William Kentridge: Ghosts and Erasures - animated films

Art in America, Jan, 1999 by Leah Ollman

In Mine, the plunger of Soho's coffee press descends through his desk and on into the dark, layered subterranean world that he commands. ("Eckstein" is the surname of an actual turn-of-the-century mineowner.) As it pushes downward, excavating history and not just earth, the plunger passes through the miners' unforgiving planklike bunks and continues deeper into the dark past, until it reaches an infamous historical diagram illustrating the most efficient way to pack men and women aboard slave ships. Kentridge's deft transmutations and the stark contrasts between the comraderie of servitude and the isolation of power yield a film of great poignancy.

Kentridge describes himself, and Felix, as captives of Johannesburg. He has lived there all his life, studying politics and African culture at university and settling with his wife, Anne, who is a physician, and their three children only a few miles from where he grew up. The barren dryness of the Johannesburg landscape was something he resented, the artist says, until he began drawing it, "almost as a revenge against its nothingness."[5] In the drawings for projection, the land figures as prominently as a third major character. It appears desiccated, but living currents flow beneath its surface, for it has absorbed the lives and aspirations of its inhabitants. Littered with construction detritus and the residue of abandoned mines, the land, like its metaphorical counterpart, memory, is marked by contingency, scarred by partially completed roads.

In the film Felix in Exile, bodies felled in violence dissolve into the earth, and the land, like the psyche, becomes an opaque receptacle for trauma. "And the fields? Aren't the fields changed by what happened?" poet Carolyn Forche asks of historical battlegrounds. "How can the fields continue as simple fields?"[6] Made in 1994, just prior to South Africa's first general election, Felix in Exile visualizes the country as a charged site where mourning and empowerment converge, for it shows the land, steeped in death, being surveyed by a young black woman, suggestive of the new generation at last charting the terrain under its own terms.

Kentridge embarks on a sort of psycho-topography in his extraordinary new film, Weighing ... and Wanting (1997), by pictorially linking the formidable rumblings of the landscape, natural and built, to the psychic unrest of his main character. The man, as formally dressed as Soho and as pensive as Felix, lives in a striking International Style house reminiscent of those in the artist's childhood neighborhood. Walking outside, the man finds a stone and brings it in, turning it over in his hands as if searching for clues to his own isolation. His domestic relationship has suffered a violent breakdown, and, at another point, he holds a china cup to his ear as one would a seashell, listening, it seems, for the lost rhythms of that intimacy.

When the man slides into an MRI chamber, the stone appears back on the ground outside, craggy and etched with parallel lines that mimic the stratified imaging of the man's brain under the high-tech scanner. In his 1996 film, History of the Main Complaint, Kentridge also invoked sophisticated medical imaging techniques to explore the seemingly dichotomous relationship between the surface and what lies beneath, between the convincing veneer of the body and the desperate, searching mess of conscience and accountability within. In the earlier film, Soho lies comatose in a hospital bed, numb to the fallen bodies in the deep dream image that appears on his bedside monitor. Only when the car he himself is driving in this vision hits a figure does Soho awake, told into a new sense of personal responsibility--one that dissipates, however, upon contact with the everyday world of work and profit. In Weighing ... and Wanting the imaging device produces physical maps of the brain--its masses and shadows the raw stuff of action, thought and memory--as well as more recognizable, nostalgic splices culled from the man's life, snapshotlike snippets of love, comfort, tender embraces.