As a child we experience the world in a completely different way from adults. Our senses are attuned to even the slightest external stimuli. Our unbound, fertile imagination whirls and creates wondrous links and conceptions that exceed all logic and "common sense". Images and sounds are conceived like fractals that give birth to new infinite designs. For, at that young age, there are no boundaries and so many empty spaces to fill in. Later on in life, these empty spaces will become casts regulating behavior and understanding.
A child can very easily relate to a puppet or a marionette because the puppet world is an airy miniature of the real world. The child, dwarfed in it's everyday existence by all things grownup, suddenly sees something small and familiar. Something that it can relate to by intuition alone, effortlessly. Imagination takes over and the child believes. It's whole being is in fact absorbed into the characters, into the story.
In our adult life we sometimes get flashbacks of our childhood. But it's always a fleeting moment when you loose control and dive into the rabbit hole like Alice. Just a spark and it's gone. The shadow of a memory long forgotten. But in that tiny moment there is something magical in what we experience. A letting go of all the templates, the iron casts and the frames. A re-emergence of that innocence. The infinite contentment of re-living that instant of childish insouciance.
These thoughts came to my mind when I first saw the puppet theatre scene in Krzysztof Kieslowski's " La double vie de Véronique" in 1991. The music, by Zbigniew Preisner, makes this magical scene a cinematic moment you will always remember. A shortcut to the rabbit hole.
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