One of the more memorable things to me about the film 'The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassuss' was the collision of cultures, the idea of this wonderfully baroque horse-drawn carnival show pitching up in contemporary London, a world of cyber-technology and instant messaging, a world slowly drowning in an ocean of information. Would the show find an audience? Would people relate to it? Could it even happen in this day and age other than on film?
The couple of characters in the pictures above, along with their traveling side-show, walked slowly into our little town in South West France the day before the circus that is 'Le Tour' rolled through (more of that later), much as I imagine mummers or traveling players would appear in towns and hamlets throughout Europe in days gone by. Pitching up in front of the Hotel De Ville they soon attracted an audience, ranging in age from the young to the very old, all of whom welcomed them enthusiastically. Their good-natured banter with the crowd slowly evolved into a 'performance' on the lines of an old-time medicine show, the doctor proceeding to extol at great lengths the strength and potency of the potions he was selling. The crowd quite happily engaged with this, one young lady being selected to act as the 'foil' for the doctor and his servant, and they all seemed both familiar with the story and aware of what their roles and responses should be. The whole event had a timeless charm to it, nothing forced, certainly nothing artificial about it, and you felt that it could have occurred here at any time over the last two hundred years or so. How the medicine show arrived with us, unheralded, and how and where they disappeared on to, I have no idea and I really don't want to know; I would much rather just think of them slowly traveling through the little towns and hamlets amongst the foothills of the Pyrenees, selling their potions as they go.
It did cross my mind what sort of response they would have got on the U.K. - the side-show either set fire to or upended in the nearest car-park, I suppose, or am i just being cynical? The nearest thing that we would have, i would think, in terms of populist street theatre, would be the traditional 'Punch and Judy' show, although even that would seem much diminished in its present form. The graphic novel 'The Comical Tragedy or the Tragical Comedy of Mr Punch' by Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean seems to me to capture exactly that melancholic, slightly scary air of damp, end-of-the-season seasides towns where both the colour and the life seem to be draining away, accompanied by the cries of the gulls. Visually stunning, both surreal and realistic with its sense of subdued violence.
It did cross my mind what sort of response they would have got on the U.K. - the side-show either set fire to or upended in the nearest car-park, I suppose, or am i just being cynical? The nearest thing that we would have, i would think, in terms of populist street theatre, would be the traditional 'Punch and Judy' show, although even that would seem much diminished in its present form. The graphic novel 'The Comical Tragedy or the Tragical Comedy of Mr Punch' by Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean seems to me to capture exactly that melancholic, slightly scary air of damp, end-of-the-season seasides towns where both the colour and the life seem to be draining away, accompanied by the cries of the gulls. Visually stunning, both surreal and realistic with its sense of subdued violence.
And finally, the carnival and the fairground have always seemed to me to have something of the night about them - Ray Bradburys 'Something Wicked This Way Comes' perfectly captures that sense of un-ease, that age-old forces are at work here...
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