Before he became the world’s most famous puppeteer – the man responsible for The Muppets and Big Bird; and turning David Bowie into the Goblin King in Labyrinth – Jim Henson was an experimental film-maker.
In his Oscar-nominated 1965 short, Time Piece, Henson stars as a man transcending time and space, the percussive beats of ticking clocks, heartbeats and other machinery creating the rhythms for the film’s montage. In a film that takes cues from Georges Méliès and Dziga Vertov, Henson goes from playing hospital patient to Tarzan to George Washington. He was a man who could seemingly be anyone, and do anything, much like Henson himself.
