William Kentridge: Ghosts and Erasures - animated films

Art in America, Jan, 1999 by Leah Ollman

From film to film, Soho and Felix move in and out of psychic and physical equilibrium. In Johannesburg, 2nd Greatest City After Paris (1989), Kentridge's first animation (he has also made documentaries and live-action films), he introduces Soho as a burly, craggy-faced oppressor. At his phone-strewn desk Soho takes actions that reverberate even in a distant vacant lot, startling a cat up a post and sending a crippled homeless man scrambling away from his makeshift fire. Felix, meanwhile, stands naked on a balcony, observing the flow of traffic on a highway interchange below. When he is reading in the bathtub, his fantasies about the perpetually "waiting" (as the caption defines her) Mrs. Eckstein overtake the pages of his book, filling them with images of his and her bodies and tongues intermingling. While Soho buys half of Johannesburg and tends to a swarm of logistical details from his desk, his wife and Felix engage in a liaison.

Shortly thereafter, Soho "feeds the poor" (as the ironic caption reads) in his own angry and guilt-ridden way by hurling leftovers from his private feast at a long line of workers who stand silently confronting him. The men enter the scene in a ribbon that winds its way through the barren landscape--a nod to Eisenstein's symphonic use of moving crowds to indicate revolutionary force, collectivist strength. The image also reflects South Africa's political thaw of 1989, the year the film was made, when, for the first time in his life, Kentridge recalls, mass demonstrations were no longer against the law. As the film ends, the men dissolve into a smudged gray sky. Soho confronts Felix with a tiny fish that Felix previously kissed into Mrs. Eckstein's palm, and they battle each other, hand to hand. Another day in the life of the city, its violence, injustices and betrayals played out in gritty black and white.

Though a few written words generally identify characters or situations in each film, and spoken words muted to incomprehensibility sometimes infiltrate the soundtrack, music provides a sturdier anchor than language for Kentridge's concentrated, discontinuous narratives. He has on occasion commissioned scores from South African composers, but more often he appropriates existing compositions that help set and intense the emotional tone, rhythm and pace of each film. Johannesburg begins with the jaunty energy of Duke Ellington, then flows into the plaintive strains of an Eastern European choir. In the wrenching Mine (1991), Kentridge mixes segments of Dvorak's Cello Concerto in B Minor with local sounds of jackhammers and the snuffling of a rhinoceros.

In both Mine and Monument (1990), Kentridge explores the persistence of racial injustice. In Monument, a powerful, highly condensed film of only three minutes, Soho appears as a civic benefactor, basking in self-righteousness as he dedicates a public sculpture of a black laborer shown with shackled feet and a heavy burden on his back. As in Samuel Beckett's short play Catastrophe (Kentridge's launching point for this film), the statue is ultimately revealed to be a living man. As crowds cheer Soho's "gift," the slave lifts his head and opens his eyes. For the last, psychically arduous half-minute of the film, we meet the man's leveling stare and hear only his labored breath, potent proof that the condition of slavery is not yet dead enough to be memorialized.