By Catherine Foster, Globe Staff, 6/16/2004

Igor Fokin graced Harvard Square with his delicately manipulated wooden puppets for only three years or so before his death in 1996, but he left a lasting impact on the thousands who saw him. Tonight, "Art Close Up," WGBH's monthly special on the arts, will air a half-hour documentary on Fokin, called "The Puppeteer."

Fokin was trained by the last surviving master of the pre-Revolutionary Russian Marionette Theater in St. Petersburg, and worked as a puppeteer in Russia for a decade before immigrating to the United States in 1993. With few resources and no access to a formal space, he and his merry wooden band performed in Harvard Square.

The documentary, by independent filmmakers Gary Henoch and Chris Schmidt, begins rather confusingly, not with the puppeteer but in a foundry, where a sculptor is making a bronze statue of one of Fokin's marionettes and talking about the legacy of the master puppeteer.

From there it moves to Fokin, showing how he prepares for a performance. He sets out a ring of rectangular mats for people to sit on and readies his rack of characters. "I take my time," he says in Russian (subtitles provided). "I'm going to be here all night."

Fokin is a handsome, bearded man who is quite charming. But he's nothing compared to his puppets. He's got skeletons, ducks, and gnome-like figures who look to be 6 to 12 inches tall. Fokin's light and skilled touch make two skeletons play patty-cake, an old woman sweep, and the feet of peasant characters turn in and out as they dance.

Of course, it's the interaction with the audience that provides the greatest joy. In one moving sequence, a little girl reaches out tentatively and a puppet ends up, inch by inch, in her lap. And there it stays, for a surprisingly long moment.

Fokin describes the difference between making puppets here and in Russia. He wanted to create an ostrich that would lay wooden eggs in kids' laps. In Russia, he says, he'd have spent all his time carving wooden eggs that would then disappear in his street performances. Here, he says, he can just buy them at a dollar store.

Unfortunately, after one energetic performance in 1996, Fokin collapsed and died of sudden heart failure at age 36. The filmmakers hadn't completed their documentary, so the story shifts from his work to the impact he had on others. Henoch and Schmidt filmed the benefit -- attended by 1,000 people -- held for Fokin's wife and children a week after his death. And in 2003, they filmed Russian-born sculptor Konstantin Simun, who was commissioned by the city of Cambridge, creating his bronze statue of Fokin's imp with a musical nose and installing it in Harvard Square. At the unveiling, children stroke the head of the bronze character with the same rapture shown by earlier children as they reached out to the wooden ones.

Not all the children are new. The little girl who had held the puppet in her lap years ago is seen again in Harvard Square. It's a bittersweet moment, with the girl's mother saying how shocking it was to lose "someone . . . so young, vibrant, and creative."

The Puppeteer On: WGBH-TV (Channel 2), as part of ‘‘Art Close Up’’

Catherine Foster can be reached at foster@globe.com

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