A state of heightened attention and alertness seizes the scene. The camera continues to explore the room and moves gradually out of the darker area of the auditorium towards the stage. Instead of the previous orchestral music, one hears sparse, sporadic sounds that resonate out of some distance and are interpolated with indistinguishable murmurs and the luring noises of exhalation. The viewer follows the camera behind the stage along the line of marionettes hanging motionless and stiff on the wall staring with their immovable eyes and faces into the dark. As one reaches the backstage mechanism – an inpenetrable jungle of ropes, reels, wheels and wooden frames – the mood of the film changes again. The mechanism sets itself off, accompanied and accentuated by an eerie reverberating sound. The spell of the strange state of floating suspension is broken. The musical score of the film takes over with a small hammer frenetically striking against a metal disc. A multitude of candles are lit and placed in front of the stage. Side panels unroll. Finally, Don Felipe and Doña Maria jump off their hooks and rush onto stage ready to conjure up the succession of dramatic events that are about to unfold.

The object world and the way that Švankmajer engages with it through animation techniques share the ontological ambiguity of the puppets. The theatre and its mechanisms retreat into an immobile state of lifelessness and untouchability before the mechanisms are set in motion via animation techniques: sets unfolding, candles flowing onto the stage, and so on. The object world of the theatre springs to life just as the marionettes in Don Šajn. The object world and the puppet world touch mimetically.

Suzanne Buchan (2006: 17) emphasizes how the understanding of the animated illusion (a world) depends strongly on how this illusion relates to the lived experience of reality (the world). Puppet animation presents a special case in this respect. Puppets pose as tangible objects operating in real sets, but what is happening in between, the movement, gestures and dramatic events, does not occur in real time and space (p. 21). The animated puppet takes the imaginary leap of object animation further, dramatizing it more clearly. As Laura Ivins-Hulley (2008) puts it:

We know if the character is hand-drawn, the action onscreen cannot be literal. We know the puppet is not actually alive, performing this dance. It is manipulated by a human to give it the appearance of literal action. In many forms of stop motion animation, we watch a three-dimensional object, so that the performance carries a paradoxical indexicality: the puppet tangibly exists outside the film, but its movement does not.

When Don Šajn uses masked actors, the paradoxical status of the puppet is not abrogated but diverted. By exploring the tension between masked performance and puppetry, by literally enclosing the actor within the puppet, Švankmajer feigns the illusion of intimate immersion and distancing exteriority. The mimetic act of displacement (masked actor for externally animated puppet) does not diminish the configurational capability of profound expressivity on the part of the puppet. ¹⁵ The case is quite the opposite, as with the blood flowing from a puppet’s body. The reason for this is the remarkable folding of the iconic and virtual values of the puppet form onto each other. The iconic character, intertwined with the puppet’s inferior simplicity, is allowed to multiply and diversify to the same degree as its virtual life and metaphoric value. Communicative acts and interchanges on the iconic as much as virtual level become eminently important. The concatenation of theatrical puppet, actor puppet, animated puppet and animated object illustrates this. The puppet and object share the ambiguity between life and death: mimetic points of reversibility that make exchanges and new ways of access possible. Heather Crow (2006: 59) suggests: ‘Animation as a film form has a long-standing relationship with death and (im)mobility.’ Animation techniques bring objects to life, create the illusion of movement and dramatic expressivity. They are also irrevocably tied to death and fatality – very much like puppets and marionettes.

This is where animation techniques and puppets touch and enrich each other in terms of hubs. As cinematic means, animation techniques are less constrained in the use of time and space; they are free to upscale and miniaturize the animated world. Švankmajer introduces this cinematic freedom to the theatrical world of puppetry in Don Šajn, by upscaling the puppets, mobilizing them and making them more independent of (narrative) time constraints, which live performances are subjected to. Object animation, again, draws attention to the material world, its fragility and haptic qualities. Bringing materials to life means to engage with their nature and finiteness, as applying animation techniques implies dealing with inertia and physical constraints. The cinematic manipulation of objects demands an unusually sustained patience, an elevated responsiveness to sensory and bodily stimuli and a high tolerance to physical pain for the animator to perform. The physical and imaginative engagement with puppets appears quite similar to objects in this respect. It requires intimacy, where the ability to know and understand is not obvious. Object animation presupposes the will to know and feel that which cannot be understood, resulting in an ambivalent, pondering state between enrichment (curiosity/liveliness) and distanciation (disinterest/lifelessness). Conjoining puppetry and animation techniques on these grounds introduces most certainly aberrations in both directions: the puppetry experience and the perception of object-animated elements.

Metaphors of fluidity

Notions related to fluidity, such as confluence, flow, stream, and so on have been used frequently in this article’s argumentation. They represent apt terms in relation to the phenomenon of intermediality, but also the puppet form, as they highlight transformative and communicative processes. For this reason, it seems worthwhile to consider the trope of fluidity briefly in its metaphorical expressivity. The imagery can be divided into three narrative complexes, according to Georg Witte (2010: 166): water, flow and liquefaction. The first pertains to water in the sense of substance with the spatial quality of depth attached. Imagery primarily concerns the idea of things disappearing and reemerging in deep waters. Flow, on the other hand, is associated with density and force (p. 167). Fluidity’s transformative power fits in here. Currents can be strong or weak, playful or fatal. The flow supports the process of metamorphosis rhythmically. Liquidation shares this dynamic relation, but in a different direction. As it describes changes in states of matter, it appears more air-bound and lighter than the imagery associated with flow. The latter refers to more tenacious and thicker matter.

The puppet’s movement, its expressivity and narrativity flow in a certain mode and rhythm, with the iconic and the virtual character restlessly folding into one another. Peter Zajac (2003: 574) explains that it is impossible to think of the metaphors of flowing, floating and gliding as something different to the folded metaphor with all its dissociations, cuts and breaches breaking it up into segments and sequences. Gilles Deleuze (1993: 3) characterizes the fold as Baroque configuration as follows:

The Baroque refers not to an essence but rather to an operative function, to a trait. It endlessly produces folds …Yet the Baroque trait twists and turns its folds, pushing them to infinity, fold over fold, one upon the other. The Baroque fold unfurls all the way to infinity. First, the Baroque differentiates its folds in two ways, by moving along two infinities, as if infinity were composed of two stages or floors: the pleats of matter and the folds in the soul.

In relation to this, Deleuze asserts: ‘Perhaps only at the limit does texture become most evident, before rupture or tearing, when stretching, no longer being opposed to the fold, now expresses it in its pure state’ (p. 36).

The metaphors of transformational flux and fluidity in relation to Don Šajn express a paradoxical idea of pause in flux. The concept of the fold addresses not simply the vital tension between matter and soul, but explores the indefinite folding of forces, dynamics, failures, ruptures and limits within this tension and bearing on life and death – the iconic or actual character. As Deleuze (1995: 111) adds in Negotiations, 1972–1990:

Yes, this line is deadly, too violent and fast, carrying us into breathless regions … We need to both cross the line, and make it endurable, workable, thinkable. We have to manage to fold the line and establish an endurable zone in which to install ourselves, confront things, take hold, breathe – in short think.

The puppet creates such a space to think within this deadly, breathless folding of strong and weak forces (feeling with and looking on/of) that take the forms of simple, complex or wave-like curves, of disrupted, chopped, staccato-like streams, of bends, bows and unlimited folded cascades (Zajac, 2003: 574ff.).

Don Šajn counterbalances the relentless and restless stream of disruptive, chopping, staccato-like motions and soft, wave-like movements. The beauty of the last part of the introduction sequence, for example, evolves directly out of the excelling movements/metaphors of transformational fluidity. Wooden frames effortlessly glide past each other, forever changing the opening that forms between them. The candles literally flow onto the stage. The set designs magically unroll to show off their soft flowing textures and colours. However, the most inspiring aspect of this moment of avid fluidity is the music. It lavishly overflows the sequence with playful lightness and affection; flowing, floating, gliding. ¹⁶

Another example is the murder scene of Don Felipe. Don Šajn repeatedly stabs his brother’s wooden body and each time his sword cuts into the body a fountain of blood gushes out. Transformational fluidity and staccato-like rhythm are literally encountering each other. The penetrating movement of the sword counterbalances the flowing, floating, gliding liquidity of the blood, both coming from opposite directions. Expressive matter and soul (of the baroque fold/puppet) come together, bearing metaphorically on life and death, flowing, gliding, chopping, killing. The point of narrative culmination excels intricate layers of emotions: Don Felipe’s love for Doña Maria which he confirms in the moment of death at the sword of his brother; and Don Šajn’s foudroyant enragement in the face of the betrayal by his brother and beloved, culminating in this scene of dreadful and excessive overkill. The narrative empowerment of the puppet in the moment of emotional involvement closely corresponds to its magical endowment as it occurs in conjunction with the counterbalancing of transformational fluidity and disruptive staccato-like rhythms. The transformational currents sensuously enrich and intensify the emotional involvement of/with the puppets’ inner lives, linking them to the world of action – while at the same time reinforcing a self-referential awareness of the configuration itself. Subversive narrative potential evolves between these two lines of conflict.

This kind of folding the line, of opening flights of passage between the lived and the livable is most evident in the delicate moments of remorse and fear that create pauses in the rapid succession of the events. Close-ups of Don Šajn’s immovable eyes or Don Šajn covering his eyes with his hands signal a gesture of utter remorse and despair. These moments of intimacy and vulnerability usually happen after the murder scenes and contradict Don Šajn’s otherwise impulsive and bold behaviour. They suggest that the puppet’s existential double state is intertwined with the paradoxical nature of affection itself. Perceiving an object as uncanny, as enthusing or disrupting, as passionately, ethical or aesthetically engaging, as good, as evil, as failing, we are recognizing these tendencies or nuances between feeling with and on/of the puppet. It makes clear that the emotional engagement with the puppet transcends its wooden body (virtual function) and at the same time depends on its objective appearance (iconic value). The interdependence of the virtual and iconic value in the puppet’s expressivity seem, indeed, to point to the paradoxical disposition of emotional affection itself. Ricoeur is quite clear in this respect. In Fallible Man (1986), he argues that of all the dispositions and paradoxes that men are exposed to (in their relations to the world and others) the paradoxical nature of affection runs the deepest. It reveals a most vulnerable and fragile aspect of man’s existence and self-perception. This is due to the fact that feeling is both revealing and self-immersive. It reveals tendencies and nuances of the object/Other which originate at the same time in the object and the subject. Feeling is substantiated in objects and beings, but never posits being in itself – just as the puppet’s movement and expression are never quite existent. For this reason, it attaches and detaches the subject to and from the intentionally perceived object, for feeling towards an object places the self (self-immersive detachment) and the object (self-distancing attachment) in the centre. Ricoeur asserts:

Feeling, for instance love or hate, is without any doubt intentional: it is a feeling of ‘something’ – the lovable, the hateful. But it is a very strange intentionality that on the one hand designates qualities felt on things, on persons, on the world, and on the other hand manifests and reveals the way in which the self is inwardly affected. This paradox is quite perplexing: an intention and an affection coincide in the same experience, a transcending aim and the revelation of an inwardness. (p. 84)

The paradoxical revelation of a transcending inwardness (self-distancing attachment) and self-immersed exteriorization (self-immersive detachment) is what bewilders and enthuses the viewer when Don Šajn holds his arms in front of his immovable eyes. Within these moments of pause in flux, of wandering off, one is reminded of the paradoxical nature of feeling and its double significance in terms of feeling and knowing the Other. Ricoeur writes:

If it were understood that the objective direction of a behavior and the aim of a feeling are one and the same thing, that feeling is nothing but the very direction of behavior as felt, we would understand both tendency and feeling, and, in understanding them, one by the other, we would advance in our understanding of the still more fundamental reciprocity of feeling and knowing. (p. 86)

The discrepancy between the emotional and the objective body constitutive of the puppet form tells us something very fundamental about how we feel and know. It shows that feeling and knowing take place in terms of a mimetic displacement, meaning that we are to learn about these intimate things and fragilities only indirectly over the intentionally driven, narrative involvement that interweaves and enmeshes ourselves with the world: emotionally, metaphorically, sensually and always only in intimate, dialogic embrace with Otherness.

Conclusion

It becomes clear that the puppet as a medium of artistic expression has little to do with a sentimental (re)appropriation of folk customs. The puppet or marionette harks back to primordial states that are commonly associated with simplicity, naiveté and a paradoxical double positioning. Švankmajer’s masked actors, in particular, submerge and transverse livable and lived experience. Puppets as intimate objects position the viewer in a folded, ruptured line that moves back and forth between immersion and detachment; a state of delirium or make-believe that creates room to breathe and think. This state of delirium touches the paradoxical nature of affection itself, as has been shown – a state of uttermost fragility and vulnerability. When the puppets experience excessive joy, rage, fear and despair in Don Šajn, they enter a state of heightened reciprocity that allows the viewer/Švankmajer to err, wander off, outgrow expressive matter (iconic value) and thereby to mimetically (re)create a language of becoming, a language outside language, pushing cinema and puppetry to its limits (virtual value). As Deleuze et al. (1997: 230) assert with regard to the reciprocal bond between life, literature and language:

Language seems to be seized by a delirium, which forces it out of its usual furrows. Language as a whole … being toppled or pushed to a limit, to an outside or reverse side that consists of Visions and Auditions that no longer belong to any language. These visions … are not outside language, but the outside of language. The writer as seer and hearer, the aim of literature: it is the passage of life within language that constitutes Ideas.

The bond between language and life/death reveals in its mythic and symbolic qualities deep anxieties, passions and vulnerabilities which press through the interstices of language, through its intervals, through the aberrations that mimetically construct and deconstruct. Means of expression (communicative channels) shift between the ability to reveal (epistemology) and immerse (ontology). Entering and exiting illusionary worlds and the dynamics of their means of expression (micro rhythms) allows us to learn about the emerging worlds, their interrelatedness and their relation to real experience. Don Šajn emphasizes the interrelatedness of revelatory and immersive processes in the puppet form and its dramatic expressivity, conjoined to other illusionary worlds. The focus is on finding points of access. The different means of expression work together in this. The actors disguised as puppets upscale the figures and settings to life size, moving them closer to real worlds, while the process of upscaling distances the means of expression from the art of puppetry. High standards of formalization emphasize again the puppetry aspect, removing it from cinematic illusion, which again is reintroduced in skilful camerawork, editing patterns and lighting. Stop motion techniques are reduced to a minimum, as the puppets are animated via theatrical performance, but where they are applied they radiate with magic. Object/subject worlds are approached, crossed, entered and exited via these channels that submerge in a state of intercommunicability. ¹⁷ Imagery of objects and organs pierced by swords and words abound. Don Šajn is a violent film and the puppets’ eyes, ears, chests and hands form prime targets of acts of aggression, as has been shown. The organs may or may not serve as channels, they may transform and transport information or not, they may or may not allow movement, in line with the paradoxical positioning of the puppet. Within the act of mimetic displacement, rupture is restlessly and relentlessly counterbalanced by immersion: ‘Whether active or passive, derivative forces of matter refer to primitive forces which are those of the soul. But always the two levels, their harmony, and their harmonization’ (Deleuze, 1993: 37).

The points of intimacy, the gestures mimic the pain of the animated material, the devotion to self-displacement and to self-transformation, the bewilderment in between believing and knowing. These intimate moments create pauses in flux that allow the taking of breath and holding back enfolded within and along the lines of mimetic composition/decomposition. They relate to the puppet, but also to the communicating vessels brought into resonance with each other. Learning more about the theatrical puppet, its traditions and characteristics is in Don Šajn inseparably intertwined with understanding it in a confluence of communicating channels, which enrich and alter each other like the hubs of coral polyps joined in a colony and linked to each other by the mask of an exoskeleton.