École Des Beaux-Arts Lecturer Dr Paul Richer made the statement above in an 1882 essay on the history of Mesmerism and “animal magnetism — the somewhat less respectable, more sensationalistic precursor to hypnotism. Richer was describing experiments wherein he “transformed” a patient into “a veritable painter’s mannequin” who responded to various stimuli by offering one or another “expressive attitude which represents contemplation or terror.” In these experiments, even an individual with no formal training as an actor could be made subconsciously to embody a representation of emotion that exhibited an expressive, formal, and physiological “mechanical precision, I would say almost with an aura of sincerity, which one cannot fake.”

These comments by a senior figure in the history of neurology and arts-teaching have not previously been related by critics to Heinrich von Kleist’s influential essay on post-Romantic aesthetics, “Über das Marionettentheater” (On the Marionette Theater, 1810). In what follows, I sketch these links, elucidating how Kleist’s fraught vision of a mechanical, puppet-like form of performance that approached the aesthetic perfection of man before the Fall would come to be rendered in a particularly nervous, fleshy form within late nineteenth and early twentieth century visions of subconscious performance. Kleist’s strategic yoking together of apparently opposed terms to evoke a transcendent model of mechanical, unreflective, yet supremely graceful movement was echoed in later ambivalent conceptualizations of the hypnotized or entranced performer so beloved of post-Romantic and avant-garde artists. Kleist’s übermarionette returns in these later manifestations, not so much as a wooden or metallic puppet but as an automaton made of flesh, blood and — most crucially of all — nerves and tendons.