figuring out Riviere’s Le Pere

I recreate historical shadow puppets to teach myself mechanisms, and have finally got around to trying to crack this Chat Noir figure by Henri Riviere by using this drawing as a pattern. It’s more challenging than most, and also fascinating, so I’m making this page to recruit others for help and share in the admiration of this complex mechanism that I’m certain moved with great sophistication.

If you need background on the Chat Noir Cabaret shadow theater of turn of the century Paris, there’s lots of information out there.

THE PUPPET

The image above is a schematic drawing of two sides of a mechanized puppet designed by Henri Riviere for the Chat Noir Cabaret shadow theater in Paris in the late 19th century. It’s been reproduced in many books on shadow puppetry since then, but I finally found more about its history in the 1992 exhibition catalog Ombres Chinoises: Schattentheater en Eurasien by Helga Werde-Burger and Christopher C. Somerville.

The drawing was created and first published in 1937 by Paul Jeanne in his book Les Theatres d’Ombres a Montmartre de 1887 a 1923 who captions it:

L’Enfant prodigies (Le Pere) Ombres de Henri Riviere Epure de l’articulation, par M. Jean de Baralle.

The Werde-Burger book contains a photos of what seems to be that same Le Pere shadow puppet now in the Fritz Fey Jr. collection held by the new in-progress Kolk 17 museum. Werde-Burger documents what she believes is the same puppet being purchased by Jean de Baralle who gave it to Paul Jeanne who put it in his book.

At a glance the photo does seems like the drawing, but in looking more closely to try to pull out the pattern, there are substantial differences in the visible parts. Could the drawing possibly be that wrong, or was there at one time multiple drafts or versions of this puppet?

THE SCHEMATIC

I discarded the photo as reference for my project and went with the drawings, and so entered a mysterious puzzle. As with all of these historical recreations, though I have an educated guess, I don’t actually know what the movement is going to be since there is no video and no access to the original.

What complicated this one more is that there are two chains of linked levers, one on each side of the puppet, and it’s not clear how, if at all, they are linked to each other, or if the two sides move independently. I guessed it was the latter, since there are 2 separate pull strings with rings, one on each side of the puppet both in the drawing and the photo. Plus, a rigid lever, so basically 3 points of input of energy, or effort.

THE PATTERN

To find a pattern I print out the drawing or photo of a puppet. I label all the parts with letters, and number all the holes for joints. Then I cut each part out, and use it as a pattern to cut a new part out of cardstock. These cardstock parts are what I’ll assemble a new puppet out of.

I was able to recreate correctly, I think, side A relatively easily. It is side B where things get crazy. There are so many overlapping parts, and while the dotted lines are helpful in figuring out the layering sequence (which part goes on top of which part) when there are more than two layers this gets hard to figure out.

The other issue is the joint marks: the dots where each lever is jointed to another lever. There are dots in the drawing where there is an overlap of 4 parts, but it can’t be that all 4 parts are connected there, or the puppet wouldn’t move. It must be only 2 or 3 parts connect at that point, but which ones? There are multiple spots like this, (see 2 & 6) so if you try different arrangements with point 2, if point 6 isn’t also right, you wouldn’t know if you got 2 right. There are infinite combinations.

I tried to think it out logically from what I know about other puppets. I can see that the bicep is a parallel 4 bar linkage often used to make a forearm move. Additionally, the bottom bar is a bell crank, essentially an L shaped lever (or in this case a triangle). I can also see another 4 bar linkage, this one crossed (for mirrored movement) in parts.

A main character of this puppet is that there is a large torso piece that bends over, jointed to the base (the seated legs) on the A side. On the B side, linkage. is clearly connected directly to this torso at point 7. And I’m pretty sure the lever the pull string is on is jointed to the base at 10. But might there be any other points that are connected to the torso or base? How about point 5?

I tried jointing point 5 to the base, and so what happens is that when the mechanism on side A is pulled, it also activated side B, making the side B pull string unnecessary, and making the movement less varied. So I don’t think this is correct.