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Marcel Marceaus life and visions

Published : Friday, 22 September, 2017 at 12:00 AM  Count : 470
Iftikhar Hossen
Marcel Marceau, born March 22, 1923 in Strasbourg, France, became one of the most famous mimes in the world. He created his own school, Compagnie de Mime Marcel Marceau, in 1948, for the development of the mime arts. Bip, was the white-faced character, based on the French Pierrot, he played on stage and screen.
Among the many original performances he has devised are the mime-drama Don Juan (1964), and the ballet Candide (1971). He has also created about 100 pantomimes, such as The Creation of the World. In 1978 he became head of the Ecole de Mimodrame Marcel Marceau.
At seven years old, before he becomes Marcel Marceau, Marcel Mangel goes to the cinema in Strasbourg with his his father, a butcher with a fine voice. The film is City Lights. A heavy curtain in the cinema pulls back as the lights go down. He sits next to his father, his shoes dangling, the seat and the velvety darkness huge around him.
Music. On the screen: a title, credits, grand municipal buildings, a crowd of people made of blacks, whites, and grays. They're all still, waiting for something. Then comes a line of speech written in curled white letters, and a fat man gesticulating-these are the final days of the silent-film era. On the screen, a lady holding flowers pulls a ribbon to the sound of a trumpet fanfare, unveiling three giant stone figures. And there is Charlie Chaplin, horizontal, asleep across a giant stone lap. He stretches a leg upward, itches it, yawns. In the crowd, chaos. Chaplin sits up, grabs his cane, tips his bowler hat, tries to wriggle off the sculpture, and gets stuck. He fills the screen, the size of three Marcels.
When the butcher looks down, he sees Marcel's eyes wide open in wonder, an expression the boy will mime often in years to come when he is the entertainment, being watched by rows of faces in theaters around the world.
The butcher's son begins to practice Chaplin's walk, borrowing his father's trousers and cane to waddle down the streets in their neighborhood. He learns Chaplin's slapstick routines, finds the timing. At his aunt's summer house, he puts on performances, miming famous stories-Robinson Crusoe, Robin Hood-andChaplin's Little Tramp.
His childhood is interrupted by war. When the German troops advance on Strasbourg, the butcher's family has two hours to pack up and leave home; they flee to the Dordogne, where Marcel and his brother join the Resistance movement. Marcel is a talented illustrator: he uses red crayon and ink to alter the identity cards of Jewish youths so they appear too young to be sent to labor camps. (Later, wanted by the Gestapo, he and his brother will forge their own cards, changing their last name to Marceau in tribute to General Severin-Marceau-Desgraviers, a French Revolutionary.) He poses as a scout leader to smuggle groups of children to the Spanish border and over the Alps to Switzerland.
In a forest near Limoges, on a summer afternoon toward the end of the war, he and a companion enter a sunlit clearing and find themselves face to face with a unit of German soldiers-thirty men and an officer. Boots, breeches, pointed collars, thirty-one helmets, thirty-one pairs of eyes looking out from beneath. Marcel assumes the role of the advance guard of a larger French regiment, puffs his chest, looks squarely back at the Germans, and commands them to surrender their weapons. They do.
The writer is a freelance contributor.  


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