The Making II: Makerer

Even more from the series of Japanese short films about crafts and manufacturing, which was featured yesterday: this time the videos feature the making of clockwork and tin toys, daruma (達磨, the hollow good luck dolls supposedly modelled after Bodhidharma, the founder of Zen Buddhism), oil pastel crayons, oil paint for artists, and mosquito coils.

The film about daruma shows equally fascinating traditional hand-made techniques, and slightly more industrial manufacturing of them. Even so, they’re all still finished individually just like the other items shown in these videos, the paint and the mosquito coils included. The pastel one is a bit tedious at the start, but if you’re an artist like me or otherwise just get excited about colours, stick with it and the one about paint for some huge, lush blobs of intense, glossy pigment erotica. The film about mosquito coils is initially rather alarming because despite them working with insecticide all day, not a single person is wearing a mask or gloves. A little research, however, showed that pyrethrum and pyrethrins derive from chrysanthemum flowers (as shown in the film) and are so safe to humans and other mammals that a person would have to ingest many grams of the substance to even get ill. The film also does a little introduction to anti-mosquito incense, which was in fact invented by a Japanese gentleman in the 1890s, although it was his wife who came up with the improved coiling version still in use today. Guess who usually gets the credit, though?

And since we’re on the subject of mosquito coils– how often does that happen?– what a great excuse for a link to two of my favourite posts on the site, though they’re among the least favourite with readers: MUSHUDA and Mushuda II: Miscegenation!

(See also Fascinating Repairmen )

The New Mother

Some dreadful automata.

“And still the new mother stays in the little cottage, but the windows are closed and the doors are shut, and no one knows what the inside looks like. Now and then, when the darkness has fallen and the night is still, hand in hand Blue-Eyes and the Turkey creep up near to the home in which they once were so happy, and with beating hearts they watch and listen; sometimes a blinding flash comes through the window, and they know it is the light from the new mother’s glass eyes, or they hear a strange muffled noise, and they know it is the sound of her wooden tail as she drags it along the floor.”

The New Mother, from Anyhow Stories, Moral and Otherwise by Lucy Clifford, 1882.

On my other blog I was speculating recently about the apparent reversal there has been in popular culture’s view of automata, mannequins and puppets over the past century or so: from jolly good fun to more or less guaranteed nightmare fuel. One-hundred and twenty years on from Clifford’s Anyhow Stories, it’s hard to comprehend that these were stories she once told to her own children at bedtime. They’re absolutely bloody terrifying to me as an adult. The last few pages of The New Mother chill me and almost make me want to cry every single time I read them. The only person who I can imagine reading these to a child nowadays is Josef Fritzl. You can read the whole book here if you don’t feel much like sleeping soundly tonight.

The equally traumatising and borderline psychologically child-abusing Struwwelpeter likewise comes unashamedly replete with children committing minor acts of disobedience and receiving in return overkill burnings, drownings and visits from the great, long red-legged Scissorman who breaks in to cut off their thumbs. It’s from the same period and it was also devised by an apparently loving and normal parent for his children, and it was marketed as a book for the very young to great success.

In short: a century ago coulrophobia was apparently an alien concept, but tacitly or directly threatening children with dismemberment, cruel abandonment and vastly disproportionate retribution was an accepted part of responsible parenthood. Now it’s the other way around:  we all recognise the joke when Bart Simpson says he can’t sleep because the clown will get him; porcelain dolls are a horror film trope. Meanwhile even films for adults come with prissy, spinsterish warnings that they “contain scenes of mild peril.”

This train of thought reminded me of yet another odd and out of print book I have- Automata & Mechanical Toys by Mary Hillier (1976). The scans I’m posting here struck me as particularly illustrative of the shift in consensus perception of these kinds of toys, from good clean fun to props on the set of John Doe’s apartment in Se7en. Clifford’s book doesn’t disprove this thesis either, since the horror is not really about the visual uncanny. Indeed we as readers  don’t “see” The New Mother ourselves, only disturbing signs that she has taken up residence; the light from her eyes, the scraping of her tail. The children in the story never lay eyes upon her either, having fled in terror while she was forcing her way into their home.

Let’s start with this little beauty, shall we? This is somewhere in the neighbourhood of what I conceive of The New Mother looking like, only worse, and six feet tall, and dressed like a Victorian governess in a black poke bonnet. Imagine it walking. Towards you. And it wants to be your mother. “Celluloid head, glass eyes, human hair” is an evocative and disturbing triad, isn’t it? Although not as bad as “human head, celluloid eyes, glass hair.”

It also reminds me of the Quay Brothers’ Street of Crocodiles, an animation that has haunted me ever since I saw it in the late Eighties or early Nineties. I saw it again recently, and it’s still brilliant.