At MoMA PS1 there was an incredible exhibit by Egyptian artist, Wael Shawky titled Cabaret Crusades. The exhibit included a movie trilogy that was all a marionette show detailing the crusades inspired by Lebanese historian Amin Maalouf’s text The Crusades Through Arab Eyes, as well as a display case showing all of the marionettes that were featured in the films. The first film used 200 year old wooden marionettes, the second used hand made ceramic marionettes, and the third used glass marionettes made by master Venetian glass blowers. They were all very nicely detailed and had working mouths and eyelids and were really beautiful and also a little bit creepy.
I loved these movies but they were each over 30 minutes and the last one was two hours long, so there was no way to be able to see it all, which always frustrates me about seeing video work in a museum. It also isn’t available to view online which sucks because I was extremely interested in watching the whole series. It was cool to see such a playful medium be used to describe such a horrible event in world history, which sort of relates to the idea of the 9/11 flipbook I posted about earlier. The visible strings of the marionettes is a nice symbol for the people being moved to these actions by their belief in god or a creator (the artist) that they were trying to serve during the crusades. The films were all in Arabic, which I think is a beautiful language, and I loved the singing. It was a very cool take on the crusades and I’m glad that artists are still exploring this part of our history and telling the story from other perspectives, which is important especially to western cultures that usually only hear about it from a christian perspective and it isn’t talked about extensively in schools or anything, at least not for me. I want to pay this guy to watch the movies. I might email him about it since I couldn’t find the movies on the internet.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r7U-pqjdHIY]-Beaudry Allen