William Kentridge: Ghosts and Erasures - animated films

Art in America, Jan, 1999 by Leah Ollman

Unlike the films tracking Soho and Felix, Ubu lacks a relatively familiar, empathetic character through whom we might gain access to the moral dimensions of the situation. The victims of torture appear in the film for the most part as faceless silhouettes. The chief perpetrator, Ubu--based on the ignoble title character in Alfred Jarry's incendiary, absurdist trilogy of plays--is the only figure with whom to identify, a prospect as necessary as it is uncomfortable and unlikely. In a related series of etchings, Kentridge more simply bridges the divide between self and other by having Ubu's contour and his own self-portrait engage in a dance of parallel and overlapping gestures.

In the film, the cartoonish, round-bellied Ubu cavorts across dark, unarticulated space, metamorphosing into a scissors-wielding skeleton as well as a camera on a spidery tripod. As a camera, a mechanical eye, he is an instrument of witness who fully exploits his power to control evidence. Scenes of torture are repeated in rows of windows in a nameless multistoried building, a dystopian honeycomb of cells inspired, perhaps, by the apartheid government's use of a former insurance company headquarters to carry out its violent tactics. At the end of the film, the tripod uses its legs to tuck a bomb under the limp figure of a man and blows him to pieces, then gathers up the pieces and repeats the process twice, blasting him into smaller and smaller bits. Former police hit squads in South Africa have testified to the Troth Commission that they destroyed evidence in much the same way, blowing up the bodies of ANC activists who had been tortured or shot so that it appeared as though they had died while carrying explosives. Disclosure of such tactics has bought amnesty for many, but Kentridge's film posits this deal as a false trade, for to move forward, to enact a new system, takes more than a full accounting of the old or its attempted erasure--what Ubu himself calls "ruining the ruins." Real, honest cultural catharsis takes longer, runs deeper and hurts more than either a microscopic approach to the evidence or its total destruction.

Kentridge describes Ubu Tells the Truth as a "video suite" gleaned from his 1997 theater production, Ubu and the Truth Commission, which incorporates live actors, puppets and animation. Like his other theater projects--Woyzeck on the Highveld (1992), Faustus in Africa (1995) and his first opera production, Monteverdi's Il Ritorno d'Ulisse (1998)--Ubu departs from the original script that inspired him. Kentridge uses the texts by Buechner, Goethe and Jarry as an assemblage artist uses a found object, appropriating it and recontextualizing it, layering new meaning onto something that is already fully loaded. Ubu remains the blunt, greedy and ruthless character of Jarry's creation, a bald manipulator of his own conscience, but Kentridge switches time zones on him. That Ubu fits disquietingly well into South Africa today only drives home the character's pathetic universality.