A Surreal Invisible Silence
Mime is the art of making the invisible visible, according to Marcel Marceau. A very complex man, Marceau was the recipient of the Raoul Wallenberg Medal for his role is savings hundreds of children during wartime France. ”While in the French underground, Marceau used his artistic skill to change the identity cards of scores of children so they would appear too young to be sent to labor camps. He also posed as a Boy Scout leader, and under pretense of hiking in the alps, he led children to safety in neutral Switzerland”.
An expression of the tragic, the unspeakable horror of Nazi occupation and it consequences forged the leitmotif of Marceau’s work, the power of illusion to show human fragility and the forces of reconciliation. His perception of good and evil is synonymous with the Biblical scriptures of Cain and Abel where the good is younger, naive and lacks depth of experience to appreciate its destiny and the formidable foe that obscurity represents. ‘‘We shall never, never destroy evil, unfortunately, but good exists and also has to reach maturity.”
Marcel Marceau , 1963
The use of the ruse, manipulation and deceit as a justification of means towards lofty causes is similar to Jacob and Esau; the sleight of hand, and agility of Marceau to frame his minodramas, are modern parables of ancient themes. Marceau said of Wallenberg, ”To succeed he was obliged to bribe and blackmail Nazi officials, issuing thousands and thousands of protective passports to save those people from a horrible death in gas chambers”
”The people who escaped the concentration camps could not talk about them. They didn’t know what to say. I have Jewish origins-perhaps that counted in the choice of silence, subconsciously.” ( Marcel Marceau ) Or, a silent form of expressionism filled with a sense of the mystical appropriated from William Blake, an influence on Marceau. His unique life experiences contributed a surrealism to his work as well creating on the whole, a catalogue of timeless work.
Marcel Marceau, 1970
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