First motion picture

Chinese shadow puppetry, or shadow plays, originated over 2,000 years ago during the Han dynasty (206 BCE – 220 CE). The puppets, made of leather or paper, are moved about behind a translucent, thin white cloth and their silhouettes are projected on the 'screen', making this not only a theatrical art form but, in effect, the world’s first 'motion picture', some 1,900 years before the beginning of cinema. Shadow plays mix musical elements that were later seen in Chinese opera with the exquisitely hand-crafted puppets themselves, and many early stories came from Buddhist and other traditional Chinese tales. Shadow puppetry spread through Asia, most notably to Indonesia and India, and by the 18th century even to France. In time, puppets evolved from paper to ever more ornate designs as artists crafted them using leather from sheep, donkey or other animal skins. They were decorated with colourful patterns such as clouds to suggest female characters and dragons and tigers for males. Like Chinese opera, there are stock characters that audiences easily recognize. Shadow puppetry was deemed “reactionary” during the Cultural Revolution and performances were widely prohibited, but the art revived as China opened to the world in the late 1970s, and Shadow plays were prominently featured in the opening ceremonies at the 2008 Beijing Olympics. Zhang Yimou, who directed the opening ceremony at the Olympics, also made shadow puppetry the subject of his 1994 feature film, To Live. The genre is so valued now that in 2011, UNESCO placed it on the “Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity” following the inclusion on the list of Kunqu opera, which had been named to it in 2001.