The Soho Chronicles: 10 Films by William Kentridge

The Soho Chronicles

M AT T H E W K E N T R I D G E

The SOHO Chronicles

10 FILMS BY WILLIAM KENTRIDGE

LONDON NEW YORK CALCUTTA

what is ar[t]? art × technology = augmented reality [thought / text / theater] what is an ar[t] book? what you're holding in your hands – a physical object subject to digital transformation – a way to see the world [new]

look @

Seagull Books, 2015 Images © William Kentridge Text © Matthew Kentridge ISBN

978 0 85742 176 0

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Designed by Sunandini Banerjee, Seagull Books, Calcutta, India Printed and bound by Hyam Enterprises, Calcutta, India

To our parents, Sydney and Felicia Kentridge

Contents Foreword

ix

A User’s Guide to The Soho Chronicles

xiv

Introduction: Stone-Age Filmmaking

1

Intermezzo: An Interview with William Kentridge

117

Johannesburg, 2nd Greatest City after Paris

120

Monument

148

Mine

164

Sobriety, Obesity, & Growing Old

188

Felix in Exile

214

History of the Main Complaint

240

Weighing and Wanting

263

Stereoscope

286

Tide Table

324

Other Faces

364

Coda: The Making of Other Faces

414

Acknowledgements

422

Foreword

The Soho Chronicles is a book a long time in the making—percolating in one form or another for the past 25 years. You might say the idea has been around ever since my first sight of Johannesburg, 2nd Greatest City after Paris, the first of William Kentridge’s 10 Soho Eckstein films.

I still remember the revelation of that film, its astonishing technique and the brilliant craziness of the images: the transitions and transformations as a smudge on the horizon became a great horde; the lusty little fish performing its sprightly dance in the pooled waters of an open palm; Soho Eckstein cramming so much food into his fat-cat mouth you expected his stone-like head to shatter from the sheer force of his greed. It had an explosive but, at the same time, elusive power and you couldn’t help make up the story for yourself as the film switched from character to character, scene following scene.

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Years later, with 9 of the 10 films completed, Ross Douglas, a Johannesburg art entrepreneur, worked with Kentridge to digitize the original 16 mm and 35 mm film versions. Douglas took the films on an extended roadshow around many of the great public venues of the world, projecting them onto giant screens with live musicians providing the soundtrack. There was a programme too, but not much in the way of reading material—just the credits and a line or two about each film.

After the London screening—Soho in Soho—I suggested that the audience might like more of a blurb, some longer notes explaining the origins and context of the films and perhaps something about the themes and common threads connecting the different stories together. Douglas agreed, but just at that time the roadshow came to an end, removing the need for an explanatory text. By then, however, I was already well embarked and it soon became apparent that I had more to say than I had initially thought.

My programme notes had expanded beyond brochure and pamphlet stages and were rapidly starting to look like the beginnings of a book.

Actually, this was not such a surprise to me.

One advantage of being the brother of William Kentridge is that you get a kind of privileged access to what might be happening in his head at any time, what new ideas are capturing his imagination and what new experiments, techniques and collaborations are underway. This has allowed me to see each film, not just as it

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FOREWORD

emerged from the editing room at the very end of the process but also from its inception, from the vantage point of a fortunate witness to the act of creation itself.

It’s a fine thing to come into William’s studio and observe the films take form from photographs, notebook jottings and early sketches; to see the grey walls fill up with drawing after drawing and their transformation through successive cycles of erasure and resurrection into animated sequences; to glimpse the story as it emerges—the angel hidden in marble.

These are things that stay with me, the enduring memories of watching the artist at work on so many days over so many different years, the indelible images: —A mid-century Johannesburg house in art deco style —Ditto superannuated Johannesburg tram stop —A series of charcoal brain scans, drawn in cross-section with the fine attention to detail of a baroque anatomical etching —The looming bulk of Soho Eckstein, propped up on a cumulus of pillows, gazing right back at you with his brooding stare Then there was the family history—a clutter of obsolete and long-forgotten objects. These were the lost things at the back of drawers and unused cupboards, retrieved and given new life in the films, sometimes retaining their old purpose and sometimes put to new and unforeseen uses:

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—An ancient typewriter you had to hit with real power and intent to make the frail keys jump up to the paper —Our grandfather’s boat-shaped blotter with its stumpy masthandle —A Bakelite phone from the hall table of my earliest memories —The old, chipped enamel kitchen scale with its creaking arms —The notary stamp from our grandmother’s office, now transformed into a detonator of cities I also remember the first rough clips, seen on the wall or in the viewfinder of the camera: —The night sky forming into a series of apparently prosaic but deeply poignant new constellations —Charcoal waves breaking on the Muizenberg shore —Eckstein house imploding with stately, surreal grace —Water spilling from the bottomless pockets of Soho’s pinstriped suit I have said elsewhere in this book that William Kentridge is a rare artist who combines artistic and literary sensibility. If, like me, you tend to look for narrative meaning, then his work both satisfies and confounds—the narrative is there in all the films, but never in a simple way, and always open to interpretation. One reason for the success of the films is that everyone can overlay their own

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meaning on the images—in fact, they are expected to do so.

William has talked about the creative process, the ideas and impulses behind the films, but he steers away from giving any definitive explanation of what the films are about. It’s always up to the viewers to construct their own house of meaning.

This book, then, is my construction—what I see as the music begins, the first words appear on the screen and the landscape of Johannesburg opens up in all its charcoal glory.

xiii

A User’s Guide to The Soho Chronicles

Readers will find an assortment of material embedded in the text using augmented reality (AR) technology. Images that bear the red icon have a film clip embedded in them, either a single animated sequence (linked to the commentary in the Introduction) or an excerpt (at the beginning and end of each chapter). Longer clips include Vetkoek Fete Galante, the ur-film in which William Kentridge first experimented with charcoal animation; a half-hour interview between the author and the artist; and the film Mine in full. To access these features, readers need to follow three steps: —Visit anartbook.com on your smartphone or tablet and follow the on-screen app installation instructions.

—Use the app to scan images marked with the they are found in the text.

Readers can test the app here

—Download the clip and watch.

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icon wherever

INTRODUCTION

Stone-Age Filmmaking

PREVIEWS AND PREMIERES By 1989, when William Kentridge produced Johannesburg, 2nd Greatest City after Paris, the first animated film in the Soho Eckstein series, he was an established name in South African art circles. He had won major awards, and those who had seen his drawings and etchings were impressed by their intelligence and power. But the greater public of South Africa, as well as that of the rest of the world, was largely unaware of his work.

Johannesburg, 2nd Greatest City after Paris was thus a tipping point in his career as large numbers of people, primarily filmfestival audiences at first, were exposed to his art for the first time.

Viewers, amazed by what they were seeing, began to talk about the film. And later, when Kentridge followed Johannesburg with sequels of equal or greater quality, the talk grew into a babble and then a

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clamour that made itself heard as far as New York, London, Berlin and even Paris—by all accounts the greatest city of them all.

Over the next 20 years, interspersed among numerous other artistic projects, Kentridge produced a further 9 films in the same linked sequence—the 10 films of the Soho Eckstein saga.

The films had been screened at film festivals and in museums and galleries for about a decade when Ross Douglas, a South African film producer and entrepreneur, converted them to digital format and then to 35 mm film, enabling them to be shown on large screens for the first time. The public screenings of Kentridge’s films, in venues as diverse as the South African Constitutional Court in Johannesburg, the Barbican in London and Central Park in New York, created a new population of enthusiasts. The works, originally conceived as an experiment in animation technique, have now become an international cultural phenomenon.

Thousands, if not tens of thousands, of people have seen the films (and countless more have seen clips on YouTube), and the response is always visceral and memorable: pleasure, excitement, a certain mystification, a laugh or a grimace when a particular image hits home. But what is it that people see, what do they find so arresting, and why exactly do these films lodge in viewers’ minds when so much other art comes and goes without a trace?

There may be any number of reasons but here are three that come to mind: 2

Drawing for 9 Films (2004).

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The Story. A saga in the old sense of the word, a narrative of heroic events, chronicled in a manner that gives us no clue about the manner in which the plot will finally unfold.

The Drawing. Working with a blank sheet of paper, a horse-hair brush, a tin of charcoal dust, an eraser and a few sticks of charcoal, Kentridge can perform feats of transformation that interrupt our scurrying self-absorption, grab our attention and compel us to stop and take a second look.

The Animation. An instantly recognizable signature technique which may at first seem crude and unfinished but whose rough quality gives the films their unique identity and makes them so appealing. It also creates an intimacy between the artist and his audience who can see not only the finished product but also the nuts and bolts of the creative process itself.

THE STORY William Kentridge is known as a great visual artist. The 10 films prove that he also possesses the skill and sensibility of a novelist.

COMPRESSED LITERARY GRANDEUR Each film is marked by a kind of compressed literary grandeur in its concern with and treatment of epic themes. Kentridge understands (Facing page) Title cards from each of the 10 films.

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all too well the power of a story which contains the universal in the particular and which sets out the markers by which we measure our own actions and worth. Loss, grief, anger, despair, betrayal, guilt and regret—these are themes which, with their counterparts—love, compassion, forgiveness, hope, fidelity, acceptance and contentment—flow turbulently through the films, illuminating the affairs of a central cast of characters who not only interest and move us in their own right but also hold up a mirror to our lives.

We meet the protagonist, Soho Eckstein, early in Johannesburg, 2nd Greatest City after Paris (1989). He is a choleric, block-faced, pinstriped urban titan, obsessed with power and possessions and contemptuous of the poor. But power and wealth come at a price— while Soho occupies himself with buying property, his wife seeks comfort in the arms of Felix Teitlebaum, a solitary neurotic who observes but who does not influence events. Felix is always naked, drawn thus in recognition of both his essential powerlessness and his guise of lover.1 If Felix is ruled by desire, then Mrs Eckstein is the object of that desire. She too is set apart, cocooned in a sensuous world of her own. Unchanging herself, she is a powerful catalyst for the men in her life—both the cause of conflict and the spoils of victory.

It takes another two films for Soho to wake up to what is most important in his life. In the second and third films in the series, he continues to juggernaut his way across the landscape of Johannes6

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burg. In Monument (1990), he takes on the mantle of ‘Civic Benefactor’, donating, with appropriate lack of savvy, the statue of a living man to the resentful masses. In the next film, Mine (1991), he appears as a mining randlord, lying at his complacent ease, propped up by a ludicrous multitude of puffy pillows, while underground miners slave away, disembowelling the earth for his benefit.

The fourth film Sobriety, Obesity, & Growing Old (1991), however, signals a sea change in the story, for Soho’s attitudes (and his heart) appear to have softened. What does it profit a man, the film asks, that he owns the earth if he has lost the woman he loves? Tortured by continuing reports of Mrs Eckstein’s affair with Felix Teitlebaum, Soho must, quite literally, dissolve his empire to win her back.

Felix, the loner, is alone once more and in the next film, Felix in Exile (1994)—the only film without Soho—we see him for the last time, exiled to a bleak, anonymous hotel room—a kind of Nowheresville in the United States of Anywhere—watching in impotent despair the violence flaring across the Johannesburg landscape, leaving nothing unscathed.

Soho is back in History of the Main Complaint (1996) and in it, as in the remaining four in the saga, Weighing and Wanting (1997), Stereoscope (1999), Tide Table (2003) and Other Faces (2011), we find him no longer trying to take on the world but struggling against his inner demons: moral blindness, guilt and regret. Soho reflects 7

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on his life, mining buried memories, confronting his acts and omissions and owning up to his culpability.

Tide Table (2003) places Soho on the beach at Muizenberg, just outside Cape Town. On holiday by the sea, he is now a movingly diminished figure. His inner agonies have given way to a more muted nostalgia, a kind of sweet sadness as he reflects on his deep past. In his deckchair, lulled by the sound of the surf, he remembers a time before corruption, a time when the ocean served not as a metaphor for approaching eternity but for the vastness of the choices lying before him, for the different lives that he might lead.

In Other Faces (2011), Soho dwells on death and the cruel nature of change. His thoughts are filled with the way that dreams may be traduced, how time bests the best of us, how life and youthful potential saps away and the world, which once held so much promise, is ultimately the province of the gravedigger. But characteristically, though much of the imagery is bleak, shot through with conflict, misunderstanding and sorrow, Soho is also vouchsafed a powerful vision of redemption and of what it means to live a life with fidelity, devotion and love.

EPIC SWEEP It takes little more than an hour to watch all 10 films, but the saga acquires an epic dimension as Kentridge layers each with conflict, turmoil, complex characters and, in the end, a fragile, temporary 8

Drawing for Johannesburg, 2nd Greatest City after Paris (1989).

Drawing for Monument (1990).

STONE-AGE FILMMAKING

resolution. From the opening frames of the first films—a view of the jumbled props and spars of the Highveld landscape—to the closing frames of the last—the word ‘Finish’ repeated on an empty screen—each story draws us in and holds us.

The epic quality of the work is present even in the very first film. According to Kentridge, this aspect of the work is a fortunate by-product of the animation technique itself: The films do become epic because one can do huge crowds very simply with charcoal. A single mark becomes a person; add marks and you have a crowd. It would be impossible to do a feature film in this format since the narrative needs to be tighter. To build the epic into a feature without script or storyboard would be daunting—you’d have to start much earlier and run each sequence much longer.2 All of this is achieved with great economy of expression, and it is possible to be swept along by the momentum of the film, untroubled by jumps or gaps in the storyline. ‘It’s the schematic psychology of the short film,’ Kentridge says. ‘I’d anticipated that the films would be so much longer. In fact, I always end up with a fraction of what I imagined I would need. The first thought in the sequence becomes the whole film.’3 Despite our emotional response to the storyline, we cannot help notice the somewhat fractured narrative—some elements are immediately clear, others remain an enigma and invite us to pro11

Drawing for Sobriety, Obesity, & Growing Old (1991).

Drawing for Stereoscope (1999).

MATTHEW KENTRIDGE

vide our own interpretation, our own bridge across the gaps. But it is this mixture of clarity and mystery that lies at the heart of what is so engrossing about the films and that helps us understand how they have retained their interest even after repeated viewings. No matter how often we watch them, we always see something we missed before, make some new connection, mine an undiscovered gem.

THE DRAWING Kentridge is a realist, or figurative, artist who draws the world as it is and not as some grotesque distortion or abstract representation.

But he is also an artist who sticks to the essentials. He can, when the need arises, produce exact, detailed images—for example, the finely drawn blue-rimmed teacup in Weighing exactly mirrors the delicacy of the china—but for the most part his work is marked by an economy of style, conveying volumes of meaning with just a few marks of the charcoal stick.

In keeping with this characteristic, each film is composed of only a handful of individual drawings, perhaps as few as 20 finished works. Each scene is a powerful artwork in itself and the final drawings are often exhibited alongside the film as an equally valuable output of the filmmaking process. The strength of the

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drawings is partly aesthetic—the pictures are beautiful in their own right and we admire them as we would any other beautiful object—and partly technical. They showcase Kentridge’s mastery of charcoal and of the subtleties of light and shade in his monochrome universe. They also challenge us to step closer and work out for ourselves exactly how he achieves his effect.

Drawing for Weighing and Wanting (1998).

For example, the way in which Kentridge has drawn Soho Eckstein’s face. In Johannesburg, Soho’s face is as square and crudely shaped as though it had been carved from a block of wood. The right eye stares out at the viewer, the left is hooded. The single, black bar of his brow underscores the severity of his expression, while his hair is black and thick, divided on the left by a parting like a scar. Below the eyes, however, the hardness of his face fractures into a delta of wrinkled flesh. In fact, it is hard to take the whole face in, riven as it is with so many folds and fissures. In this early drawing, Soho’s nose is small and his mouth pursed with sour distaste. It is the face of a man used to having his own way, used to power and used to excess.

By the time we see him in Sobriety, the fourth film, his features have altered and softened. He is now largely bald and the cuts and wrinkles on his face have smoothed out so that we can actually see his cheeks, but it is his expression that has changed most. Instead of the man who, in Johannesburg, stared out implacably at the world, this Soho looks down, the corners of his eyes and mouth 17

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drooping with weariness and doubt. This is a man for whom the old order and the old certainties are crumbling—a lonely man coming to terms with the realization that what he has lost in the way of love outweighs any empire he may have acquired.

If we were to hang these two drawings side by side and ask an audience (who had not seen the films at all) to tell us what has happened to transform the first figure into the second, they would be able to explain his spiritual awakening from the changed expression on Soho’s face alone.

This same weight of meaning attaches to all the drawings. For example, in Johannesburg, Mrs Eckstein is shown waiting for her lover by the side of an indoor swimming pool in some sort of baroque interior. We can’t make it out exactly but it looks exotic and alluring. Its chief feature, however, is its difference from other spaces in the film—the bleak landscapes and the manic activity of Soho’s desk—and it is this difference that emphasizes both Mrs Eckstein’s separation from those worlds and the enclosed, personal world she inhabits.

Elsewhere, Kentridge’s depictions of landscapes, barren plains marked with the flotsam and jetsam of human intervention—mine dumps (huge, sculpted rubbish mounds of mining waste) and pylons (a 60-foot mass of steel struts)—point us to the harshness of the lives of the people who inhabit this environment. And the people themselves, the crowds who gather from points on the (From top) Drawings for Johannesburg (1989), Monument (1990), Mine (1991) and Sobriety (1991).

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Still from Johannesburg.

horizon, are shown as a distant mass, faceless and featureless, a single stubby line for each body. It is only when they come closer that they take shape, become individual, acquire a face, that they take on expressions of suffering, accusation and demand, and it is only at that point that Soho (and by extension, we the viewers) really begins to engage with them.

GRACE NOTES Kentridge uses another technique in his drawing to add power to images and scenes—every now and then, he drops grace notes into the action, moments of redemption which stand apart from the broad narrative thrust but which add to the charm and attraction of the films.

Still from Sobriety.

In Johannesburg, for example, a one-legged beggar stumps along beside a high brick wall. We cannot see his face—only his disability. He halts beside a brazier but, before sinking into crosslegged rest beside the fire, he performs, on one crutch, a neat pirouette, an expression of joie de vivre as remarkably elegant as it is unexpected.

In Sobriety, Soho sits at his desk, a photograph of Mrs Eckstein in a frame in front of him. In the gentlest gesture we have seen so far from this man, he touches her mouth with his hand, and she, in turn, nibbles the tip of his finger. Later, in the same scene, these domestic felicities have been replaced by painful images as Soho

Still from Sobriety.

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Still from Tide Table (2003).

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watches his wife cuckold him with Felix Teitlebaum. The image of this betrayal, a flickering fish, twists and gambols in the frame of the photograph. Soho’s cat, which has been sitting on the desk, puts out a paw and tries to pat the fish, as though it were a moth or a fly or a piece of string, twirling provocatively in front of its nose.

In Tide Table, the elderly Soho dreams of his childhood nanny, and she appears, kneeling on the sand beside him, caressing his wrist with her hand, a final gesture of love and deliverance.

DRAWING FOR PROJECTION In the early 1980s, Kentridge spent several years working as a jobbing art director on films and TV productions. That apprenticeship in the South African film industry proved its worth through the cinematic quality of his animated films—his ‘Drawings for Projection’.

Stills from Sobriety

When, on the completion of each film, the drawings are exhibited, one can look at them, individually laid out on the walls of a gallery, and admire their intrinsic quality, but it is in combination, in the film itself, that we experience their real power. On the gallery walls we see a single, flat image, but in the films Kentridge uses classic cinematographic techniques to set the scene, build tension and drive the action forward.

Each film begins with an establishing shot, setting the scene for what follows. This is generally a landscape, although in History it 21

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is of an empty hospital ward. Kentridge also uses tracking shots— for example, in Sobriety, the banner-waving crowd surging down Eloff Street passes underneath an implied camera. We see successive waves of people approach and then disappear below our bird’seye view of the action.

Another favourite technique is the cross-cut, whereby the action switches back and forth between two different but linked scenes.

In Johannesburg, we see Soho at his desk, hearing the growing chorus of rumours about Felix and Mrs Eckstein interspersed with scenes of the pair making love.

We also see a variant of the cross-cut in both Johannesburg and Sobriety. In the first film, one image stays constant (Felix dreaming in the bath) while other scenes change (his dreams of Mrs Eckstein). In Sobriety, we see Soho, a constant presence at his desk, looking at the photograph on his desk in which the unfolding drama of the adulterous love affair is played out. A further variant of the cross-cut is presented in Stereoscope, where the screen is divided in two, showing us two Sohos, living two lives in parallel.

We the viewers must switch back and forth between the two panels to understand and interpret the contrast.

Finally, Kentridge uses both wide angle and close up as the story requires. The best example of the close up is in History, as Soho drives his car through the dreamscape of his coma. We see his eyes reflected in the rear-view mirror. Hugely enlarged, they take up the 22

Drawing for Other Faces (2011).

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whole wedge of mirror (whereas, in reality, we should be able to see his entire face) and seem to force us to look deeply into his soul.

THE ANIMATION Kentridge’s experience in the South African film industry gave him a taste for filmmaking and fired him with the desire to write and direct his own feature films. However, frustrated by the difficulties of raising finances and marshalling the hordes of people needed to develop such a project, he turned instead to animation where financing was simply a matter of paying for paper, charcoal and film, and the only person who needed to be organized was himself: The films [. . .] began because I had spent some years working on writing film scripts in the hope of making a feature film. I realized at that stage that it was going to be many years of jumping through hoops in order for me to be able to practice the craft of filmmaking. At a certain point that seemed impossible. So, the corollary of that was to to find a condition of making films in which I could do them on my own.4 Animation provided Kentridge with the key to his personal playground—it gave him the space and the means to effect the

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most remarkable transformations. A cat stands up, stretches, arches its back and rotates into a desk punch. Pylons rise from the ground in spindly jumps, iron tresses emerging from and mounting the shoulders of lower rungs in a pastiche of acrobats forming a human pyramid. Eckstein House implodes, sinking into a billowing skirt of dust and debris with the grace of a ballerina taking a low curtsey on an empty stage . . .

Kentridge calls his animation technique ‘stone-age filmmaking’ because at heart it is so simple—a laborious one-man show. And because, even working flat out, it is slow—months of work result in no more than a few minutes of film. There are only a handful of finished pictures at the end of the filmmaking process but each picture has undergone innumerable small alterations to reach its final form.

The process works like this: Kentridge tacks up a large sheet of paper on the studio wall and draws the opening image of a scene— Soho sitting at an empty desk, say. He sets up his camera some feet away so that the drawing is exactly framed in the viewfinder. Kentridge clicks the shutter—a pin protruding from a length of flex— three times. Three frames, a fraction of a second of film time. Then he walks back to the drawing and adds a new element—perhaps smoke rising from a cigar. Then he walks back to the camera, clicks the shutter three times, then walks back to the drawing, adds a few

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William Kentridge, in his Johannesburg studio, showing the process of animation through charcoal drawing.

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more strokes of charcoal, then walks back to the camera . . . another three clicks . . . and so on, mark after mark, hour after hour, day after day.

But what is most emblematic of the films is what happens not when Kentridge adds elements to a picture but when he takes them away. For animation is as much about erasure—about destroying an image in order to create it again—as it is about addition. To turn a cat into a telephone you have to erase the cat-like aspects and add the phone-like elements.

But there is always something left behind.

At first, when Kentridge set out, like a blind but hopeful mariner, on the voyage which culminated in Johannesburg, he tried to create seamless transitions from one image to the next: When I came to doing animation, which doesn’t use a different drawing for each frame [like a Disney cartoon] but, rather, an alteration of the same drawing, I was stuck with the problem of erasure. As you erase an arm and redraw it in a slightly different position, you’re left with the ghost images of where the arm had been.

The first year that I was doing animation, I tried every possible way to get rid of that ghost image. I got every kind of eraser, even an electric one. I tried to use shiny paper, different materials. It simply seemed to me a fault, an

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inadequacy in my technique. I thought, ‘Well, I have to solve that problem for these films to work. You want an image walking across the white paper, you don’t want all this rubbish and smudge and dirt and waste.’ When I finished the first one [Johannesburg], I hoped that people would excuse the bad erasing and that I would solve this technical problem in due course. It took me about a year and a half to understand that the erasures were part of the films. More than that—they were part of their meaning and part of their interest. They had to do with the sense of things.5 What Kentridge saw, looking at those first rushes, and later at the completed film, was the way in which the ghostly residue of previous stages in the animation gave texture and richness to the film. We talk of layers of meaning—here it was true in the literal sense. The viewer sees each successive development of the story layered upon what has gone before. We can imagine our own lives in this way, imagine that as we move from room to room, place to place, we leave our traces too, an invisible wake which disturbs the air behind us.

In Kentridge’s films, that wake is left faintly perceptible.

As Kentridge says, the effect not only adds meaning to the films but also invests the images with poignancy. Consider this

(Facing page) Drawing for Sobriety.

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Stills from History of the Main Complaint (1996, left and right) and Steresoscope (centre) .

Stills from History (left), Stereoscope (centre) and Weighing and Wanting (right).

Stills from History (left) and Stereoscope (centre and right).

Stills from Johannesburg (left) and Stereoscope (centre and right

)

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scene in Sobriety: faced with the loss of his wife, Soho has chosen to risk everything to win her back, imploding and dissolving his empire. At the end of this paroxysm of destruction, we see him in an empty landscape, no longer the economic titan but a small figure, head bowed, alone in a vast open space. And yet . . . just visible, a chimera in the sky, is the outline of his great skyscraper, Eckstein House, a reminder to him (and to us) of how much he was prepared to sacrifice and how far he has come.

NOSTALGIA The 10 films in the Soho Eckstein saga are thoroughly South African in subject and image. So rooted are the films in Johannesburg and its surrounds that watching them, one can almost taste the fine white dust of the Highveld. Yet these films have been seen and admired all over the world, winning critical and popular applause in equal measure.

What accounts for such broad cross-border appeal? In part, Kentridge’s skill in drawing out the universal in the particular context and concerns of his characters, making Soho Eckstein, that most individualistic South African megalomaniac, into a kind of late-twentieth-century Everyman. But Kentridge also seduces his audiences by tapping into yet another universal characteristic— our peculiarly human aptitude for nostalgia.

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PLACES IN THE HEART We all inhabit two places at the same time, some more so than others: the here and now of our everyday lives—me at my desk, writing; Kentridge in his studio, drawing; you the reader wherever you are, reading—as well as our pasts. We transport ourselves to places in the heart; we return to whatever memory we may have, at any given moment, of the houses and streets of our individual histories. In the words of South African poet, Lionel Abrahams: Memory takes root only half in the folds of the brain: Half’s in the concrete streets we have lived along.6 Small things, as Marcel Proust has shown us, can evoke so much—a sound, a smell, a particular image, and whole topographies of the past open up to us. Kentridge has taken this phenomenon and built it into the fabric of his work. The films are set in a South Africa straddling the before and after of democracy, approaching and crossing the hump of the millennium. Mass protests, political violence, bodies littered across the veld in their makeshift newsprint shrouds, evil stirring and bubbling in the labyrinthine chambers of the security police, AIDS-ravaged patients lying in rows on the linoleum floor of a rural hospice, xenophobic crowds gathering to drive out foreign migrants—these form the backdrop against which the narrative plays itself out. But this fiercely contemporary world is superimposed on the Johannes-

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burg of 50 years ago, the artefacts of which—anachronistic office equipment, dated modernist architecture, outmoded urban landscapes—keep breaking through the crust of history and emerge into the light of the present day.

Soho runs his empire from an office free of modern accoutrements. Commercial data reaches him through a ticker-tape machine spooling out long ribbons of paper. On his desk we find a blotter, an old lever-arch stamping machine, a roller for smoothing a well-inked letter over a sheet of blotting paper and an adding machine with a wind-up handle. The typewriter is a throwback to an even older era, and we can see right into its metal guts, see the bolts and levers, the veins of oil and the choreography of its delicate internal mechanisms. The keys, spindly as the pincers of a mechanical praying mantis, blurt their text onto paper in oldfashioned Times Roman, the letters blurred and off-kilter where the keys have jammed or smudged on impact.

Soho uses an old Bakelite phone—sometimes two or three; one even springs out at him at the end of mechanical arm—which he actually has to dial. To use the phone at all, an army of telephonists in a long-vaulted telephone exchange must be mobilized, heads clamped between headphone and mouthpiece. When the phone rings, these women, neatly attired in knee-length skirts and sensible shoes, jab metal-tipped cables into a switchboard to make the

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connection. This is a world before electronic communication— when connections took place through lines and cables, ubiquitous and inescapable both above and below ground.7 Outside, we find art deco bioscopes (still functioning, we imagine, with their tiers of red plush seats rising to the gods, the air singed with decades of cigarette smoke). The overthrow of these pleasure palaces by malls and multiplexes, their decline into junk shops and pawnbrokers, has somehow not taken place. The camera takes us along avenues down which, in contravention of the laws of time and transport, the tramlines still run and the tram stops still stand sentry. Behind them, the gardens of Le Corbusierinspired houses—cigarette boxes on concrete stilts—still flow down to the roadway, unhindered by fences and walls.

THE SEARCH FOR AUTHENTIC EXPERIENCE These images originate in the visual geography of Kentridge’s childhood. For example, the last Johannesburg tram stopped running in 1961, when he was six. The office paraphernalia, the views from Soho’s window of long, wide city streets, call up visits to the office of our maternal grandfather, a Johannesburg attorney with premises on Rissik Street, an arterial boulevard running north from the city centre. As children, we used to go to this office to watch the annual Wits University Rag procession, looking down on the crowds and the flower-spangled floats (just as Soho watches 34

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the banner-waving crowds surging along the city canyons in Sobriety). Our grandfather’s office equipment was scattered when his practice was wound up more than 30 years ago. Items such as the crescent-shaped blotting roller occasionally resurface in a box of assorted objects or at the back of a drawer, reminding us of the world of our early childhoods, of a world that existed long before we were born. According to Kentridge: ‘The nostalgia in the work is connected with moments of childhood that one tries to reclaim as a touchstone of authentic experience.’8 The Soho Eckstein films are weighted with melancholy power even for viewers with no connection to, or knowledge of, Johannesburg. The unique ‘metatime’ of the films—the merging of past and present with no gap between the here and now and the then and there—triggers in each viewer a nostalgic memory of a better time, a time of greater promise and fewer defeats, of a lost world to which we cannot return but which we remember with a pang of mordant pleasure, a pang of regret.

THEMES AND DREAMS

(From top) Painting by Tinus de

The Soho Eckstein films were made over a period of 20 years, each film a separate project with its own origins and influences. However, Kentridge has linked them into a continuous history using

Jongh, Meirings Poort (1927). Image courtesy M. J. de Jongh; Still from Johannesburg; Still from Monument.

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recurring images and symbols, themes and metaphors. Each new film picks up threads from its predecessors and weaves them into its own narrative.

IMAGES AND SYMBOLS Landscape Kentridge has always been interested in landscape, or, more specifically, the disconnect between stylized, romanticized depictions of landscape and the reality we see whenever we look out of our windows. The paintings of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European landscapes which populated the art books he looked at growing up—all verdant fields and dappled forests—bore no resemblance to the country around Johannesburg. Nor for that matter did the paintings of African landscapes by nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century artists, depicting craggy bluffs, towering mountains, thundering waterfalls and cavernous gorges. Instead, a half hour’s drive from the Johannesburg house in which we grew up revealed the Highveld countryside which appeared disappointingly different (especially when trying to find a spot for a picnic).

‘I felt that the landscape around me was a lie,’ Kentridge has written of this disappointment, ‘as if I had been cheated. Rather than growing up and thinking that these green hills in that book were a fiction, I believed they were real. The South African landscape wasn’t less real—it was more like a disaster zone. When I first began 36

Colonial Landscape (Waterfall, 1995), drawing.

(From left) Stills from Mine, Sobriety, Felix in Exile (1994), History.

[From left) Stills from Weighing and Wanting, Sobriety, Stereoscope and Tide Table (2003).

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to draw, I depicted the local landscapes I knew rather than those utopian lush landscapes far away.’9 The Highveld is flat and nondescript. Possessing no remarkable natural features, it is dry and scrubby and, most significantly, almost totally man-made. The mine dumps (Johannesburg’s answer to the flat-topped mesas of the Karoo), the ditches and culverts, the bollards and milestones, the pylons and freeways and other assorted civil-engineering clutter—these are the undistinguished distinguishing features of the local environment. And like its inhabitants, the landscape has been scarred and brutalized, making it a fitting backdrop to much of the action that takes place in the films.

The red lines that transect the landscape in many of the films are forensic annotations, both a record of violence and surveyors’ marks. We are no longer looking at what Kentridge calls ‘a set of beautiful colours looking for a home’ but the evidence of human appropriation and alteration of the landscape. The red lines and marks take us beyond the traditional notions of what is natural in order to highlight the artificiality of much of our surroundings.

Kentridge has always been interested in the way a seemingly ‘natural’ environment is actually the product of human agency. Certainly, as we have seen before, his local environment, the landscape around Johannesburg, is almost entirely man-made. Man-made, and ephemeral. Whatever we build can be torn down and rebuilt.

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Drawing for Other Faces.

(Clockwise, from top right) Stills from Sobriety, Stereoscope, Felix in Exile, History, Felix in Exile and Johannesburg.

Still from Felix in Exile.

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The mine dumps along the Witwatersrand, for example, those most emblematic of all features of the local landscape, the scenery of our childhood trips, will not form the backdrop to our children’s journeys. Almost all the dumps have been recycled, turned to slurry and passed through refineries in order to extract the last dustings of gold which earlier technologies were not able to capture.

Just as the landscape itself ‘forgets’ these earlier incarnations, so the people and events that shaped it are equally forgotten. By emphasizing the transience and contingent nature of our surroundings, Kentridge is both exploring the nature of this kind of amnesia and fighting it.

Water Water is a second defining motif running through the films and its symbolism is—appropriately—fluid. It is often used to signify hope—standing out as a startling blue against the charcoal hues of the rest of the film. In fact, this blue is almost the only colour that Kentridge introduces into the films (other than the few, sparing uses of red) and he does so deliberately in order to create pockets of relief, oases in which his characters may find some succour. The moments of transcendence occur when water begins to flow—the landscape stops being spiky and arid, and calcified beliefs and emotions soften and evolve into something which allows for ambiguity and doubt.

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Still from Johannesburg.

(Facing page) Drawing for Mine.

(This page, above) Still from Sobriety.

(This page, below) Still from History.

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But water signifies other things too: Anxiety and doubt. Felix Teitlebaum’s anxiety, we are shown, floods half the house.

Obliteration and dissolution. When Soho destroys his property empire, great plumes of water spout from the buildings as they fall in on themselves.

Sexual desire and fulfilment. Kentridge uses the image of a tiny, stylized fish, leaping and twisting in a pool of water, to represent sex.

The Office If the broken-down industrial scenery of the Highveld, interspersed with vivid blue pools and vleis, make up the external landscape of the films, the interior setting is dominated by the image of Soho’s desk. This is the space which he defines and which defines him—it is an extension of himself, his home from home, the seat of his power.

And what a mess it is—a confusion of appliances and gadgets, ringing telephones, obscure objects and general clutter. Only Soho can make sense of it, and even then we are not sure. When we first see the desk, there is some semblance of order—a metal ashtray with a smoking cigar, which soon gives birth to an old-fashioned typewriter—but things get rapidly out of hand. As Soho’s commercial

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Drawing for Stereoscope.

Still from Monument (left) and detail of drawing for Sobriety (right).

Still from Felix (left) and drawing for Stereoscope (right).

Stills from Johannesburg (left) and Stereoscope (right).

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greed increases and his private life spins out of control, so also his desk is taken over by confusion. Instead of one phone there are three, all ringing at the same time; random sheets of paper cover the surface of the desk and yet more pour out from typewriters and ticker-tape machines.

Over time, the demands of Soho’s public life leave him less and less room to manoeuvre—indeed, at one point in Stereoscope, Soho finds himself literally squeezed up against the wall by an onslaught of data. By now, Soho’s attitude to these supposed trappings of power has become ambivalent at best—part of him yearns for a quieter, more pared-down life. However, it turns out that this is more easily wished for than achieved. The more the new, selfreflective Soho tries to free himself from outside obligations, the more he tries to escape from the noise and smoke into a simpler, more honest existence, the more he finds himself shackled to his past, chained, as it were, to his desk.

THEMES AND METAPHORS Communication Kentridge keeps returning to the idea of information decaying into noise—microphones, telephones, sirens, foghorns, ticker-tape machines ceaselessly spew out data, send out their messages across the ether. He is particularly keen on drawing megaphones, which he sees as emblematic of the great twentieth-century explosion of 51

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communication. Megaphones, if one thinks about it, are a common element at events as diverse as fascist rallies, protest marches, film sets—even school sports days. They are ubiquitous public-address systems, bombarding us with noise.

In the films, Soho is at first shown as controlling communication—he erects billboards, makes announcements, he even harnesses the power of broadcast for his own (self-) destructive purposes (in Sobriety, the blaring sirens blow down the walls of Eckstein House). Increasingly, however, Soho becomes the creature and the victim of his own media. As early as in the first film, we are shown the damaging consequences of too much information as Soho, puffed up with outrage, is inundated with rumours of his wife’s infidelity.

By the time we see Soho in Stereoscope, the weight of data has him backed into a corner, trying to shield himself from the blizzard—the fusillade—of information exploding around him. In Tide Table, we find an older, wiser, certainly wearier, Soho on the beach— the desk and megaphones far away. But even here he cannot entirely escape—his seemingly innocuous newspaper expands in his hands, growing to envelop him and screen him from the shoreline. As he reads, the confusion he thought he had left behind him returns— the articles, the sentences, the words themselves slipping into a garbled jumble of signs and symbols. This entropic vision flows into Other Faces as well, in which communication (or its opposite) 52

Drawing for Tide Table.

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takes place through the pages of an old mining ledger filled with random words and dense, undecipherable marks and scrawls.

The Written Word Kentridge likes and is interested in words and has always incorporated text into his pictures. In recent years, he has increasingly used pages or maps from antiquarian books and atlases as a backdrop for his drawings and etchings. This is done partly because it makes the final artwork more beautiful and visually interesting, and partly because the text burnishes the images by placing them in context or adding extra, unexpected layers of meaning.

In the films, text plays different roles. In Johannesburg, the text moves the story along like the garlanded panels in old silent films, elucidating the action with a single, dramatic statement: ‘Soho Eckstein bought half of Johannesburg(!)’. In later films, particularly in Sobriety, the text, while still instructive, is increasingly part of the drawing itself. When Soho, calling out to his wife, cries ‘Come Home!’, the words swell in great block letters to fill the sky and illustrate the strength of his longing, the depth of his abandonment and the emptiness of the world without her.

(From the top) Stills from Johannesburg, Monument and Sobriety.

Even later, in Weighing and Wanting, the use of text changes and the statements become aphoristic, the meaning more cryptic.

The message across the sky reads, ‘In Whose Lap Do I Lie?’ The

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(From the top) Stills from Weighing, Tide Table and Other Faces.

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question is fundamental. If Soho can answer it, he can begin to quell his inner pain and acquire some peace of the spirit.

And just as the words change, so does the speaker. In the first films, where the text is more informative, the voice belongs to an omniscient narrator clueing us in to what is going on, orienting us in a world of his creation. ‘Rumours of a different life,’ he tells us, informing us also that ‘Felix Teitlebaum’s anxiety filled half the house.’ At the beginning of Sobriety, the narrator even does a helpful recap for the benefit of newcomers to the story of Soho.

During the course of Sobriety, and certainly by the time we get to Weighing and Wanting, with its existential questions, the voice shifts and now belongs to Soho himself. There is no one out there setting the world straight for us the viewers (or for Soho). He must work it out for himself—and so must we.

Dream Worlds The films also explore the private language of the mind and the realm of dreams, using the artist’s privileged ability to expose the inner thoughts of his characters. Kentridge introduces us to this technique early on, in Johannesburg, when he reveals Felix’s dreams of Mrs Eckstein. The phantasms—her mouth, her lips, her tongue—are shown as a set of floating postcards which flicker across Felix’s heavy-lidded eyes as he lolls in the bath, the halfsmile of the dreaming sexual predator on his face.

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In Felix, his dreams and those of Nandi, the surveyor, are more savage, more morbid, more poignant. The night sky becomes a canvas which reflects the actions taking place on earth. Nandi scans the heavens and sees the stars transform themselves into images of dead bodies, shrouded and bound, a foretaste of her own fate.

In History, the action takes place in a bare hospital room which gives way to the landscape of Soho’s dreams. Deep in the toils of his coma Soho relives events that he cannot consciously face, that he has suppressed but that he must remember if he is to awaken.

Beside him a coven of doctors wield their stethoscopes like fibreoptic cameras, probing the layers of his subconscious in order to display, on the bedside monitor, an unusual set of inner workings— his abdomen appears to house desk equipment—phones, punches —in place of human organs.

Finally, in Other Faces, his dreams take the form of old Super 8 home movies, flickering and whirring across the screen with fading images of a lost, Arcadian childhood.

These elements—repeated images, recurring metaphors, the reinforcing relationship between words and pictures, the role of dreams—are like clues studded along the route of the narrative.

As viewers, we can gather them up as we make the jump from one film to the next, making sense of what we have seen and using them as building blocks in constructing our own house of meaning.

(Facing page) Muizenberg (1976), linocut.

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Silkscreen posters for Ilanga le zo Phumeza Abasebenzi (1978) (left) and Security (1979/80) (right).

Silkscreen poster for Juluka concert (1978).

Art in a State of Siege (1988) silkscreen.

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ORIGINS THE BIRTH OF SOHO ECKSTEIN The Man in the Pinstriped Suit When I was a child, there was a photograph that my brother and sisters and I liked to look at—a picture of our father, aged about 10, on the beach at Muizenberg.10 He was sitting cross-legged on the sand with his brother, both in shorts and short-sleeved shirts, wearing their school caps. Behind the two boys and their mother sat their father, Morris Kentridge, MP—our grandfather—weighty in a deckchair. Best of all—and this always made us laugh—he was dressed in a black Homburg and a three-piece suit.

In the mid-1970s, Kentridge made a linocut of this photograph, the medium proving perfect for emphasizing the contrasting black and white lines of the suit: I would ink up a piece of lino, so that everything inked comes out black and every engraved line was white— essentially with a linocut, one is printing a negative. If you cut thin lines, eventually you produce a pinstripe—a dark background with a thin white line. It works with silkscreens too—you ink it up and then scrape away the acetate to create stripes. It was perfect for the suit and for the deckchair as well.

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I had done drawings of people on the beach at Muizenberg in my first year of university (1974) and this was an extension of those images. I didn’t want a black suit or a grey one where you have to suggest a lightening of the tone of the black of the print, so a pinstripe was the answer because the thing I was doing—cutting lines in the lino— had the same quality as the object I was drawing: the suit.11 From the start, the man in the pinstriped suit was portrayed as the embodiment of wealth and greed, arch-capitalist in his privileged world, fat to bursting on the proceeds of exploitation. (Given the origins of the image, this portrayal represented an ironic posthumous reversal for our grandfather. First elected as a Labour Party MP in South Africa in the 1920s, he was a life-long champion of the rights of workers.)

Later, as a member of the Junction Avenue Theatre Company, a radical student theatre group, Kentridge directed Security (1980), a satire about white privilege and black oppression in which a black man gets a job as a guard dog, complete with kennel and leash.

Kentridge not only directed the play but also played the white master and wore, yes, a pinstriped suit!

The next major development in the evolution of the character who became Soho Eckstein was precipitated by a minor, yet highly charged, historic milestone—a civic birthday. In 1986, Johannesburg turned 100.

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Sketch for Johannesburg.

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In 1986, the State of Emergency was in its second year; thousands were in detention, thousands more were on the run, the townships were ungovernable and the government’s military options were bankrupt, as was the economy. The economic, sporting and cultural boycotts effectively disconnected the country from the rest of the world. Black or white, enemy or supporter of apartheid, everyone was living in a state of siege. Casting about desperately for a crumb of good news, for a source of pride and achievement, the government declared that the Johannesburg centenary would be marked by a series of gala celebrations.

The plan was a spectacular failure. The government, with its unique capacity to turn gold back into dross, merely provoked a fresh wave of protest as opposition groups across the spectrum converged under the slogan, ‘Johannesburg: No Cause to Celebrate!’

ART IN A STATE OF SIEGE As part of the protests, a group of political activists came up with a plan to go out at night and put up anti-centenary posters all over the city. Kentridge was one of the artists asked to contribute a design. ‘I drew an acetate for a silkscreen, and, once I’d done the artwork, I went to the place where the posters were going to be printed. Only to discover that the project had fallen apart. So the printing, the posters at night—that never happened.’12

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Kentridge kept the acetate and, a year later, used it to illustrate a lecture he delivered at the annual Festival of the Arts in Grahamstown. The poster became the third in a triptych of life-size silkscreen prints titled Art in a State of Grace, Art in a State of Hope— virtues in short supply in South Africa in the late 1980s—and Art in a State of Siege. The latter neatly summed up the oppressive political atmosphere of the time and the blind end-of-the-world attitudes of many white people living behind the stockades.

Using the technology of 1987, Kentridge made slides for the lecture and incorporated the text from the slides in the posters, changing them for pure agitprop, or a simple ironic statement, into something more interesting and ambiguous.

Art in a State of Siege depicts a massive figure in a pinstriped suit, smoking a cigar. The head and torso of the man rise out of a pool of water—a marsh perhaps, or a fountain—it might even be the type of urban water feature one finds in the atriums and forecourts of the corporate headquarters of Johannesburg’s northern periphery. The figure’s hair, slick with Brylcreem, is bisected by the slash of a parting, running from right to left. But it is the face that is most arresting, most disturbing. Beneath puckered brows, the eyes glare with deranged intensity while, below them, the flesh seems to fall apart altogether. The man’s face is a map of the roughest terrain, a topography of fractures, fissures, folds and collapses. Fat pours

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(Clockwise from top right) Stills from Sobriety, Felix, History and Johannesburg.

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down from the jowls into the neck in an overblown representation of greed and excess. The right cheek is marked by a crimson colour burst, a shaving cut perhaps (for this face is unshaveable) or an epidermal bombsite of exploded blood vessels. His pinstriped suit is made up of thousands of figures, squashed together head to toe, fashioned from a diagram of how to pack as many people as possible into a slave ship. Across his chest, a sash proclaims ‘100 Years of Easy Living’. Finally, the point is rammed home in the top right-hand corner of the screenprint, with Kentridge stencilling in the abbreviation ‘JHB’ above three small decals bleeding printer’s ink, a mockery of the official logo of the centenary celebrations.

Shortly afterwards, the same figure reappears in Johannesburg and Soho Eckstein emerges, full grown, into the public consciousness, his pinstriped suit emblematic of his power, a sheath he cannot, or will not, take off.

But if Soho started out as a stereotypical capitalist fat cat, a fleshy caricature without moral compass, compassion or compunction, he did not stay that way for long. As early as Mine, his face is granted the blessing of real features and ceases to be a simple parody of his inner venality. The aggressive wet-asphalt hair recedes, replaced by a balding dome, and his block-like features grow more rounded. He steps out of his monstrous carapace and becomes, like the rest of us, a fallible human being.

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Still from Weighing and Wanting (above) and drawing for Other Faces (facing page).

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THE ALTER EGOS At the outset of the series, the character of Felix Teitlebaum was presented as Kentridge’s alter ego. In Felix’s face we see a close resemblance both to our father in his wedding photographs and to Kentridge himself in the 1980s, at about the time that his hair had taken its first big step back off his forehead.

Over time, however, as Soho comes to take an ever-more central role in the films, he replaces Felix as the artist’s alter ego at the same time as he comes to resemble his creator, particularly in the shape of the nose and the set of the eyes. (Soho is older, of course, but, over the past 10 years or so, Kentridge seems to have developed a penchant for reverse-anachronistic self-portraiture and typically draws himself as if he were 15 to 20 years older.)

More importantly, Soho’s moral compass now shows up, swinging alarmingly. He gives up his empire—or does he?—and we soon see him back at his desk. Guilt, and growing acknowledgement of that guilt drive him into a coma but he snaps out of it.

He tries to break free from the burdens placed on him by his place and status in society but he cannot.

No matter where he goes, the outside world always presses in.

Drawing for Johannesburg.

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Francisco Goya, Procession of the Holy Office and Pilgrimage to San Isidiro (1819–23).

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THE DAWN OF STONE-AGE ANIMATION

Still from Vetkoek Fete Galante (1986).

Kentridge made a film called Vetkoek Fete Galante (1986) in which he simply filmed anything that passed in front of a camera set up at one end of his studio. The fragment of film included an early piece of animation, made by adding and erasing marks on a charcoal drawing tacked up the wall and filming the changes. Angus Gibson, a Johannesburg filmmaker with whom Kentridge had worked on different projects, saw the result and suggested that Kentridge make a whole film using just that technique: ‘Just try it, and see how long it takes,’ he said.

The first drawings that Kentridge made, which eventually became part of Johannesburg, were of Felix in the bath and on his balcony, surveying the city, and of Soho at his desk surrounded by his phones. Next, he connected them with a woman—Mrs Eckstein.

The focus expanded and he drew the tramp with crutches—Harry,13 the voice of the dispossessed in the film; and the procession snaking across the landscape, based on Goya’s Procession of the Holy Office and Pilgrimage to San Isidiro (1819–23). The original working title for the film was, in fact, ‘Procession of the Dispossessed’.

After a week of work, Kentridge had about 100 feet or one minute of film. He took it to the lab for a rush print and, though he was dismayed by the imperfection of the erasures, what he learnt, more importantly, was that it was possible to make a film this way—the technique worked.

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With each new film he learnt more about the technical challenges and constraints, what was quick or slow to draw and what types of image make good subjects for animation. It soon became clear that there were sequences that were easy to draw but that would be hard to reproduce in a conventional feature film, and vice versa. A crowd, for example, is relatively quick to animate—each person is just a charcoal mark in the distance, and an hour’s drawing produces a crowd of a thousand people. By contrast, a single person walking across the screen (as in Monument) is an arduous job that takes weeks to complete because the whole figure has to be redrawn with every step. In a live-action film, it may be easy to show changes in mood through the changing expressions on an actor’s face whereas to draw the same changes requires great subtlety and skill. Although it is clearly more efficient to turn a cat into a telephone using charcoal animation than hi-tech special effects.

The cavorting fish, a key image in the early films, is another case in point: You start work and you think, ‘No, this sequence is going to be murder to draw.’ It’s going to take weeks so you have to find a different way for it to happen. In the first film, Johannesburg, I wanted to draw Soho’s erotic drive so I thought I’d have a small horse galloping round and round,

Still from Johannesburg.

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and I then thought: ‘To draw a fucking horse and rub it out and redraw it running around on his hand?!’ So I thought of the fish—it takes about a second to draw a fish which is actually a much better image, much more wet, much more slippery than a kitsch horse galloping around like My Little Pony. But getting to the fish was partly the sense of wanting to escape the hard work of drawing.

When I drew a panther pacing in its cage, it was a very slow piece of animation to do. Once it was pacing I could copy the sequence so it carried on for ever, but first you have to make one complete loop. Each step, each tiny position of each step, meant rubbing out the entire animal and redrawing it with all those tiny adjustments. Because the whole body shifts, the whole head shifts—not just the legs.

Similarly, to draw a person rocking someone in their arms would be an extremely slow and cumbersome animation to do as you’d have to rub out the whole figure.14 In Other Faces, there is a part where Soho is holding a baby sphinx.

If he was rocking it, I would have to redraw the entire sphinx for every frame. Instead, it just moves its arm which simply requires rubbing out and moving one section.

Drawings for Confessions of Zeno (2001).

These practical considerations are very important for me. The films need to be made over a period of months, or a year—but not five years.15

(Facing page) Drawing for Other Faces.

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Kentridge also discovered early on that it is easier to animate a monochromatic universe than one with patches of colour. If colour was present in some scenes, it would take for ever to rub out. It was far easier to render the landscape in grey—it was simple to erase and blended in with Soho’s suit as he passed.

For Kentridge, some objects also lent themselves to animation better than others. For example, the shiny black surfaces of Bakelite telephones and other obsolete office equipment rather than, say, a soft-pile carpet.

Mastery of technique was accompanied by a growing understanding of the importance of the films as works of art in their own right. Kentridge has said that he regarded the first four films as hobbies or asides, something pleasurable to do to break up the process of moving from one exhibition of drawings to the next. The films were shown at festivals where they were very well received (which encouraged him to make more) but they were never seen as creative artefacts with their own commercial value. But when gallery owners and curators began asking to show the films as exhibits in their own right, Kentridge was affronted: ‘When David Eliot at the Museum of Modern Art in Oxford wanted to have the films I was insulted. I thought, “Fuck you, I want to show my drawings.” So he let me show the drawings, which was lucky for me as otherwise I would have refused to let him have the films. At the

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Drawing for Other Faces.

Drawing for Stereoscope (not used in the film).

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time I wanted to apologize for all the smudges, to tell people that I would try harder next time.’16 It was only after Sobriety was completed that Kentridge began to show the drawings in exhibitions which accompany the launch of each new film. Sobriety was also the first film that he sold—for $10,000, to the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

THE ARTIST AT WORK Kentridge is not a man to sit quietly in his room working out the story in all its complexity before he begins to draw. He does not, like other filmmakers, create a storyboard which allows him (or constrains him—depending on your point of view) to start at the beginning and work his way through to the end. As a result, there is often a dramatic gap between the first idea for the film and the final product. In Mine, for example, Kentridge’s first idea was that the film would be about Soho’s daughter, Liberty Eckstein, but she never actually made it into the film. Similarly, in Stereoscope, one of the women in the telephone exchange was originally going to be a principal player but ended up only as a fleeting image. The same thing happened in Other Faces, which Kentridge had imagined would hinge on a relationship between Soho Eckstein and a woman he met in a coffee bar but she appears only as the ghost of an idea, not a fleshed-out character.

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(This and facing page) Sketch and notes (1990) for Sobriety.

(Facing page) Drawing for abandoned film and (below) drawing for History (not used in the film).

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Instead of a script, Kentridge works with a list of about 20 images, scenes he would like to include, but this list is not based on a pre-ordained structure or flow. As Kentridge draws, he relies on the work-in-progress to reveal the order in which these scenes will ultimately fit together to create the narrative. Thus, rather than starting at the beginning, Kentridge tends to work from the centre outwards, pursuing a few insistent ideas and seeing where they lead him.

PACING HIMSELF

(Below, facing page and overleaf) Stills from Mine.

Seeing Kentridge at work is like watching an animal in a confined space, always pacing, wearing down the same narrow track. From paper tacked up on the studio wall to the camera and back, he treads the same pathway for hours on end. It is mesmerizing for the viewer, but there is a crucial element of self-hypnosis at work here as well. As Kentridge says, ‘Movement is very much part of the working process. The one place where nothing happens is when I’m sitting at the desk. It’s a disaster. It’s fine if I’m making a list of things I’ll be doing, trying to reassure myself that it is possible to bring certain things into a frame of time.’17 Pacing is critical to Kentridge’s creative process as, somewhere in the midst of all that stalking back and forth, the idea takes form— his understanding expands and he begins to see what the picture will look like, how it will change, which elements will transform 84

into which others. Later, as more drawings are completed and more sections of the film captured reassuringly in the can, the narrative emerges more clearly and it becomes more apparent to the artist what he needs to do next to finish the story.

DREAM DIARIES The original impetus behind each film is always vague. It may be no more than the glimmering of an idea, a mental image, some words or phrases or aphorisms which intrigue him—perhaps nothing more than the last vestiges of a dream noted down in a dream diary. The names of the main characters, Soho Eckstein and Felix Teitlebaum, are drawn directly from a dream in which they first announced themselves to Kentridge’s unconscious. Similarly, Felix’s defining characteristic—his floodlike anxiety—also springs from a dreamphrase.

Other starting points include words and wordplay. Felix in Exile, for example, emerged in part from the juxtaposition of the words in the title. At first glance, ‘Felix’ and ‘Exile’ look like anagrams of each other—almost a palindrome or a kind of mirror writing. At second glance we see that this is not the case, but the two words do come together to frame the central idea of the film.

In Sobriety, the words ‘Sobriety’ and ‘Obesity’ play a similar role and we are shown the close parallels between the two in the way in which Sobriety morphs into Obesity in the opening titles.

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Also in Sobriety, the words ‘Come Home’ are used both to express Soho’s state of mind as well as for their visual impact— the words are the same but for one crucial letter. Later, in History of the Main Complaint, Kentridge’s wordplay sets up the deliberate pun in the title. What complaint is it exactly that we are examining?

Is it Soho’s coma (his medical condition)? Is it Soho grumbling about his lot? Or is it the world lodging its complaint against the man in the bed? One could make a case for any, or all, of these meanings.

FOUND OBJECTS Kentridge also gathers his ideas from found objects such as photographs or miscellaneous things lying around the house. One example, which Kentridge has mentioned frequently in interviews and his writing, is the origin of the catalytic idea for the film that became Mine.

Kentridge had already drawn early scenes of Soho lying in bed, a troop of tiny miners spilling out of the lift and dispersing across the counterpane. Then he rang the breakfast bell which morphed satisfactorily into his trademark cigar. But what next? Kentridge was short of ideas, so, to play for time, he drew Soho depressing the plunger of his cafetiere (which is precisely what Kentridge had been doing half an hour before, drinking his morning coffee and pondering on his lack of creative inspiration). The act of drawing 87

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was soothing in itself—it’s easy (apparently) to draw a plunger sinking in a glass vessel—and offered Kentridge a good return on effort (many seconds of film for relatively little sweat). In the process, however, he made the necessary creative leap—he realized that if he allowed the plunger to continue its descent below the bottom of the cafetiere, continuing through the bed, through successive geological layers into deep subterranean regions, he would have created his mine shaft.

From this single moment of illumination was born the imagery for the rest of the film—the miners in their underground dormitory, the layout of the shaft, the action in the stope: The cafetiere in the film is a drawing of the cafetiere that was in my studio that morning. It could as easily have been a teapot. And it was only when the plunger was halfway down, in the activity of drawing it, erasing it, repositioning it a few millimetres lower each time, that I saw, I knew, I realized (I cannot pin an exact word on it) that it would go through the tray, through the bed, and become the mine shaft. The sensation was more of discovery than of invention. There was no feeling of what a good idea I had had.

There was, rather, relief at not having overlooked what was in front of me and the sense of being really stupid not to have realized earlier what had to happen.

(Above) Still from Johannesburg.

(Facing page) Woyzeck on the Highveld (1992), theatre piece with puppets, live actors and projection.

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(Left) Still from Lord Mayor of Derby Road, etching from Industry and Idleness suite (1986).

(Right) Arc Procession (Develop, Catch Up, Even Surpass, 1990), drawing (detail).

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I am not claiming the moment or image as a particularly potent one, but what does fascinate me is to know where that image came from. It was not planned. I could not have predicted it at the start of the day. It was not an answer to a question I had posed to myself: ‘What is a domestic object that has affinities to a mine lift?’ What was going on while I was in the kitchen preparing something to drink? Was there some part of me saying, ‘Not the tea, there, you fool, the coffee, not espresso, the cafetiere . . . Trust me. I know what I’m doing.’ If I’d had tea that morning, would the impasse of Soho in bed have continued?18 Kentridge talks about the act of drawing as a medium for thinking or as a metaphor for thinking. He has described the drawing as an artistic process operating at the speed of thought— a single sweep of the arm can create a landscape of rich darkness; a second sweep of the arm, this time holding an eraser, creates a shaft of light: Drawing for me is about fluidity. There may be a vague sense of what you’re going to draw but things occur during the process that may modify, consolidate or shed doubts on what you know. So drawing is a testing of ideas, a slowmotion version of thought. [. . .] What ends in clarity does not begin that way.19

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And even if the ideas do not flow, the act of drawing—the sheer physical activity of putting marks on a page and being able to see, at day’s end, all that has been achieved from these hours of labour—is therapeutic in itself: ‘The actual physical activity of making the drawings [. . .] is a comfort in a practical sense—it is very central to me in times of distress or depression. That physical activity in a primitive, therapeutic way works to calm me down to make things.’20 THE PLEASURE OF RECOGNITION Kentridge draws inspiration for his films from other projects that he happens to be working on at the same time. Because he possesses the ability to range between many different activities at once, using ideas from one to inform another, images from the films show up in his large drawings (and vice versa) while the animation technique used in the Soho Eckstein films is used in his theatre and opera projects, all of which use animated film as a backdrop to the action on stage.

(From top) Stills from Felix, Woyzeck, Other Faces.

For example, Harry, the voice and face of the dispossessed, who appears in Johannesburg and Monument, crops up in much of Kentridge’s other work during the late 1980s and early 90s. Just as Soho is never seen except in his pinstriped suit, so too Harry never appears except in his emblematic cloth cap and herring-bone coat, crudely knotted over his shirtless torso. His face is scarred and

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pitted with alcohol, rough living and disease, a disturbing echo of Soho’s riven and corrupt features in these early films.

Still from Il Ritorno d’Ulisse in Patria (reproduced courtesy Handspring Theatre Company).

Kentridge used Harry as a model in many works created during this period, most notably in his reworking of Hogarth’s etchings series, Industry and Idleness (1986), and in his monumental, multipanelled drawing, Arc Procession (1990). In one of the prints entitled ‘Lord Mayor of Derby Road’ (the main street of Bertrams), Harry appears in his characteristic garb, embellished by a mayoral sash of office.

The messages in the night sky, which act as signs and portents in Felix, were first used in Woyzeck on the Highveld (1992), Kentridge’s first theatre collaboration with the Handspring Puppet Company, produced a year or so before Felix appeared.

In History, a group of doctors use their stethoscopes with sinister effect, digging deep to uncover the inner thoughts of a comatose Soho. This idea also has its origins in Woyzeck, and was used concurrently in Kentridge’s 1998 production of Monteverdi’s Il Ritorno d’Ulisse in Patria. In Kentridge’s version of the opera, much of the action taking place on stage may actually be occurring in the fevered imagination of a bed-ridden, dying Ulysses, as revealed by his doctors and their instruments.

The broken frames and multiple images in Stereoscope are reminiscent of the fragmented images in the film which forms the

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backdrop for Kentridge’s 1997 play Ubu and the Truth Commission, while the violent flashes which torment Soho in the film mimic the violence which flows through the play.

Still from Ubu and the Truth Commission (1997).

This process of mutual reinforcement between different aspects of his work gives strength and heft to Kentridge’s projects.

He gives himself space to work through ideas, testing them out in different ways, in different forums and through different media.

It is also useful, creating ready-to-hand entry points as he tackles a new work of art. We the viewers find these accumulated references useful too in their similar yet different guises, and they grant us the pleasure of recognition without forcing on us the ennui that comes from incessant repetition.

THE TRANSFORMATION OF TIME The Soho Eckstein films are all about the process of transformation, whether it be Soho’s psychological shift from comic-book capitalist to introspective dreamer, the metamorphosis of the organic into the inorganic and vice versa, the rise and fall of empire or the transformation of space into time.

Charcoal animation, by definition, is about transforming static images into dynamic sequences which unfold over time. To take one example: When Nandi is shot in Felix, it takes 1.5 seconds (or 37 frames) from the moment of impact, through the curvature of the fall, to the final drawing of her body lying lifeless on the 94

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ground. Thirty-seven frames equates to an arc 18 cm long which can be subdivided into smaller divisions, with the falling figure erased and redrawn at successive points along the arc. At the same time, 18 cm on paper is the equivalent of 22 cm of film in the camera, so the process of filming becomes a way of holding physical time in one’s hand.

But there is a further transformation that occurs: 1.5 seconds is the product of two days of drawing in the studio, two days of taking a mental image and deconstructing it into individual parts before reconstituting it, frame by frame, into something which both captures and transcends the original idea. In this example, the sense of the body falling is the impulse which takes the artist into the studio, but, once there, it goes through a process of obliteration in order to re-emerge, transformed, two days later and invested with emotional charge.

The process involves a distancing from the first outrage one feels and turns the shock of the dead body into formal decisions about tone, thickness of line, shape, materials—charcoal, brush, shammy leather—setting (should there be a rock in front of the body or a set of white lines to give a sense of scale?) There are other decisions involved in the filming itself, about lighting and aperture, all of which combine to transform the dead body in the veld from one form to another, from something real, out there in the world, into paper, celluloid and charcoal. At the end of the process, you 95

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hope that what the audience sees is not simply the sum of a set of technical decisions but the image of the body falling and the shock of the person dead in the field.

The red lines in the landscape provide another way of turning distance into time. When one looks at a static image of a landscape, one sees an unchanging picture with no sense of time passing. But the smallest movement—a blade of grass bending in the wind, the flap of a bird’s wing, a red line inscribing an arc across the terrain—and the viewer is pulled from his time (5 minutes spent staring at a picture) into the time of the film.

The red lines help achieve a shift of focus by providing a sense of extension and duration. They are also emblematic of what happens when the artist transforms the three-dimensional world into a two-dimensional image. If a writer were to describe the dead body in words, the language of thinking about the object and writing about it would be the same. It takes longer to write a sentence than to read it but the difference is not very great, and the writer can come up with the idea and write it down in a single, uninterrupted flow of language.

Drawing is different. Looking at something—a photograph of a body on the ground—and reconjuring it in a different form (a charcoal drawing on paper) is a more palpably transformative activity. It takes far longer to draw something than to see it, and the animation technique makes the process longer and still more fractured. The 96

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artist has to stop after each mark, go back to the camera, record the changes, reflect, and then begin again with the next precise erasure and redrawing.

For the artist, there is the sense of the slow accretion of time and the red lines curving across the page count out the beat of time passing, of things in an inexorable process of change.

LEAVING ROOM FOR INTERPRETATION We have already mentioned the quality of Kentridge’s animation technique, and the way in which the ghosting that accompanies each new image creates an intimacy between viewer and filmmaker that is absent from seemingly more polished animated films. This intimacy is reinforced in the creative process and the way in which meaning is revealed. If we are surprised by the way the story unfolds, taken aback by some of the transformations that occur, then so is Kentridge. The fact that meaning is ultimately contingent—my interpretation of the film may well be (most likely will be) different from yours but equally valid—means that viewers have a central role to play in ‘completing’ the film: The greatest danger is of a completed narrative. [. . .] In these, the finality of the story acts to shut out the viewer.

An incompletion or awkwardness is needed—stories stop where they should continue, gaps are left for the viewer to bridge. This is not a prescription but, rather, a reflection 97

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on what has made certain narrative pictures (not just my own) intrigue me and others die a death. [. . .] One is captivated by trying to reduce to sense a riddle which has no answer, of joining in the play which the artist has offered and, in so doing, accepting his or her terms.21

POLITICS IN THE 10 FILMS HISTORY LESSON The 10 films in the Soho Eckstein saga were created over a 20-year period encompassing the most profound political changes in the history of South Africa: 1989. Johannesburg. There is a state of emergency in South Africa.

The last great apartheid demagogue, P. W. Botha, resigns as president of South Africa. Meanwhile, the police continue to ban protest meetings, break up demonstrations and detain activists and protestors.

1990. Monument. The African National Congress (ANC) and the South African Communist Party (SACP) are unbanned, and Nelson Mandela is released after 27 years in prison. There is continuing warfare between supporters of the ANC and the Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP), rival black political movements, spreading from Natal to the townships around Johannesburg.

(Facing page) Drawing for Sobriety.

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1991. Mine and Sobriety. Apartheid continues to unravel as more laws and regulations are repealed. Political exiles return to South Africa as a new future opens up, and all political parties (including those newly unbanned) take part in the Congress for a Democratic South Africa, the first step on the path to full democracy.

1994. Felix. The first non-racial democratic elections take place, resulting in an overwhelming victory for the ANC and the election of Nelson Mandela as president.

1996. History. The new Constitution is ratified but crime levels remain high and, outside of designated war zones, South Africa is listed as the most violent country in the world.

1997. Weighing. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) continues to hear testimony on crimes committed by all parties during the apartheid years, and to consider applications for amnesty by those confessing to criminal acts whether in the name of, or in the war against, apartheid.

1999. Stereoscope. The second post-apartheid democratic elections are held and Thabo Mbeki becomes president.

2003. Tide Table. The government’s response (or lack thereof) to the AIDS crisis sweeping South Africa draws it into conflict with AIDS activists and makes the country a laughing stock in the international community.

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Drawing for Felix.

Still from Felix in Exile.

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2011. Other Faces. The country has been a non-racial democracy for more than 15 years but the going is far from smooth. For every story of hope and progress there is a tale of violence and bad faith, the most recent and savage being the attacks on foreign migrants which exploded across townships and informal settlements in 2008, killing scores of people and displacing thousands more.

THE REVOLUTIONARY DUTY OF THE ARTIST William Kentridge is often described as a political artist. This is, of course, true in a trite and obvious way, but this kind of glib labelling fails to understand precisely the part that politics plays in his work and the way he sees his own role as artist.

Kentridge’s work is infused by the political history of South Africa—in particular, the reality and obscenity of apartheid—but, unlike South African resistance artists of the 1970s and 80s (who painted glowing portraits of heroes of the struggle or wrote books and poetry about freedom fighters), his drawings are not specifically about politics. Rather, his starting point is closer to Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s often-quoted dictum that ‘the writer’s [or artist’s] duty—his revolutionary duty, if you like—is to write [or draw] well.’

Kentridge describes the evolution of his approach to political art as follows:

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During the 1970s and 80s I made some posters and drawings as well as theatre pieces, all of which I saw as acts of political opposition. [. . .] Since then the work has become more a reflection on the political world, in terms of the way it affects us personally, than an attempt to become part of it.22 Political events are an essential raw material in Kentridge’s work, but his impulse is always to tell the stories of individual people—not of the masses. He is interested in the impact of specific events rather than abstract ideas. He is an artist—not an ideologue.

For Kentridge, art created only in support of a political programme or cause—while it may be praiseworthy in itself—is often uninteresting or ephemeral, with the same staying power as the day’s headlines. What matters is what is done to these political raw materials, how they are transformed to create an art that has lasting value.

In the films, the specific events and crises comprising the country’s political transformation form the backdrop to the story unfolding across the screen. We see the protests, the violence, the dark secrets emerging painfully into the light—the pathologies of the new society. These subjects frame the stage on which the action is played out but the films are not about political events. Johannesburg is not about the revived Defiance Campaign of the late 1980s;

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Weighing is not about the Truth and Reconciliation Campaign; and Tide Table is not about the disaster that is AIDS in South Africa.

Instead, the films are concerned with the way these inescapable elements affect us as individuals—in the ways we live our lives, and the kinds of responses (or silences) they evoke from us.

Take Johannesburg, for example. On the surface it seems the most overtly political of the films, with Soho starring out in the role of demonic money grubber. However, if the film was only about apartheid and late 1980s’ protest politics, about the clash between capitalism and socialism, it would have come and gone with the events of the time. Instead, it endures and keeps its interest precisely because it transcends the specifics of the day. Its real subject is that most universal of themes—a love triangle. As viewers, we are intrigued more by Soho’s predicament as cuckolded husband than we are by his contemptuous treatment of the poor—and the artist is too. As the series progresses, the eye which imagines Soho, and the hand which draws him, becomes ever less censorious and judgemental and ever more curious and compassionate. Soho, in all his doubt, his culpability and his guilt, is ultimately a sympathetic figure, for (as the artist implies) who are we to cast the first stone? This treatment is in direct contrast to overtly ‘political’ art, where right and wrong are black and white hard-edged categories without space for doubt or ambiguity.

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Series of drawings for Other Faces.

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Similarly, Felix Teitlebaum, in his indecision and inability to engage with the world—the perpetual observer, the quintessential outsider—is treated with an empathy born of recognition and kinship. This is Kentridge’s description of his approach to political engagement: ‘Rather than saying, like Lenin, “What is to be done?”, my engagement is politically concerned but distanced. One contradiction in the South African situation is the oscillating space between a violent, abnormal world outside and a parallel, comfortable world from which it is viewed.’23 Kentridge describes himself as working in a space where: [O]ptimism is kept in check and nihilism is kept at bay. It is in this narrow gap that I see myself working—aware of and drawing sustenance from the anomaly of my position.

At the edge of huge social upheavals yet also removed from them. Not able to be part of these upheavals nor to work as if they did not exist.

This position—neither active participant nor disinterested observer—is the starting point and the area of my work. It is not necessarily the subject of it.24 But this gap, this stance as observer and illustrator, does not constitute a kind of moral relativism. It is not as though Kentridge is saying, ‘Everything out there is OK—it’s all grist to the artistic mill.’

On the contrary, Kentridge’s approach to art and politics may be

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summarized in the following comment, in which he encapsulates his point of view about the relationship between the two: ‘To say one needs art, or politics, that incorporates ambiguity and contradiction is not to say that one then stops recognizing and condemning things as evil. However, it might stop one being so utterly convinced of the certainty of one’s own solutions.’25

END NOTES Other Faces was made between July 2010 and March 2011, a period of roughly nine months. In absolute, elapsed time, this is longer than the time taken to draw the other films in the sequence. In relative time taken, however, Kentridge produced the film in a blur of creative energy. In the past he would work either full time or largely full time on the films; with Other Faces, by contrast, aside from a concentrated three week burst of work to get the film underway, he worked on 10 other projects at the same time. And these were not minor diversions but major undertakings, ranging from individual drawings and prints to an exhibition in the Egyptian rooms at the Louvre and a major retrospective at the Jeu de Paume.

In the past 20 years, the timeline of the Soho Eckstein films, Kentridge has dramatically increased the scope of his artistic endeavour. Known originally for his charcoal drawings and animated films,

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he is now known as a great polymath of contemporary art, equally renowned as a Writer, producer and director of plays: working with puppets and animation to create a unique theatrical experience; Director of operas: with a repertoire ranging from earlyseventeenth-century work to modernist Russian opera; Performance artist: often using a filmed backdrop to create tableaux in which two, three or four copies of himself appear, working with and against one another in comic tension; Sculptor : with works ranging from small maquettes barely a hand’s span in height, to the 11 m–high Firewalker public sculpture which stands at the entrance to the old Johannesburg CBD; Experimental artist: working with anamorphic drawings, turning sculptures, stereoscopic vision and other experiments in the way in which we perceive reality.

One consequence of this proliferation of different projects and activities has been a lengthening of the period between films, with the first 8 films taking 10 years to make, and the last 2 only completed after a further 12 years.

This diversity of imaginative effort flows through to the films and adds to their weight. The emblematic anatomical drawings of

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FILM

YEAR

GAP BETWEEN FILMS

Johannesburg, 2nd Greatest City after Paris

1989

Monument

1990

1 year

Mine

1991

1 year

Sobriety, Obesity, & Growing Old

1991

< 1 year

Felix in Exile

1994

3 years

History of the Main Complaint

1996

2 years

Weighing and Wanting

1997

1 year

Stereoscope

1999

2 years

Tide Table

2003

4 years

Other Faces

2011

8 years

History, for example, were originally conceived as a dry run for Kentridge’s production of the Monteverdi opera, Il Ritorno d’Ulisee in Patria; the violence that infuses Stereoscope draws on images from the play Ubu and the Truth Commission, first performed the previous year; and the bird that floats into finitude at the end of Other Faces owes its existence to the birds that flock to Papageno’s outstretched hand in Kentridge’s version of Mozart’s Magic Flute.

But if other projects have enhanced the films, at a deeper, more fundamental level, the line of causation runs the other way. Even as Kentridge strikes out in new directions and embarks upon ever110

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more ambitious departures, at base there is always the drawing, and with the drawing, the animated films. Without the films there would be no theatre, and without the theatre no opera, and without the opera no anamorphic and stereoscopic installations, no turning sculptures and no performance art.

The impulse to break new ground, to throw himself into new ideas and undertakings, is vital to the creative process, but for Kentridge the films remain at the heart of who he is as an artist, the cornerstone supporting all that he has achieved in the past quarter century of work.26 Casals talks about coming back to play the Bach Unaccompanied Suites for Cello every year—or if not every year, then certainly regularly—as a way of coming back to basics, remembering what the lifetime project of playing the cello is about. Similarly, the return to charcoal animation, to the Soho films, is a way of coming back to basics for me, to a sense of what it is to be in the studio, drawing.

I write a lot about stalking the image, about walking round and round the studio, about productive procrastination, but when you get through that, and you’re actually drawing, all the weeks and months of making the film, then it feel like you’re at the heart of the activity. That’s not to say the other work is not engrossing, but it always seems

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slightly away from the central project; the charcoal drawing is always the bedrock.27 Kentridge talks about ‘the engine of the studio’, the machine where inchoate ideas are given substance, transformed into products with form and weight.

We do not know when the next Soho Eckstein film will come spinning out of the machine. As yet there is no foundation image to anchor the next installment in the saga, as the idea of the waves lapping on the shore, the movement of water on the beach, provided the initial impetus for Tide Table. However, there are already intimations of what it might contain: another film within a film using different animation techniques for each; a soundtrack which returns to the clicks and scratches of Other Faces; or perhaps a new encounter with Soho’s old nemesis, Felix Teitlebaum, in all his menacing nakedness.

No matter what the outcome of the long gestation period, or the form in which the film will finally appear, it is clear that the story of Soho Eckstein is far from over. The epic will continue to unfold in years to come, like a red line sweeping in a wide arc across the landscape towards some distant resolution—a little rest, a little peace.

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Notes 1 Kentridge has another, simpler explanation for Felix’s appearance: ‘I drew him naked because I am not a costume designer.’

2 Conversation with the author, November 2011.

3 Ibid.

4 Programme notes for 9 Films.

5 Quoted in William Kentridge and Angela Breidbach, William Kentridge: Thinking Aloud; Conversations with Angela Breidbach (Johannesburg: David Krut Publishing, 2006), p. 36.

6 Lionel Abrahams, ‘The Fall of Van Eck House’ in Journal of a New Man (Johannesburg: Ad Donker, 1984).

7 It is also, usefully, a world which opens itself up to drawing: connections between characters, buildings, states of mind can be shown with a simple blue line running from one to the other.

At the same time, heavy mechanical office equipment (typewriters, telephones, telex machines) stand up and beg to be drawn. As Kentridge has said, these are objects which meet the process of drawing half way because even in full colour they appear in black and white.

8 Quoted in Dan Cameron, Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, J. M. Coetzee, Italo Svevo and William Kentridge, William Kentridge (London: Phaidon, 1999), p. 9.

9 Quoted in ibid., p. 22.

10 A nostalgia-rich beach resort on the Cape peninsula in South Africa, which had its heyday in the first half of the twentieth century.

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11 Conversation with the author, November 2011. When we returned to the original linocut we saw that the suit was, in fact, black with no stripes at all. However, what mattered was that Kentridge had remembered it as a pinstriped suit and that is the image that later flowed through to all subsequent drawings and prints.

12 Ibid.

13 Modelled on a tramp who camped out on the corner of the street in Bertrams, a ramshackle Johannesburg suburb where Kentridge was living at the time.

14 It is possible to speed up the process using cut-out animation, drawing each part of the body on a separate piece of paper and physically manipulating the cut-outs to show movement. Kentridge has used cut-out animation in a number of projects over the years—particularly in a later film, entitled Procession of the Dispossessed, in which silhouetted figures move across an empty white screen. In the Soho films, however, he has used this technique only once—in a short sequence in Felix in Exile—but it is a strange anomaly and comes across as crude and jerky in contrast to the charcoal animation in the rest of the film.

15 Conversation with the author, November 2011.

16 Ibid.

17 Quoted in Kentridge and Breidbach, William Kentridge: Thinking Aloud, p. 70.

18 Quoted in Cameron et al., William Kentridge, p. 118

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19 Quoted in ibid., p. 8 20 Quoted in Kentridge and Breidbach, William Kentridge: Thinking Aloud, p. 70 21 Interview with the author, November 2011.

22 Quoted in Cameron et al., William Kentridge, p. 105.

23 Quoted in ibid., p. 14.

24 Quoted in ibid., p. 9.

25 Quoted in ibid., p. 103.

26 Quoted in ibid., p. 34.

27 In a neat linguistic twist, â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;Ecksteinâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; means cornerstone in German.

28 Conversation with the author, November 2011.

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Matthew and William Kentridge, October 2012, Johannesburg.

INTERMEZZO

An Interview with William Kentridge

I interviewed William Kentridge in his studio in October 2012. It was early spring in Johannesburg and the garden outside was already in full bloom. On the lawn, the hadedas were stalking to and fro, stabbing their long curved beaks into the grass while up in the jacaranda tree the hoopoes were cackling to each other in raucous chorus.

The old birdbath, a relic from the early years of the house, had been restored and converted into a fountain which gurgled discreetly outside the front door. Tamino, the white Labrador, lay like a faithful doormat on the stone step at the entrance to the studio, while inside, in the office, Kentridgeâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s assistants were busy with the thousand tasks that make up the commercial end of an active artistâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s work. On the sofa under the window, the two cats slept companionably in a shaft of sunlight.

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The interview took place inside the studio proper. We drew the curtains against the glare of the Highveld morning and pulled shut the sliding doors to cut the noise of conversation, the tap-tap of computer keys, phones ringing, the buzzer from the gate at the end of the driveway and, always, the hiss of the busy coffee machine.

William and I were seated at a work table, having pushed to one side the usual assortment of pencils, sharpener and erasers, sticks of charcoal, a soft brush and tin of charcoal dust, black tape, pots of ink, jars of water and a carafe. Behind me, an old Bakelite telephone with its dial obscured by ribbons of torn paper, squatted mutely on a corner of the table.

The camera was set up to capture a single shot of the two of us in profile, or three-quarter face if we shifted a bit. The microphone had been rigged to the arm of the old franking stamp from our grandmotherâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s attorneyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s practice. It sat, with incongruous charm, in the middle of the table, an object at least 90 years old and invested with the whiff of early Johannesburg, a city of trams and high ambition that nevertheless still retained its frontier feel.

I had prepared a set of notes and quickly reminded myself of the questions I wanted to ask him:

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• How the films evolved from something peripheral to being central to his work.

• At what point the story starts to emerge and how the creative process shifts from making images to plotting a narrative.

• Why, and to what artistic hinterland, did Felix and Mrs Eckstein disappear after Felix in Exile and Weighing and Wanting respectively?

The list continued but the red light of the camera was on—my cue.

I pulled the microphone forward and said, ‘Will, we’re in your studio in Johannesburg. It’s 9th September 2012—’ I was immediately interrupted. William grabbed the franking stamp, pulled it towards him, looked at his watch and said, ‘At 4.05 p.m.’

At this point I didn’t know if this would be a regular interview or something rather more absurd. Either seemed fine.

‘Yes, the South African spring,’ I continued. ‘We’re going to talk about the 10 Soho Eckstein films, and I’d like to start at the beginning.’

Drawing for Other Faces

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Johannesburg, 2nd Greatest City after Paris 1989 • animated film • 16 mm film transferred to video • 8 minutes 2 seconds • EDITING Angus Gibson • SOUND Warwick Sony, with music by Duke Ellington; choral music • PRODUCED BY The Free Filmmakers Co-operative, Johannesburg

A blank white screen.

The sound of crackling static.

A single word in a crooked typeface . . .

Johannesburg.

A dark and spiky landscape.

Black clouds mass across the sky. Poles and bollards, the terrace of a ramshackle set of stands, a tall floodlight, a black pit (possibly an inky vlei). To the right, a white square—a billboard, or the screen of a drive-in cinema. A motley collection of half-built, halfcollapsed builders’ debris.

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This is the urban wasteland of the Highveld, filling the spaces between cities and towns.

If this is the hand of man at work, then he does not appear to be a master craftsman.

Ant-like cars scurry along the freeways and a single skyscraperâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;the Carlton Centreâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;overshadows its neighbours. In the background, on the city skyline, the distinctive silhouette of the Hillbrow Tower makes its mark.

This is Johannesburg, 2nd greatest city after Paris.

Enter Soho Eckstein, property developer. A huge, ruthless, creature, he wears a pinstriped suit and clutches a cigar in his left hand like a weapon. He looks as though he has been hewn from wood, his face pitted and scarred by the blows of the chisel. His eyes gleam with a cold belligerence and, when he inhales, the stripes of his suit rise into the air and linger about his ears for a moment before subsiding back into the fabric of his shoulders.

Soho, the big man, is also prone to big gestures. When he buys property, he buys up half of Johannesburg and then, with a single sweep of his arm, clears the ground of people and buildings in order to make room for his ambitious projects.

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A billboard identifies the emptiness as ‘Eckstein Territory’, a moment of ironic homage to the overblown territorial claims made by real-life estate agents in Johannesburg.

Then, a naked man, seen from the back, standing on a balcony, watching the teeming city go about its business. This is Felix Teitlebaum, captive of the city, yet set apart from it; always the observer, never the active protagonist. There is something ephemeral about Felix—it may be because he is always depicted naked or because we usually see him surrounded by water, the symbol of change and impermanence. Like water, life flows around him—people may bump against him for a while but then they drift off again or submerge and disappear.

Then, Mrs Eckstein. She is waiting, sitting by the side of an indoor swimming pool housed in an ornate colonnaded atrium with a vaulted glass roof (we are still in Johannesburg, but we could be in the pump room at Karlsbad or Baden Baden), absently caressing herself, smoothing and stroking the material of her blouse over her left breast.

Outside, a beggar on crutches creeps along a dark wall to a billet beneath a lamp post. He executes a graceful, one-legged twirl and settles down for the night beside a brazier, sinking his chin into his chest like a roosting pigeon.

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JOHANNESBURG

Meanwhile, in Soho Eckstein’s office, the pace of commerce is

she drinks a cup of tea, her breasts, the glorious multitude of

hotting up. Like a god, he conjures up a buzz of activity from noth-

delights she might yet visit upon him. And his dreams abruptly

ing more than a burning cigar in the ashtray. The smoke gives rise

come true. For Mrs Eckstein spies him through the window and

to a typewriter and then a plethora of obscure and anachronistic

draws him towards her with such magnetic force that he comes

office equipment—rollers and blotters, stampers, calculators and

somersaulting through the vaulted arcade to drop at her feet, his

ticker-tape machines—all built on sound mechanical principles

head in her lap. She places a restraining, a balancing, an amorous

with not an electronic circuit between them. Scowling, Soho grabs

hand upon his shoulder and leans back, giving herself up to him.

the sheets of paper pouring out of the typewriter, glances at them,

Outside, the rumour mills begin to turn. Soho, at his desk, is

balls them up and tosses them aside. A hammer and sickle, pesky

besieged by information. Importunate phones ring off the hook,

as a house fly, free themselves from one document and buzz about

thrusting their aggressive handsets in his face and an insidious

Soho’s head before they vanish.

gabble of falsely sympathetic voices rushes out at him in a swirl of

Fuming, he vents his spleen on the poor, hurling a bottle at the

inverted commas and smoky exclamation marks.1

wall behind the sleeping beggar who jerks awake, struggles to his feet and hurries off.

The shards of broken glass coalesce into a black cat which then scrambles up the lamp post, mewling in outrage.

Standing waist deep in the shallow end of the pool, Felix plants a kiss in Mrs Eckstein’s hand. His love—his liquid desire—becomes a fish, mercurial and flashing with quicksilver life, leaping and twisting in the pool of water cupped in the palm of her hand.

The rumour mills grind on, stronger and louder. Soho’s eyes

In Felix’s flat, elsewhere in the city, the taps are running, overflowing with Felix’s anxiety and flooding half the house.

A teacup floats past on the waters, then a hat, a hammer, a

pop with surprise, rage and betrayal. He is going mad with the strain of trying to make sense of all the voices surrounding him.

Felix becomes aquatic. He slips below the water and swims to

glass, a toothbrush, a letter . . .

But Felix’s life is not all disquiet—there is still space to sit in

Mrs Eckstein. There is a ripple beneath the surface, a moment of

the bath and dream of Mrs Eckstein, her lips, her mouth, the way

collision, and then her head snaps back with a grimace of pleasure.

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Out on the open ground, lit by mast lighting and spotted with bollards and broken stumps, a crowd of ragged people arrives along the dirt track, snaking its way past pylons and mine dumps, advancing across the landscape, coming ever nearer, taking form, gaining features and personalities.

Soho is seated at table, a massive banquet spread before him.

A text box announces that Soho is about to feed the poor but this is a cruel jokeâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;the only appetite satisfied is Sohoâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s own. He stuffs food into his mouth, an immoral glutton feasting while others starve. He crooks his arm round his plate and glass, like a cat protecting its feeding bowl.

At the head of the procession of the hungry and dispossessed is Harry, a bruised and disfigured man, his eyes hooded under a cloth cap, a torn herringbone coat pulled close against his bare chest.

Harry raises his arm and points at Soho. It is a profoundly eloquent gesture, rich with accusation, judgement and condemnation.

Then he opens his mouth, like a cave, and from it pours the voice of the masses, a soaring soundtrack of anger, frustration and demand. Indeed, the strength of the voice far outstrips the ragged column of supplicants from which it issues.

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The cry is too much for Soho who covers his ears against the sound, then tries to fit as much food into his mouth as he can before the song resumes.

Stuffed and sated, lazy and disdainful, Soho then tosses a few scraps to the crowd. They spatter and burst against Harry’s tattered coat, staining it like a gunshot wound, then fall uselessly, wastefully, to the ground.

Harry drops his arms to his side in a gesture of supplication, of disbelief, of despair.

Having bested the masses, Soho must now deal with Felix. As they face each other across the usual landscape of spars and metal rods, Soho opens his hand and shows Felix the evidence of his adultery—the leaping fish—before brushing him aside. However, unlike the poor, or the landscape itself, Felix is not so easily crushed—he returns and, with a left hook, knocks Soho to the ground.

The fight continues outside in a vlei, and the two men wrestle in an implausibly well-choreographed sequence of grapples, throws and falls. Nearby, a box full of heads stands sentinel, like a cabinet in a macabre ethnographic or archaeological museum.

There is death all around—from poverty, from political violence—and there is more to come.

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JOHANNESBURG

Into this grim landscape comes Mrs Eckstein wearing a shift.2

and photographers who had come to document Johannesburg, the

She pulls a long shawl over her shoulders and erases the cabinet

second greatest city after Paris. This dream is clearly a wry joke on

which then becomes a giant fish trailing in her wake. These morbid

the part of Kentridge’s unconscious for, under apartheid, Johan-

images are not her concern—her appetites incline more to the

nesburg was never going to be the second greatest city after any-

carnal.

where. And, indeed, neither the dream nor the film spends any

And still Soho and Felix fight on. Faceless actors, deprived of

time dwelling on the more appealing aspects of the place. Instead,

features or individuality, they are in the throes of enacting an all-

we are shown scenes of egregious inequality, of suffering, of glut-

too-familiar and primitive ritual.

tony and selfishness, each laid out against a broken-down urban

Behind them, the chariot of history continues on its relentless

landscape filled with scattered refuse.

way. The masses are still on the move. We see them pass across

But the title of the film is not merely a satirical comment on

the landscape, then grow smaller and smaller and finally disappear.

the artist’s hometown. To understand its origins, we need to under-

They are leaving, but they are not going anywhere.

stand the context in which it was chosen. More specifically, we need to consider the long-running (and peculiarly parochial and

ORIGINS: THE 2ND GREATEST CITY

humourless) debate within anti-apartheid circles as to what constituted ‘acceptable’ or ‘authentic’ African cultural values.

The first of the Soho Eckstein films is remarkable for its title, and Under apartheid, white children were given no opportunity at

those who come across it for the first time (especially in South Africa) are usually forced to do a kind of inward double take. Johannesburg? Second greatest city? Really?

school to learn indigenous languages—any child wanting to learn a foreign language had to choose from among French, German, Greek and Latin (and, in some cases, Hebrew). English depart-

And, second only after Paris? Why not New York, Sydney, Tokyo, Moscow? Why not London?

William Kentridge once had a dream of a figure in a pinstriped

ments at white high schools and universities offered courses in Shakespeare, Chaucer and Dickens while African literature was no more than a niche specialization. In the same vein, much of the

suit standing outside the EMI headquarters, surrounded by artists 136

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different types of art on offer were European in origin—the regional opera companies produced operas by Verdi, Puccini, Offenbach and Strauss while the biggest theatrical hits were local productions of Andrew Lloyd Webber musicals and British bedroom farces.

Therefore, in the 1980s and early 90s, much was said and written by resistance ‘cultural workers’ in South Africa about the iniquities of this ‘Eurocentric’ approach to cultural values. This approach, which downgraded or disparaged local art by comparison to a false European ideal, was seen as a form of cultural colonialism. This argument was not entirely without merit, for many in the white community had been brought up in an environment that taught them to regard European culture as ‘superior’ to anything produced in South Africa.

Most of Kentridge’s artistic upbringing also comprised an exposure to the classics of European art. So much so that, to the white, English-speaking Johannesburger, London in many respects felt closer to home than Pretoria, just 60 km north along the freeway.

But if Kentridge has conceded the kernel of truth in the arguments of those who oppose so-called European cultural colonialism, he has also rejected the premise that, by definition, European

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art has no place in South Africa and nothing to add to the creation of local work. On the contrary, some of Kentridge’s earliest, and politically most influential, artistic influences are European in origin. Far from trying to distance himself from this European artistic heritage, Kentridge explicitly incorporates elements from them in many of his projects. In 1985, for example, Kentridge presented a series of groundbreaking drawings which owed much to the spiky style of the pre-war German Expressionists. In 1987, he worked with artists Robert Hodgins and Deborah Bell to produce South African versions of William Hogarth’s most famous moral fables.

Georg Büchner’s Woyzeck and Bertolt Brecht’s Mother Courage were performed at the Market Theatre in Johannesburg in the 1970s; Kentridge later transposed the story of Woyzeck into a South African setting in his 1992 play, Woyzeck on the Highveld, creating a new theatrical vocabulary in the process. He repeated the trick with the story of Faust, in his next play, Faustus in Africa (1995).

Goya’s etchings have been another guiding influence, particularly behind Kentridge’s long-running obsession with the nature of crowds, with images of procession and dispossession, and these have shown up in numerous different projects over the past 15 years. In fact, in Johannesburg, the scene in which Felix and Soho battle it out with sticks is drawn from Goya’s Fight with Cudgels

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(c.1820–23), one of a sequence of the Black Paintings and depicting two figures, trapped in a swamp, striking out at each other with clubs. And, of course, many of the characters and ideas from Kentridge’s reworking of Hogarth’s Industry and Idleness (1747) were later incorporated in the Soho Eckstein films.

In the nature of his projects, therefore, and in the way he explicitly chooses to label his work, Kentridge exposes the intellectual bankruptcy of those who try to build a wall between Africa and Europe. By juxtaposing and cross-fertilizing African and European themes, he enhances both, transforming regionally specific material into art with universal relevance and appeal. He refuses to be pigeonholed or forced by self-appointed cultural commissars into a particular stance. Instead, he proves his quality, his iconoclastic power, by not only ignoring the debate but also by redefining it.

It is in this context, then, that we must revisit Johannesburg, 2nd Greatest City After Paris, made, let’s not forget, in 1989, at the height of that debate.

The title is perhaps his two-finger salute to the joyless ideologues of that cultural struggle.

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Notes 1 Familiar symbols of clamour first used by Saul Steinberg in his cartoons and covers for the New Yorker.

2 This scene is a reference to the famous Eadweard Muybridge photographic sequence, â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;Unmarried female (nude) throwing a large handkerchief over her shouldersâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;.

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Monument 1990 • animated film • 16 mm film transferred to video • 3 minutes 11 seconds • editing Angus gibson • sound Catherine Meyburgh • MusiC edward Jordan • produCed by the Free Filmmakers Co-operative, Johannesburg

the Highveld. Like a desert. empty and barren. the odd rock. A culvert with its concrete sidings off to one side. A tree in the background. the throbbing, louring sky.

A man, in the midst of this emptiness. His head, bowed. the shiny nap of his skull creased and nobbled with the scars of old injuries. His forehead lined, his eyes screwed shut. His nose, flattened by the blows of life. His mouth, a thin, ragged line. A man, half-dead with exhaustion, weighed down by an enormous burden on his back.

What is it? it’s hard to tell but we think we spy some old tins of paint, a bucket and bundles of cloths all crammed into a cardboard carton which once shipped boxes of surf washing powder.

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the man moves with ox-like patience, his feet dragging slowly across the ground, each step a monumental effort.

A blast of triumphal music—enter soho eckstein, Civic benefactor. A multiheaded bank of microphones surges towards him as he reads from a sheaf of papers, snaking forward to catch his words or flinching back from the blast of his oratory. We can’t hear what he is saying—the public address system seems to be malfunctioning—but it is something suitably portentous. His fleshy face registers a look of the purest complacency as the news of his benefaction blares across the landscape, transforming the empty ground into a meeting place complete with amphitheatre and stadium lights. the monument itself, sheeted and chained, slowly emerges from the rain of words spilling out of the mouth of a megaphone.1 From all parts of the horizon crowds begin to converge. this is not the single, patient line we saw in Johannesburg but an entire floodplain of souls. rivulets of people swell into great tributaries that pour into the empty bowl around the steel structure, overflow into the formal seating area and then pool and dam around the steel scaffolding. A full house no less, with soho in the midst of it all, eyes half closed in an ecstasy of self-satisfaction, plump hand waving and gesturing, signalling his flamboyant largesse to the mob.

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A rope shoots out, snags the top of the shroud and pulls it off, disclosing the nature of soho’s benefaction. not a standard Johannesburg civic sculpture—not a flight of leaping bronze springboks, say, nor gleaming miners sweating and striving in the pursuit of greatness nor posed heroically around a central rock drill, like the flag-raisers on iwo Jima. no—soho’s monument consists of a classical plinth supporting the statue of a man carrying a heavy burden, modelled no doubt on the figure we encountered in the opening frames of the film. this is William Kentridge’s Ecce Homo—a man, nothing more, squeezed dry, just trying to survive, to get through the world. the camera pans up the figure, from his feet, bare and shackled to the pedestal by iron bands, to his legs, the frayed skirts of his coat, his bare chest, his bowed head, his eyes closed under the weight of his load. but then the figure looks up and opens his eyes. What we thought was a statue is actually a living man. He blinks slowly, surveying the crowd, then closes his eyes once more. From his dry mouth comes a slow rasping breath as the air is dragged into his lungs one breath at a time and then expelled with a groan of effort, a groan of exhaustion.

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origins 1: tHe MAn on tHe MonuMent south Africa under the nationalist party government was a country of the disenfranchised and dislocated. state-sponsored forced removals, the destruction of squatter camps and shanty towns in the name of apartheid—or its bastard offspring, separate development—left thousands of people with no place to stay and no place to go. Whole communities were left with nothing more than a smattering of possessions miraculously rescued from the jaws of the bulldozer. poverty created more homelessness while, in the 1980s, local conflicts—low-grade civil wars and other forms of coordinated violence—stripped people further of shelter and protection. Victims of poverty, or of state and other forms of violence, became refugees in their own country. photographs of the homeless and dispossessed were reminiscent of pictures of victims of other wars. in the early years of the nineteenth century, Francisco goya created a series of etchings entitled The Disasters of War, graphic depictions of the savagery visited upon soldiers and civilians alike in the spanish peninsular War of 1807–14. in some of them, crowds move slowly across broken terrain; in others, the focus is more on individuals. one etching, And This Too, is worth a closer look: two women crossing a body-strewn landscape; one has a baby

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tucked under her arm while the other staggers under the weight of a child slung over her shoulders. behind them, a third figure toils, bent under the weight of an enormous sack. in 1990, Kentridge created a huge multipanelled drawing called Arc Procession with the individual sheets of paper (14 in all) arranged in a high arch 8 metres across. the drawing depicts a procession of people crossing from right to left, a motley crowd with no apparent connection between them: several miners (one carrying a hyaena cub tucked into a blanket on his back), a walking billboard toting a megaphone, a naked woman and an amputee with his bandaged stump stretched out in front of him. At the centre of the arch—the key stone or architrave of the entire artistic edifice—is Harry, the supplicant/accuser we encountered in Johannesburg. Wearing, as usual, his tattered herringbone overcoat, he stands with arms outstretched in crucifixion or, perhaps, in blessing.

At the head of the procession, however, is the figure we are most concerned with—a man bent almost double under a massive burden. He is carrying bundles of cloth, a wheelbarrow, planks, a kitchen cleaver, pots, cups and other obscure objects. though it is hard to see the human figure under all this matter—he prefigures the strange mutations in Kentridge’s later drawings and films of processions, half man, half tree, half man, half telephone—we recognize in him the figure from goya’s etching, transposed to this 156

[Ω]

MONUMENT

most south African of processions; and we recognize him again when we see him next—the figure in the landscape, the man on the monument.

Kentridge has said that the name of his main character came to him in a dream which he later noted down in a dream diary.

However, soho eckstein, Civic benefactor, has a real forerunner— Herman eckstein, a mining baron operating on the goldfields of Johannesburg when the city was founded. eckstein was a partner in the company that later became rand Mines, one of the most powerful of the early mining houses. He was a central figure in early civic life—the first stock exchange made its trades in an area just outside his offices and he was elected first president of the south African Chamber of Mines.

However, the reason he is remembered today is because the greatest civic benefaction in Johannesburg’s history was made posthumously in his name by his former partners—they donated the land just north of parktown that has become, like a miniature Central park, the focal point for the city over the past one hundred years. named the Herman eckstein park, it is better known today, by all Johannesburgers, as the Johannesburg Zoo and the Zoo Lake.

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origins 2: CAtAstropHe in 1984, Kentridge directed samuel beckettâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Catastrophe at the Wits theatre in Johannesburg, a minimalist play of surprising power and impact despite its brevity and the apparent simplicity of the script. Catastrophe, written for Vaclav Havel in 1982 when he was still a victim of state repression in Czechoslovakia and about 10 years before he became president of the country following the Velvet revolution, is a parable about authoritarianism and resistance. A powerful character, the director, assisted by an aide, prepares for the opening of a new play which consists of nothing more than putting a man on show in front of a hidden but sycophantic audience. the man himself stands passive and immobile, looking down, face obscured, while the other two discuss him and experiment with his â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;lookâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; as though he were an object, a thing with no human feelings or characteristics. When he has been primed and primped to their satisfaction, the play within a play is ready. the lights first down and then come up on the solitary figure standing on an empty stage. the appreciative audience begins to clap but, just as the applause is building, the man looks up and stares at the unseen watchers who then lapse uncertainly into silence. in that single act of defiance, the victim on the stage breaks the totalitarian power of the director.

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it may be too much to hope that the figure in Monument, by raising his tortured eyes at the end of the film, is breaking the power of men like soho, but the gesture carries the same weight in Kentridgeâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s film as it does in beckettâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s play and, once again, forces every viewer to recognize the essential humanity of the man on the plinth.

Note 1 the image of the tarpaulin-covered monument is a reference to a drawing by Henry Moore of a covered monument in a field.

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Mine 1991 • animated film • 16 mm film transferred to video • 5 minutes 50 seconds • EDITING Angus Gibson • MUSIC Antonín Dvorak’s Cello Concerto in B Minor, Opus 104 • PRODUCED BY The Free Filmmakers Co-operative, Johannesburg

From out of the darkness and the depths comes a confusion of sounds: the crash of metal doors opening, heavy machinery sputtering and clanking and a deep echoing groan, like the call of a prisoner entombed in the belly of a whale.

Underground. A mask-like head with a miner’s torch fixed to its forehead. A series of obscure, buried articles. And then, spinning faster and faster, growing larger and larger,1 the name of the film comes rushing towards us—MINE. These are not the spindly letters of some ancient typewriter, nor the prosaic lettering used to announce the second film. These are big block letters, as chunky as rock.

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Through a cross-section of the earth, with all its strata and faultlines, we see the white pipe of a mine shaft with a cage ascending to the surface. The mine entrance is marked by the steel housing of lift machinery, a characteristic architectural blip on the Highveld landscape, while off to the side a spewing smokestack signals that the refinery is working at full blast, extracting ore from rock.

A throng of people pour out of the lift when the cage finally makes it to the top of the shaft.

Then, a seismic disturbance, a cataclysmic upheaval. The ground shifts and rolls, crushing and sweeping away people, buildings and machinery. Only the chimney of the refinery is left to smoulder, like a cigar balanced on the counterpane, for the ground has morphed into a bed in which Soho Eckstein, in his trademark suit, has just turned over in his asleep.

Soho, we discover, is also a mining magnate—a Johannesburg randlord.

Soho’s cosy sheets contrast with the miners’ quarters—rows of concrete bunks, a coal-fired brazier placed at intervals to add a touch of warmth to the bitter chill of this bleak dormitory. The workers congregate and turn in, their bunks packed tightly in layered rows, a few inches of low concrete partitioning separating each sleeper from his neighbour.2 166

MINE

The miners sleep the sleep of the dead, overcome with exhaustion. They frown in their dreams, their chests heave with the muscle memory of their exertions while their limbs lie slack with abandonment—this is their brief moment of reprieve.

But Soho is awake now, sitting up in bed with a dozen fat cushions at his back, a writing board across his lap and a cigar in his mouth. We see the outline of his legs under the blanket, the shadows shifting as he brings his knees together in pleasurable anticipation—another day, another cocopan full of cash. This wicked little wriggle, an artful piece of animation, points us to the pun in the title of the film, to Soho’s gleeful delight in his position. ‘Mine?’ he seems to be saying, ‘Damn straight! All mine!’

The smoke from Soho’s cigar now transforms into a bell which both rings for breakfast and sends the signal to wake the next shift of miners. They line up under the showers, heads bowed under the jet, privacy a ludicrous concept. Soho’s coffee arrives in a cafetiere. He spits out his cigar which conveniently becomes a coffee cup, although it’s not certain whether he’ll get his morning libation for the plunger breaks free of the base of the cafetiere, passes through the bedclothes and into the depths, creating a new mine shaft in its wake. The runaway plunger eats through layers of earth in which lie buried the traces of the lost and forgotten—here, more heads from the house of the dead; there, an ammonite.

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The plunger continues its descent, now cutting through the minerâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s billet, past the showering men and the disembodied heads of those still in their bunks, down to the level of the stope itself.

Here the drills are at work, each jab a pneumatic concussion, causing a starburst of light at the tip of the drill bit. In what is arguably the finest piece of animation in the entire Soho Eckstein series, we see the blackness of the footwall opening up in front of us, one drill at a time, as the miners begin work.

From the shaft, the mine spreads out in a series of levels, stopes and crosscuts, opening up more and more corridors and chambers. The pounding drills create an underground architectural blueprint in the distinctive pattern of the sleeping quarters on an eighteenth-century slave ship.

Above ground, the cafetiere has transformed into a ticker-tape machine and the pillows have rearranged themselves into a desk.

We are presented with the traditional markers of Soho at workâ&#x20AC;&#x201D; paper spools out of office machines, the phones ring and Soho, the overlord, keeps to his post with his familiar implacable control.

The ticker-tape machine then becomes the entrance to the mine shaft. The new shift emerges and the miners are collected to form a mine dump, the ubiquitous man-made hills of the Witwatersrand. The mine dumps are middens of spoil, gathering up the

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tens of thousands of tons of waste required to extract a few precious ounces of gold.

Down at the stope the work continues, brutal, exhausting, stifling. The miners wrestle with the weight of the drill, fighting the resistance of the writhing hoses channelling pressurized air and water to the point of the bit, battling them into submission as they coil and yank at their arms. The output of all this effort is a cocopan full of rock which comes rattling down the level along narrowgauge rail tracks. The underground railway runs through the workers’ subterranean sleeping quarters, pauses alongside a naked man warming himself at a brazier and tips a load of slurry at his feet, entombing and monumentalizing him (reminiscent of the figure on the plinth in Monument) before clattering on its way again to reach its destination—Soho’s desk.

It is the end of the day. The lift rises to the surface one last time. The doors open and a rhinoceros emerges, no bigger than the palm of Soho’s hand. It looks about, snuffling and grunting, hesitant in this alien terrain. Soho sweeps away the clutter on his desk, all thoughts and all indications of the mine put aside, in order to give his pet space to roam. Back in his bed, propped up once more on his bank of pillows, Soho creates a wide welcoming bay within the sweeping bluffs of his encircling arms. The rhinoceros

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explores this space before finding harbour, then sniffs and licks the fingers of Soho’s hand, spread open like a blessing.

ORIGINS: LIBERTY ECKSTEIN When Kentridge set out to make Mine, he thought the film was going to be about Soho’s daughter, Liberty Eckstein. All he had to do was get Soho up and off to the office and the story of Liberty could begin. However, in the end, Soho never makes it out of bed, and, far from being about her, Liberty Eckstein does not appear in the film at all (nor in any subsequent film). She is a ghost, a whatmight-have-been.

‘I was thinking like a novelist,’ Kentridge says, recalling the early days of Mine. ‘I needed to have a woman but I couldn’t inhabit her head, I didn’t know who she would be. I kept thinking I’d get to her but first I needed to get Soho to work at the mine. So what was going to be the opening beat became the whole film.’3 And the narrative shifted focus to concentrate on what was happening underground, with the bottomless cafetiere providing the link between the stifling world of the stopes and Soho lying at ease on his bank of pillows in the clear air.4

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BEHIND THE MASK One of the notable features of Mine is the presence of the carved African heads or masks in different places. We see them early on, buried in the ground. As the miners drill into the rock, the lift house spits out a jet of ore which then becomes a series of mounted heads on Soho’s desk. Later still, one of the miners is transformed into a carving, emerging from a single block of wood or stone.

Kentridge chose the image of the African carving to highlight the gap between European—and, more specifically, White South African—attitudes to Africa and the reality around them and for which they are responsible. The African masks represent the exotic made domestic, the dangerous made safe. The great ungraspable mystery of Africa now becomes easy to handle, and without having to gets one’s hands dirty either. Soho Eckstein can parade his African credentials by having authentic artifacts in his house and on his desk. He is a man, he seems to be saying to us, not without aesthetic sensibility and not, for that matter, without culture.

The reality, however, is very different. Soho’s true connection to Africa is less benign, less refined or culturally astute. The reality for which he is responsible is one of exploitation of land and people. It is a reality of people living and working like slaves, stripped

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of individual dignity, while Soho lolls at his ease on the softest of beds. It is only through the toil of others that the means are created for him to indulge his taste for the exotic.

The films reminds us that even if something graceful or lyrical were ever to emerge from all this grindâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;a sculpted head, say, carved from bedrockâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;if we pause to think about the toll, in human labour, in human lives, required to produce it, that lyricism would be lost and the moment of grace would shatter. Ultimately, however, the film has an even sterner message for Soho, reminding him that what has been so easily amassed at the expense of others, can just as easily, and through the same agency, be destroyed.

ENTER THE RHINOCEROS At the end of the film, the doors at the top of the lift shaft open to reveal not miners, not a cocopan full of ore, but a snuffling, pintsized rhinoceros. Soho cossets and shepherds the animal around his bed like a child herding a pet within the pen of her arms.

What is the rhino doing here? Is its presence a critique of a faddish and self-indulgent bourgeois enthusiasm for conservation causes or is it an attack on the affluent for liking animals more than people? Or is the scene a reference to the way in which mining houses in South Africa have embraced conservation as an environmental salve to their consciences?

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In Optima, the magazine put out by the [South African] Chamber of Mines, there were photos of open-cast mines and stories of conservation—a combination of mining and sentiment for animals. It threw up the whole question of what’s domestic and what’s wild. Ironically, in South Africa, you’re never safer than in a game reserve where you neither fear the animals nor fear being hijacked. This is the idea behind the rhino as a kitten, a comforting small animal, presaging the end of the industrial era—when industry fails and gold mines cease, the last hope is eco-tourism.5 But the rhinoceros plays a different role as well—it is a leitmotif in Kentridge’s work, from his earliest drawings to his most recent projects. The first time the creature appears, it is lying pinkly on its side in an early drawing from the 1980s. Later, it has a role as a grunting puppet in the play Woyzeck on the Highveld (conceived soon after Mine was completed). It reappears as a dancing marionette in Kentridge’s version of The Magic Flute and finally, and most poignantly, as a victim of contemptible German colonial hunters in the installation Black Box (2005).

Kentridge’s fondness for the rhino references Albrecht Dürer’s iconic print of 1515 (which shows that, with the right combination

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of talent and imagination, it is possible to produce a powerful and remarkably accurate drawing of something one has never seen), as well as Eugene Ionescoâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s 1959 play in the course of which the inhabitants of a French village transform en masse into rhinoceroses as an absurdist (and rather unfair) metaphor for the way that conformity can lead to moral blindness and savagery.

So, ultimately, there is a deeper, simpler, more visceral reason for the appearance of the animal at the end of the film and one which goes beyond questions of conservation and the role of ecotourismâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;just as we all have certain things we love to do, certain signature tunes, so Kentridge loves drawing rhinoceroses. Why else is it always a rhino and not, say, an elephant or a hippopotamus, turning up again and again in his drawings, his etchings, his films, his theatre and opera productions, his installations? There is, as yet, no space in his garden for a live rhinoceros of his own but you can be sure that he would be delighted if he were to wake up one morning and, looking out, see one foraging in the flower beds.

This element of fun, this taste for caprice which contributes so much to the overall appeal of the films, emerges spontaneously from the way in which Kentridge works. We are seduced by the way he combines a serious mission (and message) with anarchic

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personal enjoyment. Like a great sportsmen or opera singer, he wins us over with his ability to both experience for himself, and convey to us, his pure pleasure in the act of creation.

Notes 1 This is a reminder of the opening credits of the old black-andwhite SA Mirror/SA Spieel newsreel which used to precede the main feature at the cinema of our childhoods.

2 The sleeping miners bear an uncanny resemblance to the cupboard full of heads we saw at the end of Johannesburg and to the disembodied heads in many other works by Kentridge.

3 Conversation with the author, November 2011.

4 See Introduction, p. 87â&#x20AC;&#x201C;91.

5 Conversation with the author, November 2011.

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Sobriety, Obesity, & Growing Old 1991 • animated film • 16 mm film transferred to video • 8 minutes 22 seconds • EDITING Angus Gibson • MUSIC Antonín Dvorak’s String Quartet in F, Opus 96; choral music of South Africa; M’appari aria from Friedrich von Flotow’s Martha, sung by Enrico Caruso.

A barren landscape, flecked with colour. Out on the horizon, the masses are marching, banners unfurled, a brilliant slash of red against the grey, overcast sky.

The land, full of voices—from the mouths of megaphones come announcements, proclamations, declarations, statements and attestations. And a solitary, figure, seated on a simple wooden chair, naked but for a set of headphones. Felix Teitlebaum—absent from the last two films—is back, listening to the world.

Soho Eckstein’s power lies all around us. Eckstein territory, it seems, encompasses property of every type—assorted commercial buildings, a five-storey block of flats and an anachronistic cinema,

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the latter with the standard pre-war art deco features. Most impressive of all, however, is Eckstein House, Soho’s headquarters, a soaring monolith towering over the empty plain. Built in the best of brutalist style—massive columns support its great slab-like walls broken here and there by narrow, hostile windows—it is more a stronghold than an office block.

The pounding clackety-clack of typewriter keys grows in volume and intensity. The sky keeps time, flexing and swirling behind the building. On the roof, a megaphone swivels restlessly, broadcaster and antenna for incoming intelligence.

In his office, Soho gazes out at Johannesburg. A framed photograph of Mrs Eckstein stands on the desk in front of him. We see him for the first time from the back and notice that Soho has lost a lot of hair since his last outing; he is bald now but for a tonsure clinging tenaciously to his temples. Soho’s cat, lying curled at his right hand, now stands up and stretches, morphing, in the process, into a telephone. We see it again a moment later, slipping across the urban landscape, past the mine dumps overshadowed by the skyscrapers to which they gave birth.

It is time to pause, regroup, take stock, recap.

Here are Soho Eckstein and his wife, Mrs Eckstein, in comfortable understanding (Mrs Eckstein reclines, propped up on the cushion of Soho’s arm). But this is a false intimacy—above them, 190

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looming over Mrs Eckstein’s upturned face, appears Felix. From his mouth slips the leaping fish, symbol of his desire, twists and flashes and then darts between Mrs Eckstein’s lips.

In the office, the phone is ringing. The instrument itself, which has retained its cat-like essence, obligingly flicks its tail to alert Soho to the call. Picking up the receiver, Soho touches the photograph of Mrs Eckstein; she responds by daintily nibbling on his fingertip. This happy scene, however, is rudely interrupted by the arrival of Felix and his fish. As news of the continuing affair comes in, the typing ratchets up in tempo and ferocity. The building quite literally sweats with Soho’s rage and jealously, surrounding itself with a blue halo, a miasma of water reminiscent of the gushing anxiety with which Felix flooded his house in Johannesburg.

At home, later, Soho has taken to his bed, still in his suit. This is not the lordly Soho, the pasha of the pillows whom we encountered in Mine, but a lonely, cuckolded husband, his face sodden with sadness. The empty pillow beside him pronounces its verdict—Soho has been abandoned.

He flutters in his sleep, smoothing down his unruly eyebrows with an unconscious hand.

Outside in the empty landscape, Felix is still listening to the world but now he has Mrs Eckstein by his side. They cleave to each other in a casual embrace, Mrs Eckstein’s head upon his shoulder.

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We see them from the back, peaceful, absorbed, entwined. Mrs Eckstein raises a sensual arm and strokes Felix, gently, lovingly, with her thumb.

Soho’s cat returns with a little crooning purr and makes itself at home on the side of the bed vacated by Mrs Eckstein. It blinks slowly, languorously, twitches its tail and curls and flexes its paws, gloriously indifferent to the human drama into which it has strayed. Then, suddenly, it streaks upwards, claws at Soho’s face and transforms, in the same instant, into a gas mask.

In the city, the crowds are on the move, pouring through the streets under the protection of their banners and their stirring songs of demand. The sound of traffic is replaced by the roar of their voices and the clarion call of freedom songs.

Marooned in his fortress, Soho is unmindful of the protestors converging at the base of Eckstein House. His eyes are riveted to the frame on his desk in which the spectacle of Mrs Eckstein’s infidelity is unfolding in all its passionate detail.

Felix and Mrs Eckstein lock glances and the intensity of their gaze uncorks the dam of the heavens. Their lovemaking is like a rain dance—each thrust brings forth new fountains, spurting and spouting in celebration of their uncontrollable desire.

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and overflow the roof like the vines of a tenderly murderous plant, pulling down the very structure that sustains and supports it.

And still the lovers persist. Soho cannot drag his eyes away from their erotic tableau. He watches with the despair of a man previewing the video of his own deathâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;each touch, each clench of pleasure drives the knife deeper.

The waters are out of control, submerging the lovers. In this neodeluvian environment, only the emblematic fish is in its element. Captured in the frame on the desk, it cavorts and capers with exuberant abandon. The telephone, provoked beyond endurance, reverts to origin and uncoils back into the cat which tries, with futile swipes of its paw, to catch the dancing fish. Defeated, the cat stretches and mutates into a long-handled office stamp.

Johannesburg is now overrun with water. Sick unto death and disgusted with life, Soho propels the forces of destruction, wielding his office stamp like the handle of a detonator. With each plunge of the handle, he brings ruin upon his works. The buildings explode or implode in a cloud of dust and black smog. One by one, the parts of Sohoâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s power base are undermined and destroyed. In a shower of splintered spars, planks warp and peel off the wooden facings of office blocks and pleasure palaces. Concrete walls soften and drip like ripe cheese, or topple over, spewing masonry and bricks. All that is left, when the dust settles, is a desolate sign, 200

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upheld by two fragile polesâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;Eckstein & Co. Through the canyons of what is left of the city, the megaphones blare, a long mournful lowing sound like a foghorn or the trumpets of Jericho, bringing down the last of the skyscrapers.

Soho watches the dissolution of his empire. The cityscape has disappeared and been replaced with a blank sheet. Enoughâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;Soho has had enough. The waters are rising around him too. The love affair between Felix and Mrs Eckstein is flooding the world and will drown him if he does not take action. In one final act of abnegation, he pulls the plug on his headquarters and Eckstein House implodes from the ground up, subsides on itself, disappears behind a veil of debris. All that is left is Soho himself, mortified and forlorn, alone in a wide, open landscape. The urban titan is gone, together with his implacable glare and the insufferable arrogance of power. The new Soho is a muted figure, dwarfed by the wide bowl of the sky in which we can still see the ghostly trace of his defunct command centre.

Soho stands hunched and stooped, his chin sunk in upon his chest, a penitent supplicant. The cat, his ever-willing familiar, rubs itself against his leg. Stooping, Soho lifts the cat; it turns into a megaphone through which Soho can broadcast his longing and his need: Come Home Come Home COME HOME 203

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Finally, the fiery passion is extinguished and the unquenchable thirst is slaked. It is Felix who is now abandoned, left to himself and his own devices—specifically, his headphones—among the megaphones and gramophone horns through which he engages with the world.

Soho and Mrs Eckstein are reunited, lying together in a pond in some anonymous corner of the countryside, ready to grow old together. Singularly well preserved, Soho’s suit alone is unaffected by the recent disturbances in his life. He is wearing it now, even as he lies half-submerged in a Highveld vlei. Mrs Eckstein, however, is naked, her busy fingers lightly caressing her flank as they doze and drift together. The marchers pass by in their columns and battalions but Soho and Mrs Eckstein pay them no attention. Soho’s empire has shrunk from encompassing half of Johannesburg to a mere 6 feet of real estate—the space their bodies now occupy, threaded together in uxorious embrace—the best bargain, perhaps, that Soho has ever struck.

ORIGINS: IMPLODING CITY During the 1980s, as the South African economy limped to a standstill, investors found a home for their surplus cash in property. At that time, before the present wave of capital flight out of the Johannesburg CBD to a new focal point in Sandton, much of

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the investment was still directed at the old city centre. As a result, the face of the city changed dramatically. Many iconic buildings, erected in the first 50 years or so of Johannesburgâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s existence, were demolished to make way for mirror-fronted skyscrapers, hotels and massive corporate headquarters. The overthrow of the old became a popular civic attractionâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;huge crowds turned out to watch the implosion of Eskom House, an early Johannesburg office tower, in 1983, and the demolition of the Newtown cooling towers in 1987.

Kentridge was intrigued by these events, drawn by the spectacle of controlled obliteration. Properly engineered, an implosion is remarkable for the way it contains its own destructive forces. Thousands of individual charges are placed at critical points around the building and detonated sequentially. The explosions fatally weaken the load-bearing beams, causing the building to fall in upon itself in a matter of seconds. Neighbouring buildings may need to have their windows taped to prevent them from blowing out but they are otherwise unaffected. Spectators watching from the other side of the street may be showered with cement dust but are in no danger from flying debris.

Kentridge was keen to draw the mechanics of this process, to show how, after the first round of detonations, the building seems intact but for a giveaway puff of dust at ground level. As the dust rises, the stricken building lurches, dropping a few feet at the base

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as if cut off at the ankle. At that point the entire structure falls inwards and the ruffle of dust explodes in a great obscuring cloud.

Sobriety provided Kentridge with the vehicle he needed to experiment with the visual impact of implosions. In the first half of the film, he lays the foundations for his powerful denouement— we are shown the scale and scope of Soho’s property empire, a collection of buildings touching all parts of urban life. When these structures fall, it is Soho himself who pushes the plunger on the detonator. For if the buildings are a metaphor for Soho’s selfish greed and ambition, their destruction signals the sacrifice he chooses to make in order to renew and purify himself, vanquish his rival and win back his wife.

MARCH PAST In Sobriety, great crowds of people fill the downtown precincts of Johannesburg, gathered in a series of protest marches or massed at the gates of Soho’s monstrous headquarters.

During the 1950s, marches like these were one of the few outlets available for expressing opposition to and defiance of the apartheid pass laws. After the banning of the ANC and the SACP in 1960, however, mass political gatherings were proscribed.

Protests were banned before they could take place and organizers and activists were detained and imprisoned—or disappeared.

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Instances of spontaneous mass action, where people marched despite prohibition—Sharpeville in 1960 and Soweto in 1976— were met with murderous force.

By the late 1980s, however, mass gatherings re-entered the political vocabulary as the police state began to lose its grip. This reawakening continued with the release of Nelson Mandela and the unbanning of the ANC and the SACP in 1990, producing an unprecedented efflorescence of political activity. By 1991, when the film was made, protest marches, strikes, funerals and rallies had become the most tangible evidence that the long midnight decades of National Party rule were over.

All this activity is visible to Soho from the heights of his office at the top of Eckstein House. It was also visible to Soho’s counterparts in the real world of South African business at the time, who saw in the marches the potential for the overthrow of their comfortable worldview. However, while other South African businessmen were exerting themselves to turn the ANC away from their socialist worldview— pressing the claims of free-market capitalism and trying to ward off the spectres of nationalization and expropriation—the Soho of Sobriety is curiously disengaged. He does not wait for the forces of history to destroy all that he has built but does it himself, for his mind and thoughts are otherwise occupied.

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At the end of the film, the marchers pass by as Soho lies in his marshy pool with Mrs Eckstein but he does not see them. He has made his choices—he is caught up in matters of the heart with no thought to spare for the rest of the world.

KEEPING DEATH AT BAY The films are all made without a formal storyboard or script. At one level, this raises the stakes for the artist who has to trust that something coherent will emerge at the end of the process but it also creates unexpected opportunities and possibilities and opens the door to caprice and the element of surprise.

In one of the most surprising scenes in Sobriety, Soho lies in bed, abandoned, with no one but the cat for comfort and company.

In a split second, the cat leaps up at Soho and transforms into a gas mask. Just as Lewis Carroll’s Alice is asked the rationally unanswerable riddle, ‘Why is a raven like a writing desk?’ Kentridge seems to be asking us, ‘Why is a cat like a gas mask?’

There are several answers. Sobriety was made in 1991, at the time of the First Gulf War. It was the first ‘real time’ war in which we saw images from the front line at the same time as the war was being waged. Iraq was firing Scud missiles at Israel and Israeli correspondents were presenting news reports while wearing gas masks.

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Kentridge, who watched the reports on the nightly news after a day’s work on the film, was struck by the eerie way in which the abnormal had been incorporated into the everyday. The thought stayed with him when he returned to the studio the next day.

At the same time, he was reading the poem ‘Things We Do to Keep Death at Bay’ by South African poet Kelwyn Sole. As missiles, whether actual or metaphorical, rain down around us, a gas mask, for all its macabre trunk-like appearance, is a device which keeps death at bay when the very air is poisoned. In the film, the world around Soho has grown toxic because of the affair between Felix and Mrs Eckstein, and the cat, which is Soho’s lone companion, now becomes the apparatus which helps him survive.

Ultimately, however, there is an ambiguity to the scene which is why it is both so memorable and disturbing for the viewer—at the moment of transformation, the cat, which had been purring on the counterpane, suddenly switches from pet to predator and appears to attack Soho. Soho writhes and recoils, clutching at his face, apparently choking before he adjusts and we hear his laboured breathing through the mask. Kentridge shows us how comfort can give way to discomfort and that it is precisely those things that are meant to help us breathe, to hold death at bay and keep us alive that, in fact, end up suffocating us.

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Felix in Exile 1994 • animated film • 35 mm film transferred to video • 8 minutes 43 seconds • EDITING Angus Gibson • SOUND Wilbert Schübel • MUSIC Philip Miller, String Trio for Felix in Exile (musicians: Peta-Ann Holdcroft, Marjan Vonk-Stirling, Jan Pustejovsky); ‘Go Tlapsha Didiba’ by Motsumi Makhene (sung by Sibongile Khumalo).

This is familiar territory. The lines may be a little sharper, the colours brighter, but we have been here before. In the background, the inevitable mine dump squats on the skyline while closer in we see the neat gash which marks a culvert—around here, the streams flow along cement-lined beds. Off to the side, the edge of a concrete picnic table just makes it into the picture. The view is interrupted by a stunted forest of posts and staves, the characteristic markers of the surveyor, measuring and apportioning the land into manageable blocks. Only the rock-fringed vlei in the centreground seems to be natural, but that too might be no more than the remains of an abandoned excavation.

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And here is the surveyor herself, Nandi, a new character, drawing on a draughtsman’s tablet with concentrated intent. Her marks and lines mirror the markers on the ground, reducing the physical topography to the flat planes of paper and ink.

We are transported, as if by magic, to a bleak, anonymous hotel room on the other side of the world. The furnishings are not promising: halfway along the wall we find a mirror and a basin with a bidet off to the side, and the only option if we want to sit is a hard, high-backed wooden chair. A single bulb hangs on a long flex; the missing lampshade a casualty, no doubt, of some former occupant.

There is a bed, but the proportions of the room are so odd—the ceiling is impossibly high and the walls seem to be falling in towards each other—that the bed seems somehow squashed under the weight of all the empty air above it.

At first sight the room appeared to be empty but now we find it occupied. There is a suitcase on the floor, and a naked man— Felix Teitlebaum—sits hunched on the wooden chair, apparently gathering his thoughts. Then he opens the suitcase on the bed and we see that it is filled with albums and loose photographs. The first picture shows a dead man lying on the ground, his shirt pulled up over one shoulder, blood seeping from a wound in his side.

The image draws us away from the hotel room and into the landscape itself. A gust of wind worries the edges of a pile of discarded

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newspapers, tugging the sheets up into the air. Some of the papers flutter down to cover the dead man with a makeshift shroud, while the rest, like a flock of white doves, flap off over the empty countryside.

But not empty for long.

Silently, seriously, Felix turns the pages of his album and we see that the land is full of bodies.

Now we see the world through the round lens of Nandi’s theodolite. Her expression is compassionate, yet somehow distanced. She brings the same intense scrutiny to the dead that she brings to the local dongas and rocky outcrops. The bodies are measured and documented, the wounds ringed and logged with the same crosses and marks that she uses to measure and apportion blocks of land. This is oddly appropriate, for, even as we watch, the bodies merge into the landscape. Wooden palings emerge from the earth and ring-fence the scattered forms lying shrouded on the ground. Dust to dust, the bodies sink into the welcoming earth.

They are absorbed into the features of the landscape, become rocks and hummocks—Neolithic burial mounds for modern times.

In Felix’s hotel room, the pictures fly out of his suitcase and stick themselves to the flypaper walls. Felix has surrounded himself with reminders of all that he has left behind. Under the weight of these mementoes, the walls crowd in on him and the images clamour for 219

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his attention. This is the tragic lot of the exile, sentenced to a halflife, indifferent to the present, unwilling to look ahead and embrace the future and unable to tear his eyes away from the past. To the exile, it is not just this dismal hotel room but the whole world that seems like a prison, preventing him from returning to the one place he longs to be—home.

Felix’s thoughts dwell on Nandi and we see her measuring the angle of the heavens with her sextant, wearing the same detached expression. She is a haven, a still point in the turbulent world, the embodiment of science and reason in a world disjointed by violence.

The viewfinder of her telescope (for she has switched instruments) throws up a circle of night sky. The stars form themselves into new constellations—the Plug, the Tap. In sympathy, perhaps, with these celestial events, the tap in the hotel room begins to gush into the basin, a blue flood of sexual craving bringing with it the destructive consequences of desire.

Felix is stooped over the basin, staring at himself in the mirror.

He is shaving—or, rather, a disembodied hand and arm appears to be shaving him—with alarming results, for the razor has erased half his face. Moved, no doubt, by the belief that a shock of cold water will jolt his missing features back into existence, Felix splashes his face under the tap. This action only makes matters 220

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worse, for now his reflection has disappeared and all he sees is a flood plain carved up by the familiar sprinkling of surveyor’s marks.

These annotations resolve themselves into Nandi’s face on the other side of the mirror. Felix tries to caress her but his hand is blocked by the glass. Instead, they gaze at each other through a two-way telescope, each end a mirror image of the other.

Felix’s eyes are shut but his mind’s eye is wide open.

Back on the bed, he goes through a further set of pictures in his suitcase. These are images of water and of Nandi naked. We see her feet, we see her lying on her back, Felix’s characteristic fish flipping between her breasts, we see her washing and drinking, head flung back, before enfolding Felix in an embrace, pulling him close to her as the waters rise around them.

And here in the hotel room, the water from the basin keeps running, pouring out onto the floor, where it eddies and subsides as it washes up against the walls and furniture.

Nandi is still inscribing marks on her drawing block, scrutinizing and observing the world as day shades into night. Stars flash across the sky and coalesce into yet more patterns—a corpse in its winding sheet, a suitcase—for just as Nandi dominates Felix’s thoughts, so too she thinks of him and of his absence.

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In the hotel room, the pictures are floating, sailing, sinking in the rising waters.

Nandi’s telescope sweeps the landscape and comes to rest on the gathering crowds. The people are waiting, watchful. One face in particular stands out—Harry, wearing his habitual expression of patient exhaustion. Elsewhere in the landscape the bodies are mounting up, each bearing the signs of the autopsy, the police examination. The red circles and lines ringing the entry points of wounds convert each death into an official record in a file. The bureaucratic process that underlies these forensic observations has a curiously soothing, dehumanizing effect, converting the chaos and horror of violence into more manageable, compartmentalized incidents. These dispassionate marks somehow mask the rawness of the injuries, and we no longer see each body as a person but as an abstract collection of parts.

A pen suspended over a revolving drum inscribes a wavy line on an unfolding sheet of paper, like the tracings on a seismograph.

This particular line, however, does not record disturbances in the earth’s crust but those on its surface, a coded record of the violence and death taking place all over the Highveld. The drum spins faster, the blue ink of the pen gives way to a spurt—a great blotch!—of red. We hear the sound of a shot. The telescope shatters. The water in the tap runs red. Nandi, who has been washing, clutches at her

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side, leans over, topples. We see the poignant trigonometry of her death in the ghostly shadows multiplying behind her, inscribing the terrible arc of her fall.

Felix witnesses everything through the barrier of his mirror.

He sees Nandi lying on the ground. Her eyes are closed and her expression is peaceful, one arm flung above her head. She could be asleep, even post-coital, except for the black stain spreading around her neck and head. She, who has logged so much, is now a statistic herself—an annotation in someone’s report. We see the tracing of the pathologist’s chalk round her body before the purifying newspapers fly up to cover her. She, too, unites with the landscape, gently transformed into a rock-fringed pool, another vlei.

It is over for Felix.

The pictures flap down off the walls of the hotel room and stack themselves in the suitcase like birds returning to a cage. He has lost everything, so he might as well go home.

And here he is, standing with his back to us, in the vlei—the incorporeal transubstantiation of the woman he loved.

He ruffles the water with his hand, bestowing one final farewell caress.

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ORIGINS: COMMENTARY IN BLOOD Felix in Exile was made between September 1993 and March 1994, as South Africa lurched towards the first democratic elections in its history, held at the end of April 1994. At that time, the levels of violence, particularly in the area around Johannesburg, remained as high as ever, plagued by running battles between rival factions and the police. The townships of the Witwatersrand constituted an extended series of killing fields, delivering, each week, a grim harvest of souls.

These were deaths which occurred on the edges of public vision. The newspapers carried brief references to each event and published pictures of bodies, lying where they had fallen, covered in whatever shroud lay to hand—an old jersey or a page of newspaper. The corpses in Felix in Exile are based on these pictures and other, more close-up images of human destruction.

But they are also based on a much earlier, deeply scarring experience from Kentridge’s childhood. The dead bodies in Felix refer not only to contemporary violence but also to photographs he had seen of the victims of the 1960 Sharpeville massacre. The photographs were in an envelope in a drawer in our father’s study in Johannesburg. Kentridge came across them by chance when he was six or seven years old, and, more than 30 years later, he set out

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to recapture the shock he felt at the time, the teetering sense of disbelief that such things could be possible.

Kentridge was also influenced by police investigative photographs in which the wounds are highlighted and captured this coldly functional annotation in his drawings by placing blood red rings around the injuries and thus presenting us with a forensic portrait of the dead.

The red marks on the pictures compel us to confront the violence—there is no turning away, the marks force us to look. Simultaneously, this clinical view—the notion of bodies becoming statistics, medical notes, a series of annotations to be used as evidence in a putative criminal prosecution—is juxtaposed against the documentary of the heart. This documentary is the true story, written in the language of heartache and affliction, which lies behind each death.

The contrast is foregrounded in the story of Nandi and Felix.

When Nandi is shot by a sniper, we see her as just another corpse, another object of investigation for an over-stretched police force.

At the same time, we know her. We know her as a builder, a surveyor, a stargazer, a sensual woman, a lover—as a person bestowing and receiving love. We also know her through Felix’s eyes and we understand that the anguish he feels at the death of this one victim, eclipses, for him, the anguish he feels for all the other deaths, for 235

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the whole suffering country. We don’t need viewers’ notes or authorial/artist’s explanation to tell us this—the commentary is implicit in the unfolding story, in the access we have been granted to the workings of Felix’s heart.

But today’s violence and heartbreak is swept away tomorrow by a fresh wave of events. When the bodies in the film turn to rock, does that mean that they have been forgotten, petrified and absorbed without trace? Or have they been enshrined and memorialized? Kentridge is interested in the way amnesia of terrain mirrors a human process of forgetting: The difficulty we have in holding onto passions, impressions, ways of seeing things, the way that things which seem to be indelibly imprinted on our memories still fade and become elusive, is mirrored in the way in which the terrain itself cannot hold onto the events played out upon it. [. . .]

In the same way that there is a human act of disremembering the past, both immediate and further back, that has to be fought through writing, education, museums, songs and all the other processes we use to try to force us to retain the importance of events, there is a nat-

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ural process in the terrain through erosion, growth, dilapidation that also seeks to blot out events. [. . .]

In Felix in Exile, the bodies in the landscape are connected to this process. I was interested in recording the people. Giving burial to those anonymous figures in the photographs, planting a beacon against the process of forgetting the routes of our recent past.1 Ultimately, Felix in Exile is about the pain and helplessness of exile and lossâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;about the crimped life imposed by distance and by having, always, to view the world through the eyes of others.

But it is also about the importance of fighting, and winning, the battle of memory against forgetting.2

Notes 1 Quoted in Cameron et al., William Kentridge, pp. 126â&#x20AC;&#x201C;7.

2 Here Kentridge lifts his hat to others, like Milan Kundera, who have also trodden this path and explored these ideas in other political contexts.

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History of the Main Complaint 1996 • animated film • 35 mm film transferred to video • 5 minutes 50 seconds • EDITING Angus Gibson • SOUND Wilbert Schübel • MUSIC a madrigal by Claudio Monteverdi

A broad city street, an empty boulevard. A sheet of paper flapping aimlessly along the windy urban canyon flanked on either side by low city buildings in art deco style.

Sirens in the distance, the sound drawing us into a private ward in a hospital somewhere in Johannesburg. The room has a scrubbed, antiseptic look, bare but for a washstand supporting a bowl of water. And a single bed, curtained off. Small islands in a sea of polished grey linoleum.

Behind the curtain, Soho lies on his back in a narrow hospital bed, comatose. An oxygen mask covers his mouth and nose and, on the table by the side of the bed, a cafetiere plunger rises and

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falls with his breathing. He is still wearing his suit. An ECG yields grainy cross-sections of his brain, shifting with each beat of his heart, while a range of other medical machines, refugees all with their rounded forms and enamel exteriors, from the 1950s, display images of his body on their anachronistic monitors.

This landscape of the interior—a view of Soho’s innermost being—is a dark and obscure world. This dense, broken ground, annotated with red crosses identifying wounds and fractures, could as easily be a view of the night sky or satellite images of clouds.

The curtain ravels back, providing a wider view of the comatose Soho, breath rasping through the black hole of his open mouth.

He fills the narrow bed. His head, heavy as rough granite, carves a crater in his pillow.

A doctor appears at his side, sliding a stethoscope over the blankets and pausing occasionally to listen intently. The doctor is joined by a colleague and then another, all with stethoscopes, all looking down with the same expression of grave absorption, and all, disconcertingly, clones of Soho himself.

An X-ray of Soho’s body, taken from the side, shows a stethoscope probing its way down his spinal column like the plunger mine shaft in Mine. It is joined by others, snakelike alien invaders,

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twisting about in Soho’s guts or passing on, surprisingly, to probe for news in his knee or lower leg.

The X-ray reveals Soho’s dreams, or perhaps the very building blocks of his soul. We see the desk stamp-cum-detonator used in Sobriety. Later, when the heads of two stethoscopes collide in his bowels, they form a circuit and spark off a sudden confusion of noise and activity. Doors clang and slam shut, a phone begins to ringing, shrilly, persistently, before it is picked up and answered in a garble of voices. Everything intensifies—the soundtrack becomes more insistent; yet more doctors cluster round the bed until the patient is completely concealed.

The flickering territory displayed on the ECG resolves itself into a country road seen through the windshield of a car. Posts and markers, trees and white lines approach and disappear as the car speeds through the empty city, past its faceless buildings. We see the scene from behind the driver’s head but we realize it is Soho at the wheel. His eyes are reflected in the rearview mirror, the road unfolds before him.

As the car passes along an avenue of stakes, the ECG sputters, disgorging disjointed images—a table setting impatiently pushed away (not the cause of the patient’s malaise, evidently); another ringing phone, this one handle-operated from a pre-electronic age

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when power was generated by hand crank; a ticker-tape machine spewing out its endless lines of information—all of them memories, briefly checked and then pushed aside.

The doctors have become a throng. We cannot get near the patient for stethoscope-wielding bald men in pinstriped suits. The X-ray reveals more examples of outdated office machinery—the crescent-shaped blotter reappears while Soho’s pelvis houses the spindly carapace of a pre-war typewriter. The viscera throw up more visceral images—a hunk of meat, a foot, a cock—but nothing sticks. All is fleeting.

The journey continues under a louring sky. The car passes billboards, figures on the verges and at the margins of vision, barely glimpsed shapes. In the space of a few breaths, the car passes from a long country road down the main street of a small platteland town and then out again onto a corpse-strewn road. Soho drives on. His eyes see what is happening around him—a man being kicked to death, others hacking their victim with axes or hoes (every blow marked by a cross, every wound circled in red)—but he refuses to engage. The X-ray of his body is now a maze of fractures. Soho may try, consciously, to block the violence taking place around him but there is no escape from a subconscious involvement and he takes all these external injuries upon himself, into his skeleton. We see

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the skull of the beaten man, with its mosaic of red crosses, resolve itself into Soho’s head, framed in the car window. The windscreen is scored with marks, a history of all the excesses witnessed or imagined.

Soho closes his eyes to erase the visions; the wipers swipe back and forth clearing the view.

In the hospital, the doctors have departed. The curtains are drawn, once again, around the bed. Soho has been abandoned to his nightmares.

He is moving faster now, back in the car, down a narrow treelined avenue—they might be tall stakes, it’s hard to tell—unable to see anything on either side of the road. Figures flit from side to side, appearing and disappearing in a moment in front of the car.

They all cross safely—until one does not.

Time slows.

Then the man—naked and featureless but for his mouth stretched wide in a gaping scream—crashes into the windscreen and Soho’s eyes fly open.

The machines ring like bells. Every picture, on every monitor, reflects the moment of collision, the broken bones, the force of the impact. That buried memory has been winkled out. Soho can confront his guilt, and, through recognition, assuage it.

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The images retreat, fall away, shrinking down to the familiar archaic (and anarchic) furniture of Soho’s desk.

In the hospital, the curtains are still drawn. When they pull back along their runners, we see Soho no longer in bed but back at work, catharsis achieved.

Soho’s demon is a hydra, though. He may cut off one head— he may cut off five—but there are more to come.

ORIGINS: TRAUMAS TRANSPOSED History of the Main Complaint, like Felix in Exile, is about the effort required to withstand the forces of amnesia. However, while Felix was concerned with a public, or social, act of commemoration, History focuses on the personal retrieval of buried memories.

The film explores the impact of psychological trauma, its deep scars, and the therapeutic effect of the act of remembering. The building blocks of Soho’s trauma are the violent acts witnessed but not acknowledged and the violent act of which he was the unwitting perpetrator. In choosing these catalysts, Kentridge has transposed traumas from his own childhood onto the psyche of his protagonist.

Kentridge has spoken of the shock he experienced as a child, a backseat passenger in a car driving past a group of men hitting 251

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and kicking a man lying on the ground—a scene which disappeared almost as soon as it was glimpsed. Until that point, he had not realized that this was something that adults did to one another.

For Kentridge, the moment of seeing was simultaneously the first moment of suppression, of locking away an image—an idea— too painful to confront directly. Since then, the memory of the incident—and primarily of the shock he felt—has surfaced from time to time before resubmerging in the sluggish pool of ugly experience.

The other incident directly referenced in the film is the horror of driving into a man running across a road—in this case, the airport highway east of Johannesburg. On that occasion, the shock and guilt could not be displaced so quickly—Kentridge had to deal with the accident and its consequences directly—but the emotional aftershocks still run deep.

These memories—disturbing enough to drive even Soho into a vegetative state—have the power to return with disintegrating force. They resemble, in this respect, those dreams of drowning, where the dreamer, on the brink of death, has to wake himself up, surfacing sickened and distraught, to draw in a breath of air and return to life.

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OLD MEN—CAT SCANS—METAPHOR In 1996, when History was made, Kentridge had begun work on an opera for Belgium’s Theatre de la Monnaie, to be premiered in Brussels in May 1998.

The opera he chose to produce was Il Ritorno d’Ulisse in Patria, written in 1640 by Claudio Monteverdi. Monteverdi’s opera interested Kentridge because its portrayal of Ulysses is more complex, less one-dimensional, than the more traditional retellings of Homer’s epic. The plot opens with the return of Ulysses to his homeland, Ithaca, and the main action centres on his confrontation and rout of the clamouring rabble who, in his absence, have been besieging his wife Penelope with their importunate suit.

Monteverdi gives us a Ulysses at the mercy of the gods—a man whose actions are only partly of his own making and partly determined by Fate. A chorus of abstract characteristics—Love, Fortune, Time and Human Frailty—provides additional commentary on the plot as it unfolds. Ulysses himself is shown as a man divided: on the one hand, we have the legendary hero, driven by hope, strength and self-belief; on the other, we see Ulysses as an old man, a guise that is part disguise and part reality. This is the Ulysses who has been away from home and hearth for over 20 years, weary, riven with doubt and far from certain that he will prevail.

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Kentridge’s interpretation of the plot focuses on these two versions of Ulysses: the warrior who strings the unstringable bow and uses it to transfix his rivals with a single arrow but also a deeply counter-intuitive alter ego lying in a modern hospital bed, ancient, delusional, dying.

This second Ulysses lies in a coma, playing back the return to Ithaca on a loop in his head. At his bedside, doctors probe and examine him, track the turbulent tides of his mind and gravely try to make sense of his ravings.

If this sounds familiar, well—it should. Both History and Il Ritorno were versions—reworkings—of the same central idea and the film was partly conceived as a test for the opera to see if Monteverdi’s music worked with the animation. It was also a process of discovering the anatomical imagery used in the opera and picked up on an idea that Kentridge calls ‘bringing the gods inside’: In the past, we feared external threats—being killed by fire or floods or lightning bolts thrown by the gods. But now our fear is internal, the terror of a heart attack which we ward off with gym or dieting—forswearing red meat as our contemporary lightning conductor. The sensuous pleasures of the body, food and fucking, can also give us so much misery. There are parts of the world over which we

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have agency, and parts where we don’t and which we therefore have to appease.1 Just as Ulysses has to placate the vengeful gods of Olympus, so too Soho places himself in the hands of latter priests—doctors— who can interpret the inner mysteries of the body and find ways to mollify our inner gods.

In both film and opera, Kentridge has his characters hooked up to a wide and eclectic selection of medical instruments. Kentridge is interested in the visual outputs of these machines which provide, after all, the most revealing portraits of the inner mysteries of the body and which are indispensable when it comes to making pinpoint diagnoses of hidden medical complaints. However, as Kentridge himself points out, these pictures are coded portraits at best and not actual photographs of reality which would show blood and guts, bone, fat and ligaments but not the elegant cross-sections of CAT scans nor the shadowy skeletons of X-rays.

These images—sonar, X-ray, MRI, CAT scan—are different from either external images of the body, anatomical paintings or photographs of dissections revealing a body.

They are, by their very nature, internal images. Dissect as deep as you like and you will never find the mimetic reference of the sonar. They are already a metaphor. They are

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messages from an inside we may apprehend but can never grasp. In their separation from the apparent, they come as reports from a distant and unknown place. [. . .]

The familiar world of paintings, photographs and films of the body are reassuring reiterations of the part of us that seems familiar and our own. CAT scans, X-rays and sonar scans are notions from a distant and more dangerous other region. The surface of the body is like the surface of the sea. We swim at the top but have a fear of wet, slimy unpredictable things underneath.

We fear these depths because we cannot see them. They are out of our control, yet we need them to function, to live. X-rays and CAT scans are our one-eyed guides in this kingdom of the blind— they show us the state within, identify faultlines we would otherwise never find.

In his films, Kentridge recognizes the function of these images to direct the process of diagnosis. But he takes the metaphor further, using the machines not only to show how Soho’s (or Ulysses’) organs are functioning but also how his characters are thinking, what they are dreaming, what they are remembering. Thus, in

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History, the X-ray reveals not only the patient’s spine and sternum but also a phone—as integral to Soho as any bone in his body— while the CAT scans shows not only synapses firing but also the very stuff of memory.

Kentridge has always appreciated the space that animation creates to show people’s thoughts and dreams—it’s a technique he has used in all his films, plays and operas (Felix dreaming of Mrs Eckstein in Johannesburg, his dreams made manifest as a set of floating postcards; or the dreams of Nandi in Felix, inscribed as heavenly images in the night sky). Now, in History and Il Ritorno, the instruments of modern medical technology provide him with both means and metaphor for exploring the inner worlds of his characters. And in so doing they provide us, the viewers, with an entrée to those fleeting, intangible, ineffable qualities—the very stuff, in short, of their souls.

Note 1

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Weighing and Wanting 1998 • animated film • 35 mm film transferred to video • 6 minutes 20 seconds • EDITING Angus Gibson and Catherine Meyburgh • SOUND Wilbert Schübel • MUSIC Philip Miller (musicians: Peta-Ann Holdcroft, Marjan Vonk-Stirling, Ivo Ivanov).

A white china cup stands on a saucer, a delicate blue band round the rim.

The living room of a post-war modernist house in Johannesburg. The architecture pays homage to Le Corbusier, all geometric planes and straight lines. The fireplace is a square set into the far wall and the armchairs are hollowed-out cubes with deep seats and plank-like armrests. There are vases on the floor and, in the foreground, a table with pieces of broken china spread across the surface. An old enamel kitchen scale creaks up and down. Nearby, the ECG monitor, first encountered in History, makes a reappearance.

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Outside, we see the familiar scrubby fields and flattened mine dumps of the Highveld but the smudges of cloud have been replaced by fine lines of varying thickness, like the cross-hatching in an etching, and the objects in the landscape are more delicately drawn. As before, the countryside is full of wounds, each pinpointed with a red police marker. There are markers in the sky too.

Nowhere is untouched by violence.

An enormous boulder, full of cracks and cliffs, jagged lines and broken edges, dominates the surroundings.

Inside the house, Soho lies flat on his back on a stretcher which slowly passes him through an MRI scanner. We see him in profile on the monitor, a series of fine lines reproducing his sinus cavities, the bonework of his skull, the massed contours of his brain. But who is this Soho? His appearance has changed and he now looks unnervingly like his creator, like the artist himself. The monitor throws up cut after cut of his brain, stripping him away layer by layer to reach the essence of the man.

This interior view is replaced by a return to the exterior world first seen in Mine—administrative buildings, the housing of the lift machinery at the head of the mine shaft—although it is not clear whether we are actually outside or viewing images imprinted on Soho’s brain.

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And here is Soho himself, modernist house in the background, walking stiffly across the open veld, stopping to pick up a stone.

In the living room, a sombre-featured Soho examines the stone at the table, cradling it in his hands and caressing it with his thumb—the recurring gesture of affection which flows from film to film. On the monitor, a new picture appears, the scan of the rock itself—at first glance, surprisingly similar to that of a human brain.

Once again, the scanner probes deeper and deeper, passing from a series of lines and whorls to a set of broken images from Soho’s life—tumbled about, like shattered china, scraps of torn photographs or snatches of misheard conversation.

Here is Soho and Mrs Eckstein. She is naked. Soho (in his suit, his pinstriped skin) wraps his arms around her from behind, binding her to him. He lays his head in her lap; she caresses him gently, absently.

More fractured images, flung randomly across the screen. He is clinging on. She is too, affectionate if a little disengaged. The image on the scanner shifts from top to bottom and back, reflecting the slow tipping of the scales up and down. On the one side we see the cup, which Soho puts to his ear like sea shell, listening for the sounds of the ocean.

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A series of random, unattached marks appear on an empty background. They lengthen, find each other and take shape as a series of pylons, growing organically from the stony ground.

The pictures of Mrs Eckstein are erased, replaced by pylons.

Pylons, mine machinery—this is the direction of Soho’s life.

The tender, the loving, has been pushed aside to make way for brutal, hard-edged ambition. Soho lies in his wife’s lap but she vanishes, leaving him resting uncomfortably on the unyielding plastic of a telephone.

Mrs Eckstein is alone now, lost, searching for Soho. He reappears, his hand on her breast but then she disappears again and Soho is alone once more, his mouth set in a snarl of grim disappointment. A last glimpse of Mrs Eckstein’s lap—it is empty. Soho is elsewhere.

Wires grow like weeds, snaking up through the ground. On the surface, Soho stands in his self-created industrial wasteland listening for news, for words of comfort, through his teacup (just as, long before, his rival Felix Teitlebaum sat listening to the world in a field of megaphones). Soho’s arrogance has been replaced with a humble awareness of what has been lost. He stands, shoulders slumped, in the posture of a man living with ineffable sadness.

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The trellises of the pylons are transformed into wounds, scarring a woman’s back.

Pylons decorate the empty walls of the living room, mutating into script. The writing on the wall asks, ‘In whose lap do I lie?’

The scanner, still searching the deepest recesses of Soho’s brain, finds a pylon. It implodes, collapsing like a tower made of matchsticks. Soho embraces Mrs Eckstein but this is now the overture to violence. She strikes him, hard. We see the impact of the blow—an angry red mark on an X-ray of Soho’s head. Mrs Eckstein flings away the teacup—we see it shatter. Soho smashes the scale. The teacup breaks again and again, a series of blows which sear the brain.

Soho is alone in the living room, listening to the teacup. He is in pain, stooping with the effort of sustaining the weight of his existence.

Mrs Eckstein kneels, crouched in a burrow under the weight of the rock. She flexes her shoulders and straightens. Above her, the rock parts. The earth shifts and opens. Things on the surface are swept away by the tectonic forces created as Mrs Eckstein stands up for herself.

Soho and Mrs Eckstein are both trapped inside the rock. They sit apart, their backs to each other, but a subtle shift is taking place.

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have moved a little closer—we can see both characters in the same frame. Now they are facing each other, staring down. They look up, lock glances, smile. Their rage has dissipated and faded. The wounds in the brain are healing. The tea cup is coming together again, recoalescing shard by shard. Soho and Mrs Eckstein embrace. They are reconstituted too.

A bowl of water appears in Mrs Eckstein’s lap, the bellwether of love, of lust. Compared to the plumes and fountains of past films, the bowl may seem sedate but it is nonetheless a potent symbol of trust.

In the house, the broken shards of the teacup are gone, as is the scale. In its place, the bowl of water stands on the tabletop. The arms of the scale creak up and down. The stone and the cup weigh up against each other, finding their equilibrium.

ORIGINS: THE WRITING ON THE WALL The origin of Weighing and Wanting lies in a dream in which Kentridge found himself unable to read some writing on a wall: ‘I read the phrase and the title emerged. I thought: What do I spend my life doing but writing and drawing on the wall?’1 The phrase is a direct allusion to the writing on the wall at the feast of Belshazzar, king of Chaldea, in the Book of Daniel.

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And this is the writing that was written, MENE, MENE, TEKEL, UPHARSIN. This is the interpretation of the thing: MENE; God hath numbered thy kingdom and finished it.

TEKEL; Thou art weighed in the balances, and art found wanting.

PERES; Thy kingdom is divided, and given to the Medes and Persians.2 The biblical message, of course, reappears in the title of the film with its deliberate double entendre. On the one hand, we see Soho weighing the different forces in his life against each other; on the other, we see Soho himself being weighed in the balance, judged by Mrs Eckstein, by us, the viewers, by society at large.

Hence, the weighing. And here is Soho in a state of need, longing for his heartâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s desire but here also is Soho who emerges from judgement and whose heart is found to be lacking, deficient, incomplete, and in need of fulfilment and restitution. Hence, the wanting.

HEART OF STONE Weighing and Wanting, like History of the Main Complaint before it, is focused on the inner life of Soho Eckstein rather than on the 279

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nature of his engagement with the outer world. But while History probed the secrets of the mind, disinterring and projecting Soho’s dreams and memories on the medical machinery ranged round his hospital bed, Weighing is concerned with deep emotion, with the forces of longing and loss. Though Kentridge again uses scanners and sonars to explore the hidden regions of the subconscious, this time what we see is the secret life of the heart The central metaphor of the film, the password which opens the door to these concealed chambers and vaults, is the rock—a huge boulder dominating the landscape, or Soho Eckstein’s heart of stone.

At the outset, Soho’s heart appears calcified by ambition. His deepest, truest emotions have been pushed aside by the trappings of power—the pylons, mine dumps, administrative buildings and lift housings of his commercial empire. As a result, the delicate balance required to create domestic harmony—represented by the fine china teacup riding one arm of the kitchen scale—is swept aside, shattered, plunging both Soho and his wife into an emotional wilderness of pain, anger and resentment before it is reassembled and the broken fragments of their life restored.

At the same time, the Soho who emerges from the emotional maelstrom into quieter waters at the end of the film is more aware

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of himself—of his actions and choices and of their consequences.

‘In whose lap do I lie?’ he asks. The question appears as writing on the wall of his living room as he asks himself, for the first time, where he finds his happiness—in the endless process of growing richer? Or in the healing, restorative arms of his wife?

It takes an upheaval of earthquake proportions—an upheaval instigated and carried out by Mrs Eckstein—to overcome so much dead weight and restore the original geography of Soho’s heart.

That she is able to do so makes Weighing (perhaps surprisingly) the most optimistic and redemptive of the Soho Eckstein films, the one with the greatest faith in both the power of hope and the possibility of change.

Notes 1 Conversation with the author, November 2011.

2 Daniel 5.25–8.

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Stereoscope 1999 • animated film • 35 mm film transferred to video • 8 minutes 22 seconds • EDITING Catherine Meyburgh • SOUND Wilbert Schübel • MUSIC Philip Miller (musicians: Peta-Ann Holdcroft, Marjan Vonk-Stirling, Ishmael Kambule, Minas Berberyan).

A bank of switchboards runs the length of a cavernous room. Suspended from the ceiling, the hands of a big moon-faced clock slowly revolve. Huge hopper windows tilt inwards on their axes to channel the breeze upwards into the room. A lampshade, like an inverted tulip, hangs over each set of switches and plugs. In its centre, an old-fashioned mouthpiece invites confidences.

A telephone exchange from the 1940s.

At this early hour all is quiet. The only sound is the remorseless ticking of the clock.

The scene shifts to Soho Eckstein’s living room, first seen in Weighing. The space is familiar, although Soho’s taste for minimalism 287

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has grown more pronounced. The room is starker than ever—a single rug across the bare floorboards, a cold, gaping fireplace, a narrow bed squeezed out of frame to one side. And Soho himself, at centre stage, reading a letter.

Outside, a set of curving tracks run past an old tram stop. With its rounded bow and square stern, it is built like a landlocked tugboat. It must be freezing in winter, for there is no glass in the windows—only a set of bars.

A single crow flaps messily across the sky.

The top of a telephone pole, complete with enamel insulators and a high-mounted megaphone, gives way to a view of cooling towers overlooking a square, thickset power station. A cat walks past the building, its tail picking out the name of the film as it passes along a white wall. Stereoscope.

The firm black line of the utility pole divides the two elements of the word—Stereo/Scope.

In the living room, Soho is still reading. He puts down the letter as the cat comes into the room and sits on the mat. They regard each other silently. The cat blinks first, flicks its tail.

Back to the telephone exchange. The first operator has arrived for work. Wearing a white coat, he sits in a narrow-backed swivel chair from a former, pre-ergonomic office age. He links callers to 288

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their destinations by plugging copper-tipped cables from one slot on the switchboard to another.

Soho sits at his desk, staring at a page dark with dataâ&#x20AC;&#x201D; columns of heavily inked numbers, the individual entries ringed in black and connected to each other by thick lines. The cat snoozes on the tabletop. Soho puts down the paper, links his hands behind his head and leans back, gazing up at the ceiling to clear his thoughts.

The telephone exchange is now packed with operators; every board and every chair is occupied. Connections, drawn in blue, dart from one bank of switches to the next. At the first table, the operator makes a connection and a blue line runs from the plug to a stylized electric circuit which throws a switch and sends another line across a city street, through a window and into the room where Soho had earlier been reading. The connection, illuminated by the light radiating from a cone-shaped lightshade, is caught in the mouth of a megaphone mounted, like a futuristic trophy, above the fireplace. The line rebounds through another wall into a room where it pierces and transfixes a smudged human figure and then bounces up behind a man reading and disappears off screen.

Our point of view shifts abruptly. An exterior view of a building, a mid-century block of flats in the Johannesburg city centre, built

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above an old, shaded shopping arcade. From our vantage point, in the shadow of the building on the opposite side of the street (the balconies loom above us like the teeth of a giant zip), we see the blue phone connection enter through a flat on the fifth floor and emerge, a moment later, through a fourth-floor window on the other side of the building. The line streaks in through the lowered blinds of another room where a naked woman is on the phone.

The connection strikes her in the belly, comes out of her mouth, slants back off the far wall and drops down into a small laboratory on the floor below. Venetian blinds mute the light coming in through the windows and throw shadows on the framed medical qualifications on the wall to the right. Beneath the window, an odd collection of quasi-scientific equipment lines a counter at the front of the roomâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;jars, microscopes, pipettes, a spotlight on a tripod, a megaphone on a stand and, somewhat impractically, a scale in a glass case.

The blue line reflects off the tray of a microscope and cuts back to a room occupied by a naked man and woman, each on the phone.

They are facing each other, although from the angle of their expressions it is clear that they are not speaking to each other. They are using old fixed-line telephones and a coil of black flex flows back over their shoulders and anchors them to an off-screen handset. The

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blue line encircles both man and woman like a rope and pulls them back, tugs them further apart.

In the rooms framed by the windows of the power station, we catch glimpses of little squares of life as the phone rings and ushers in a set of human tableauxâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;figures silhouetted against the light, embrace, read or primp at a dressing table. In one room, a family faces up to each other grimly across a dinner table. The phone rings again. With each new connection, more and more windows light up.

The blue lines coalesce into a spiky electric cat which stretches against a black background. The cat leaps up and pulls down a set of looped cables which shape themselves into the viewfinder of a stereoscope, shuttles back, divides in two and turns into the twin spools of an old reel-to-reel tape recorder.

A series of divided screensâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;a set of dual images which start off the same (or almost the same) then begin to change as they grow further and further apart.

Two Sohos sit behind identical desks, stroking identical cats.

In front of each desk we see the edge of a typewriter, a phone half hidden behind it. There is a ticker-tape machine to one side and a notebook which flips open to reveal page after page filled with columns of numbers. Both Sohos watch impassively as ribbons of 300

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paper spew out of the ticker-tape machine. Then the images and activity on the two sides of the screen begin to diverge. The scrawl of figures in the notebook on the left intensifies, actually drawing data from the ledger on the right (the pages of which revert to white). The ticker-tape machine, likewise, spools out of control, tangling round itself and snaring the equipment on the desk.

The two Sohos now turn to look at each other—then the lefthand Soho, in a gesture emphatic with power and disdain, leans across the blue line dividing the screen in two and yanks the tape out of his right-hand counterpart’s machine.

In the notebook, the numbers give way to images—the power station, a pylon which collapses under the blaring cacophony of a tripod-mounted megaphone.

The film reverts, briefly, to a full-screen view. The ringing of a bell heralds the approach of a tram as it trundles down a city street, past shops and blocks of flats. We catch a glimpse of Soho’s modernist house, then see Soho and his naked wife. He sits in his chair with his back to her. She approaches tentatively but is knocked away by an aggressive blue line which seems intent on keeping them apart. Mrs Eckstein falls into a heap of tumbling numbers and her portrait is replaced by that of Nandi, the quantity surveyor from Felix, also rapidly erased by a flood of data.

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On the divided screen, the differences between the two sides are mounting. Pages fly across from the right to the left, where the phone is ringing. The Soho on the right, in a moment of rank exhaustion and self-disgust, pushes aside the clutter in front of him. His desk clears but the table top on the left remains buried under a dirty pyramid of paper and random equipment.

Soho is on the phone. Blue lines worm their way through the earth, their edges fuzzy with static. The electric cat prowls this hidden domain.

On the dual screen, the two Sohos stand facing the walls of their respective rooms. The lines of communication ricochet round the walls. They curve round the Soho on the right and send him sprawling on the bed. On the other side, the Soho on the left stands, hands in his pockets, amid a mounting tide of clutter. On the right, Soho is now sitting on the bed, staring at the blank wall of his empty room and resolutely ignoring all connection.

The line between the two rooms widens into a crack though which the chaos of the outside world pours in. We are looking down on the roof of a tram. On our right we see the bottom of an old Woolworths sign running down the side of a building. An angry crowd has gathered at the base of the power station, reminiscent of the protestors who besieged the doorway of Sohoâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s

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fortress in Sobriety. The pace of communication and connection increases—amid a scree of tumbling numbers, we catch fleeting images of copper-tipped cables, telephone poles, phone lines, megaphones and tape recorders.

The violence is palpable. Off to one side, a man is being beaten up; elsewhere, men lift a victim over the edge of a roof and drop him over; two men assault a third with a stick. The landscape is scarred with the corpses of the dead. A mass of people—fleeing crowd or rampaging mob, we cannot tell—runs off in the distance.

Up on the roof, another man is lifted over the parapet, his murderers using his (now hidden) body for target practice as he falls. A man executes another with a shot to the head.

On a road filled with debris, faceless men stone a tram as it clatters past.

The two Sohos are affected by the turmoil in different ways.

On the left, the pressure of added noise and information is so great that the screen divides once again to accommodate the profusion of information. Soho is smashed against the wall by a blue line— just in time, it turns out, as the clanking tram rushes through. On the right, Soho listens fearfully at the wall, before covering his ears with his hands.

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Outside the power station, a black anarchist bomb, recognizable from a thousand Looney Tunes cartoons, smokes ominously.

The light glinting on its polished surface gives it a devilish aspect which resolves into a set of oval catâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s eyes, blinking slowly as the sputtering wick burns down to the inevitable explosion . . .

But that was just a foretaste, it seems, for here is a second bomb. Time thickens to treacle as we wait for the cataclysm. The music slows and fades away. To the left, Soho is barely visible in the immense scribble of his room; to the right, Soho sits at the bare table, waiting.

The second bomb explodes, giving birth to a landscape full of ruptured cables, scything, writhing and withering like the severed heads of a Hydra. The blue lines recede, sucked down into the silent plugs of the telephone switchboard or slung back in disconnected loops under the earth. The connections are broken, reduced to a few pinpricks of blue light against the darknessâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;the last few synapses firing after a beheading.

On the screen, two weighty blocks of text come up, again and again: GIVE FORGIVE

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And here, at the end, is Soho once again in the empty room.

He stands with his hands in his pockets staring at the floor.

Water pools out of the breast and jacket pockets of the pinstriped suit, building into a cascade which pours down his torso and flanks, dams at his feet and rises to fill the room.

ORIGINS: STEREOSCOPE A nineteenth-century optical instrument developed in the wake of the invention of photography as a form of pre-cinematic amusement, a stereoscope unites two flat, two- dimensional images to produce an illusion of depth. Two seemingly identical pictures (but actually taken a few inches apart) are placed side by side on a sliding bracket and then viewed through a viewfinder. The spectator moves the bracket to find the correct distance from the eyes, at which point the two pictures merge into one and the flat surfaces become three-dimensional. In this respect, a stereoscope mimics the actual process of seeing, recreating the action of the brain which takes in separate images from the left and right eye and combines them to create a three-dimensional vision of the world, corroborated by evidence from the other senses.

As a child, Kentridge had a toy stereoscope made from the standard brown or black marbled Bakelite of the time (a material 312

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which, as we have seen, has a particular nostalgic hold on his imagination). The instrument came with a series of slide shows, views of the Grand Canyon or other emphatically contoured landscapes.

You slipped the slides, arranged in a wheel, into the viewfinder, then pressed a heavy, spring-loaded lever on the side to advance from one view to the next.

Thirty-odd years later, the idea of making stereoscopic art resurfaced in different projects: first in Stereoscope itself, which uses the notion of stereoscopic vision as a metaphor for duelling states of mind; and in later works constructed to be viewed stereoscopically.1 If stereoscopic vision is based on the principle of combination, Stereoscope, figuratively speaking, turns this principle on its head, dealing instead in a series of bifurcations and dualities. Instead of merging two images into one, Stereoscope takes the familiar, singlescreen view and breaks it into two, using the increasingly pronounced differences between the two sides of the screen as a metaphor for the growing rift occurring within Soho Eckstein himself. These are differences between the man of the world, standing at the centre of an incessant babble of information which, by the end of the film, has practically engulfed him (so much so that he has to divide himself again and again to cope with the flood).

Against this, we find a second Soho, an intensely private man who 313

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has pushed the world away, rejected all trappings of material luxury and stripped his life down to the bone.

Between these two conflicted sides of Soho’s personality, the real world rudely intrudes. It surges in upon the Soho on the left—entangled in lines of communication, he is almost flattened by a runaway tram. His counterpart on the right strives to maintain his isolation by allowing no external communication into his sealed room. But, even here, Soho cannot escape entirely—he cowers against the wall, listening to the sounds of confusion filtering in from outside.

Kentridge has said that the impetus for Stereoscope came from his own need to try and resolve the contradictions at the heart of his life. On the one hand, his career was at its most buoyant, with exhibitions all over the world (often on different continents at the same time), theatre and opera projects and a diary of commitments scheduled years ahead. On the other, he sought simplicity, a paring down of his life to the essentials. Kentridge has said that when he made the film, he ‘was in the state of feeling split between a desire for extreme control and simplicity and a sense of absorbing and being involved in the world.’2 However, as he says, each impulse on its own—clamour or silence—is ultimately infeasible: I was interested in what I was feeling at the time; that on the one hand my life was much too complicated, there were

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too many complications that I could not deal with. On the other, the image of the completely simplified, pared-down life, also seemed impossible. So in the film [. . .] the one rooms splits into one half that gets fuller and fuller and more and more impossibly busy; and the other becomes increasingly empty and leaves just Soho alone. Both are impossible situations. So it is about the balance between leading a full life and an empty life in the simplest sense.3 Having broken the elements of his life into separate components, only a judicious merging, a stereoscopic recombination, can result in a life that is meaningful and sustainable.

THE THIN BLUE LINE Blue lines cut across the screen in Stereoscope, running from telephone exchange to power station, burrowing underground and reemerging in different parts of the city, darting into individual rooms and binding and entangling their occupants. They represent communication and the ubiquitous connections by which we are all linked to the world. At one level, the lines simply reproduce the fat black cablesâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;the most visible symbols of twentieth-century scientific progressâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;which power our homes and cities or enable us to speak to people on the other side of the world as easily as we

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speak to people on the other side of the street. But the imagery goes further—the lines also remind us how, in the past 20 years, communication has become both vastly more intricate and more invisible and more intangible. Email, wireless Internet, mobile phones, satellite TV and GPS systems have brought about an explosion in the scale and complexity of modes of communication while simultaneously rendering cable technology increasingly obsolete.4 These connections become ever-more insistent and overwhelming. Only brute physical violence it seems—the exploding bombs which cause the blue lines to slacken and fall—can halt the crushing profusion of connections and demands. But we know this is only a temporary pruning. For the next wave of linkages will be thicker and more densely connected than before.

GIVE: FORGIVE Towards the end of the film, the images on the screen are replaced by the statement GIVE/FORGIVE repeated several times in heavy block letters. The words pick up an idea explored in three of the previous films, Sobriety, History and Weighing—that Soho must give something up, make sacrifices, shed his carapace and expose his vulnerabilities in order to achieve forgiveness both from his conscience and from others, most notably Mrs Eckstein. The theme is

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personal to Soho but also reflects a parallel process occurring more broadly in South Africa at the time.

In the late 1990s, when Stereoscope was created, the TRC was concluding its hearings and reaching its findings. Set up as a forum for individual and social healing in South Africa, the TRC provided a space in which the perpetrators of violence during the apartheid and transition years could come forward and account for their actions face to face with their victims or the families of victims.

Those who freely confessed and expressed remorse for their crimes received amnesty from the commission. In other words, only by giving themselves up to the tribunal, both literally and metaphorically, would they receive forgiveness.

For all its gaps, the TRC has been recognized internationally as one of the greatest exercises ever undertaken in national reconciliation. The commission’s procedures and terms of reference have been studied in other parts of the world in need of succour after generations of internecine conflict. Similarly, the testimony of victims and persecutors alike—while profoundly South African in content—has touched a chord with people who have lived through similar experiences in their own countries.

Kentridge, like other South African artists and writers, was influenced by the unfolding drama of the commission. In 1998,

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working with the Handspring Puppet Company, he created the play Ubu and the Truth Commission, based on actual transcripts from the commission, and an accompanying animated film and etching series entitled Ubu Tells the Truth.

Stereoscope constitutes a further, more oblique, response to the TRC. The chaotic violence in the latter part of the film refers to events under review by the commissionâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;though not exclusively, as Kentridge also drew on images from other parts of the world (including riots, shootings and executions in Kenya, Russia and Indonesia). Just as people in other countries recognized a kinship with South Africans through the TRC, so too Kentridge recognizes that brutality in South Africa is just one expression of a global vocabulary of violence.

The TRC was a light in the darkness, illuminating the murkiest, most deeply hidden, secrets of apartheid; in Stereoscope, Kentridge brings his own spotlight to bear, calling Soho Eckstein to account. Unlike the government assassins who came forward seeking atonement for their crimes, Soho does not stand accused of assault, abduction, rape or murder but he does have other sins to expiateâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;his sins of commission. In Stereoscope, the world that is going up in flames is a world that he and his ticker-tape machine, his typewriter and telephone helped create. To hell with everyone else, as long as he made his fortune. There are also his sins of 320

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omission. Soho must face up to his moral blindness and lack of courage. By failing to take a stand, to use his power and standing in the business community, he shares a complicity with all those who witnessed the iniquities of apartheid, and the suffering it caused, but remained silent.

The water pouring from Sohoâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s pockets, like a fountain of tears, expresses both the depth of his remorse and the promise of recovery.

Notes 1 These works, made in 2006/07, consist of a number of baroque theatre sets, designed, drawn and constructed by Kentridge, which were then photographed to be displayed both as pictures in their own right and as dual images to be viewed through the viewfinder of specially crafted stereoscopes.

2 Kentridge and Breidbach, William Kentridge: Thinking Aloud, p. 80.

3 Ibid., p. 74 4 There are areas of the world, for example, which have bypassed fixed-line telephony entirely, moving directly from minimal telephone coverageâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;a traditional indicator of economic underdevelopmentâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;to mass usage of mobile phones.

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Tide Table 2003 • animated film • 35 mm film transferred to video • 8 minutes 50 seconds • EDITING Catherine Meyburgh • sound Wilbert Schübel • MUSIC ‘Likambo Ya Ngana’ by Franco et le TP O.K. Jazz; singers from the Market Theatre Laboratory.

The sound of the ocean ushers us in.

The surf is breaking on a long curving beach. Here is the dark swirl of the approaching water, the rippling white crests gathering force before collapsing into broken pockets of dirty froth along the shore. The waves leave behind a fringe of foam, a smudged white line between sea and sand which recedes and fades away as the undertow sweeps the water back from the beach. Above, out of frame, wheeling seagulls mew and caw. In the background, the old Hottentots Holland mountains, the original, natural boundary to European expansion in South Africa, cast their shadows.

Judging by the position of the mountains, we are on the strand at Somerset West, along the north-eastern shoreline of False Bay. 325

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As the film progresses, however, the beach huts, the art deco architecture and the sound of the piano in the cocktail lounge of the hotel remind us more and more of Muizenberg, a once-favoured, now somewhat superseded seaside resort about 40 kilometres closer to Cape Town.

An empty deckchair stands, waiting, on the sand.

Further back, four beach huts, constructed from sea-weathered clapboard slats, are lined up in a row. Three short wooden steps provide access to the huts which are raised from the sand on short stilts.

Our view swivels past a tableau of anonymous bathers lying in the shade of an umbrella to take in an art deco hotel, a relic from a world and a style of beach-front architecture, before glassfronted skyscrapers marched in and colonized the shoreline.

At ground level, a colonnade bisected by the fluted columns of the central stairwell, frames a line of dwarf cypresses. The balconies on the first floor are hidden in the shadows but, on the floor above, the rooms open onto a long terrace enclosed by a shipâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s railing.

A figure emerges from a door on the far right, stepping out to take in the view. Soho Eckstein, in his pinstriped suit. He plants his arms on the railing, the gesture of a man used to exerting control, but then his posture shiftsâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;he hunches up, folds his arms 326

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and hugs them into his body. He seems distracted, uncertain, in need of comfort.

Out in the bay, the incoming tide swirls round a single rock, beached in low water.

And, finally, the title page of the film—the front page of a newspaper, filled with mysteriously migratory print—a kind of automatic writing—vague images of cows and what seems to be a blurred photograph of Soho himself.

Soho is on the beach now, seated in the deckchair, the surf sucking and hissing at his feet. He is absorbed by the tide table in the newspaper—the shifting maxima and minima of flow and ebb recorded in a fluid sine curve, the shape of the graph mimicking the geometry of the waves themselves. But the newspaper has some tricks of its own and, as Soho opens the broadsheet, it seems to grow, doubling and redoubling in size every time he turns a page. Eventually it forms a massive screen which hides him—feet excepted—completely. Soho’s concealed arms, we infer, must have also sprouted to an impressive width, holding up the newspaper like the crosspiece of a kite.

At the end of the beach, a group of cows stands at the edge of the sea, tails swishing. They turn their placid curiosity towards a young boy in shorts and hat, kneeling in the shallows, scooping 331

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wet sand into a bucket. He is clearly a talented artisan of the sand, for his sandcastle, glimpsed only briefly, is a perfect reproduction, in miniature, of Soho’s hotel.

The boy’s nanny stands a little way off and to the rear. It is as though we are standing at her shoulder, for we only ever see her from behind and our view of the beach is through her eyes. Right now, we are watching a man pushing another man to the water’s edge in a wheelbarrow, feeling the painful effort of trundling the heavy wheel over the unresisting sand.

The beach huts again, in the third of which a glowing lightbulb, surrounded by a swarm of midges, hangs from a line of flex.

The hut is filled with the expected paraphernalia of the beach: umbrellas, a multitude of buckets, a set of collapsed deckchairs stacked against one wall and, in the middle of the floor, one empty chair.

Outside, boys are fooling around on the beach, tumbling in the water, performing backflips. The boy whom we saw earlier is out there too but he keeps to himself, jumping barefoot from rock to rock, amusing himself with solitary pursuits.

In the hut, the open chair has come to life, anthropomorphized into a cavorting creature, breakdancing round its own struts, turning in and out upon itself like a rickety Jacob’s Ladder.

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At the far end of the beach, where previously the cows had congregated, a prayer meeting is underway in the shadow of the confiding mountains. It is a baptism. Men and women in robes of white and green—some with a star of David embroidered across their backs, others with a cross—are submerged in the salt water, purified and reborn.

Some distance away, Soho sits in his chair, arms crossed behind his head, staring out over the waves. The downward turn to his mouth suggests a melancholy train of thought.1 Soho perhaps reflects on youth but his dreams turn to his childhood. And we realize that the boy in the white hat, ranging the beach oblivious to the watchful gaze of his nanny, is young Soho himself, in a state of prelapsarian innocence, skipping stones over the wavelets.

Back at the hotel, three generals in matching totalitarian insignia—uniforms, epaulettes, peaked caps and sunglasses—stand on the first-floor balcony. Unlike the terrace above, open as the foredeck of an ocean liner, these balconies have been partitioned into a series of concrete cubicles, claustrophobic and uninviting. The generals stare out to sea, watching with unreadable expressions as a cow emerges like a bovine Venus from the foamy surf.

In the beach hut, the cow stands under the light. The insects are having a feast day. A set of ropes swings from the rafters, grappling

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and securing the cow and hauling it up into the air. In the process, the animal is transformed into a massive, marbled side of beef, hanging flayed and dripping, from a butcherâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s hook.

Next door, the dancing deckchair is in a paroxysm of movement, toyi-toying across the bare floor of the hut, before it too undergoes transmogrification into the tubular metal frame and thin mattress of a hospital bed.

A rural hospice, a single room. The patients overflow the narrow beds, crowding onto pallets and sleeping mats on the floor, some with only a few sheets of newspaper for a blanket.

Back on the beach. Sohoâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s nanny is sitting on a towel, the ribbons of her doek falling like a wimple down her back, her legs tucked modestly beneath her.

Night at the hotel. The lights are on in every room and the tinkle of the ballroom piano sounds faintly in the still air. The generals are back on their balconies, no more than dark silhouettes in the dusk. Above them, Soho comes out to sample the night air before returning to the beach for another hour or so with his ungovernably expanding newspaper.

In the beach hut, the boy is balancing on the arms of the deckchair while, next door, the charismatic priest spins members of his congregation into religious fervour, the voices of the choir 338

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drowning out the music from the hotel. The boy spins too, performing an elegant pirouette.

In the next hut, the light shades have become shower heads, raining a spout of water from which emerges another cow. Soho’s newspaper is somehow keeping track of these disparate events with its news of the livestock market, of cattle bought and sold. But any purchase made is not a good bargain, for, before our eyes, the plump cows sicken and starve, their skin a parchment over prominent ribs, the flesh melting as the skeletal animals become actual skeletons. ‘Sale in liquidation’ the paper announces. The cows collapse into shadows and then disappear beneath the waves.

Soho drops the newspapers and stares out to sea. We see the feet of his long-gone nanny pass slowly across the beach. The newspaper forms a carpet over which she walks.2 Slumped in the deckchair, the newspaper draped over his face, Soho slumbers under the afternoon sun, observed from a respectful distance by the cows. His nanny sits on the sand at his side, her face, as ever, turned away from us. She stretches out a hand and touches Soho’s wrist, caressing it as a mother strokes the cheek of her child.

In the hospital, relatives are bidding goodbye to those they love, gathering round the emptying beds.

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A man, face drawn with sorrow, carries the wasted frame of his brother to the water. The dying man clinging to him with the last of his ebbing strength before slipping into the water. This is not a baptism but a valediction, for when the waters release him he is a shrouded form which is then transformed into one of the scattered rocks along the shoreline.

Nearby, the wheelbarrow lies on its side, no longer needed, its cargo gathered and gone.

Out on the rocks, the boy in the white hat is still skipping stones.

At the hotel, Soho watches his former self through binoculars before heading out to those same rocks. He stands there, ankle deep in water, indifferent to the surf breaking on the cuffs of his trousers.3 The cows fade away, becoming markers, mere stakes in the ground.

The generals give up their watch, step back into their rooms and pull their curtains shut.

The skeleton of a cow washes up on the tide.

Soho picks up a stone and skips it over the water. The sea rolls in over the rocks and then recedes to reveal the boy on his knees in the damp sand, collecting periwinkles in his bucket.

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The day is fading over the empty beach.

All that is left is the movement of the tide and the deep, consoling susurration of the sea.

ORIGINS: FILIAL RELATIONS According to Kentridge, Tide Table had its origins in a moment of epiphany on a mountainside overlooking Rio de Janeiro, some time after the completion of Stereoscope. Asked by an interviewer if he had plans for another Soho Eckstein film, Kentridge replied that in his next outing Soho would be beside the sea, sitting in a deckchair on the beach.

When Kentridge began work on the film, the original working title was ‘Soho on the Beach’, a reference to the Philip Glass opera Einstein on the Beach which, instead of a formal plot, is made up of a series of symbols and references taken from Einstein’s life.

Why a beach? In part, Kentridge’s response may have been influenced by the distant view of the long sandy beach along the Baia de Guanabara; in part, it reflected a desire, after three deeply introspective films, to reconnect Soho with the wider world.4 Partly, too, Kentridge was looking for an opportunity to draw the sea, to experiment with animating the different components which combine to produce the image of a wave breaking on the shore.

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Whatever the original inspiration, as with all the Soho Eckstein films, the meaning of the narrative changed as the work progressed, revealing itself more clearly as the creative process unfolded. Specifically, Tide Table came to focus on the relationship between one’s older to one’s younger self: [I]n the end, the film became as much about the relationship of Soho to himself as a child, not to his child, but to his younger self. It is a question of: Who is the person we were 40 years ago? Is that the same person we are now? Or is it a different being altogether? If you imagine bumping into your earlier self, then would you be embarrassed by who you were? There is always something depressing about seeing pictures of oneself as a child, almost as though you feel you are saying ‘I’m sorry’ to that photograph. ‘I was supposed to look after you, I was supposed to make good decisions, but somehow I made a whole lot of bad decisions and in the end you turned into me.’5 In Tide Table, this inter-temporal communion is represented by the older self (Soho in his pinstriped suit) contemplating his younger incarnation (the boy in the white shorts and hat). Hidden behind his enormous newspaper, Soho mulls over his past, reexamining the original raw material of the man he has become.

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Sitting in his deckchair, he dreams of his youth in a protected, nurturing world where love and care were so taken for granted that they needed no acknowledgement. It was an uncluttered, sensory world, free of the stresses and anxieties of adulthood, lived in the here and now, with thoughts of the future no more than a patchwork of dreams and ignorance, a guiltless blend of reality and heroic fantasy.

What is far more painful is to look back through the eyes of experience and to reflect the path down which we have come, the blunders, the wrong turnings.

In a world driven relentlessly onward, the person we once were is the most poignant alter ego of all, and, as our former selves recede into the past, we can only look on helplessly. Like Walter Benjamin’s Angel of History, we want to go back and fix things but that is an impossible dream; for we can only go forward, blasted, blindly, as helpless as ever, into the future.

This intimate, elastic connection, stretching across time, by which our older selves both interrogate and apologize to our younger incarnations, applies implicitly to other filial relations as well. As Kentridge says: ‘[W]hen I came to finish the film, I understood that it was a lot about my father and myself, myself and my son, my grandfather and my father.’6

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In other words, Soho’s musings over the boy in the white shorts can be likened to a father’s dreams and aspirations for his son, and to the limits of those dreams. Just as we cannot go back in time and fix the mistakes we made in our youth, no matter how much we come to regret them, so too a father always has only limited stewardship over the choices made by his son.

For Kentridge, as a son to a father and a father to a son, Tide Table is a personal conversation across the generations. To his father, he says: ‘The choices which have shaped and governed my life, I made because of, and despite, the decisions that you made.’

To his son, he asks, ‘How will the choices I have made impact you in the future?’

Kentridge had his son, Samuel, very much in mind when making the film. Just as Soho appears as the alter ego of the artist (and at times comes to resemble him closely physically), so too the boy in the white hat is modelled on his son. In the process of making the film, Kentridge videoed Samuel walking, jumping, throwing, pivoting, dancing, and deconstructed the mechanics of each movement, frame by frame, in order to animate these actions in the film. So the boy is both the young Soho and the artist’s son.

We see this dual identity in a small, felicitous anomaly in the film: the boy in the white hat is left-handed (as is Kentridge’s son) while

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the older Soho, the boy grown up, skips a stone across the water with his right hand. He is right handed, like the artist himself. The transition from boy to man, it seems, has been even more transformative than we might have imagined.

Ultimately, however, there is one other filial relationship at work as well, one which makes the location of this final film particularly apt. In the Introduction I wrote about the deep origins of Soho Eckstein lying in a photograph of our paternal grandfather sitting in a deckchair on the sand with his wife and sons ranged at his feet. In situating Tide Table on the beach at Muizenberg, Kentridge acknowledges his unconscious debt to his grandfather by reuniting Soho with his progenitor at the precise place of his inception.

SEVEN LEAN YEARS And Pharaoh said unto Joseph, â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;In my dream, behold, I stood upon the bank of the river: And behold, there came up out of the river seven kine, fatfleshed and well favoured; and they fed in a meadow: And behold, seven other kine came up after them, poor and very ill favoured and leanfleshed, such as I never saw in all the land of Egypt for badness: 355

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And the lean and the ill favoured kine did eat up the first seven fat kine: And when they had eaten them up, it could not be known that they had eaten them, but they were still ill favoured as at the beginning. So I awoke.’

Genesis 41.17–21 In Tide Table, fat cows wander on the margins of the beach, up their hocks in the shallow water. Inexorably, however, the years of plenty give way to famine. Under the pitiless gaze of the generals, those modern harbingers of the apocalypse, the cows are butchered, or sicken and waste away, becoming the barest husks, a barrel of ribs under a threadbare hide. When the tide washes out, it leaves behind a skull and a few bones, bleached by sun and sea.

Skeletal cows are recognizable symbols of poverty in South Africa, grazing among the rocky scrub of droughtstricken and eroded pastureland. In parts of the country—the Transkei, the north coast—it is common to come across a herd on the beach, moving slowly down from the headlands to forage for dune grasses.

But the cows represent more than just the malady of poverty.

As they sicken, so the hospices fill up with the dead and dying, as AIDS—known in Africa as the disease of thinning—tightens its

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grip on the country. Baptisms give way to burials, prayers of rejoicing become songs of lament.

South Africa, like Egypt, the film seems to be saying, has entered its time of famine. Unlike Egypt, however, in this country our rulers were without foresight; the storehouses are empty.

Our Josephs, the seers who warned of the onset of AIDS, went unheeded—for far too long prophets without honour in their own country.

ENCORES Tide Table has a valedictory flavor, full of visual or conceptual allusions to the films that have come before, as if Kentridge is unconsciously acknowledging to himself the long road leading to those final scenes on the beach.

The newspaper, laid like a carpet of honour beneath the feet of the young Soho’s nanny, has its antecedents in Felix where, for want of a better cloth, it is used to cover the dead in a gentle mantle of respect.

The biblical allusion to Pharaoh’s dream and the seven lean years, which provides Tide Table with one of its underlying themes, reminds us that an earlier film, Weighing, is also structured around a biblical theme—the writing on the wall which 359

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denounces Soho, like Belshazzar before him, as having been weighed and found wanting.

The rocks which speckle the shoreline also reprise a set of images from Felix, in which the corpses (of victims of violence, as opposed to AIDS) are absorbed into the ground, memorialized as rocks or other features of the landscape; The touch which the young Soho’s nanny bestows, across the arc of time, on the wrist of the older Soho, is just one more in a long line of similar gestures of affection: Mrs Eckstein rubbing her thumb over Felix Teitlebaum’s shoulder in Johannesburg; Soho stroking the cat in Sobriety; Soho caressing Mrs Eckstein in a gesture of reconciliation and reunification at the end of Weighing.

The hotel where Soho is staying is a classic example of South African beachfront art deco. This is a coastal variant of the art deco architecture which runs through many of the films,but is most apparent in Sobriety, where Soho’s property empire (before its dissolution) appears to be made up entirely of deco buildings erected in Johannesburg in the 1930s and 40s.

These familiar elements, recurring as understated, yet powerful motifs in Tide Table, charm us like a series of encores—a fitting tribute from the artist both to himself and to us, the viewers, as the light fades over the sea and the waves slip quietly up the sand.

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Notes 1 We are reminded of another ageing dreamer—Gustav von Aschenbach, protagonist of Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice, sitting on the beach on the Venice Lido watching Tadzio, the gilded boy, at play on the sand.

2 Another reminder, this time of the carpet of dreams which W. B. Yeats, for want of the cloths of heaven, spreads beneath the feet of his beloved.

3 The image evokes T. S. Eliot’s J. Alfred Prufrock, another man whose dreams and regrets provoke our compassion: ‘I grow old . . . I grow old / I will wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled / [. . . ] I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.’

4 If this was Kentridge’s original intention, it was overthrown in the process of creation. As the film progresses, it becomes clear that Tide Table is as inward looking as its predecessors. Although Soho is surrounded by other people—generals, schoolboys, a church choir, mourners—he does not interact with any of them.

Instead, he sits in self-imposed isolation, distant and disengaged from the life of the world around him.

5 Kentridge and Breidbach, William Kentridge: Thinking Aloud, p. 60. Kentridge is quoting the narrator in Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity (London: Penguin, 2000).

6 Kentridge and Breidbach, William Kentridge: Thinking Aloud, p. 86.

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Other Faces 2011 • animated film • 35 mm film transferred to video • 9 minutes 45 seconds • EDITING Catherine Meyburgh • MUSIC AND SOUND design Philip Miller • voice Ann Masina and Bham Ntabeni • SOUND MIXING Wilbert Schübel and Gavan Eckhart.

On the open pages of an old exercise book, the words ‘Other Faces’ appear. A capital ‘D’ and ‘C’ in old-fashioned Gothic script indicates that this a ledger used for double-entry bookkeeping; the careful (though frankly indecipherable) calligraphy of the entries indicates that it must be old, a record perhaps from the early days of Johannesburg as a mining town.

We become aware of sounds: a hissing like a garden sprinkler, the chirrup of crickets, the muted whistle of an object flying through the air to land with a thud and a splat, in a black smudge on the page of the book, like a clods of earth flung up by a spade.

Red surveyors’ marks remind us that human agency is at work here.

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The book gives way to a patch of scrubland, the kind of scrappy vegetation that flourishes in the gaps and interstices of urban landscapes. This is the inevitable, familiar terrain of Johannesburg: in the background, a mine dump is crowned with a drive-in screen seen side on while the foreground is given over to marsh grass around a hidden vlei, scrubby trees and the remains of an old watering pond. Tiny figures are barely discernible in the distance. They move across the base of the mine dump and are hidden in the long meadowland, but we can mark their progress by the disorder of the grass stalks, bending as they pass.

A cemetery on the edge of town, stubby headstones against a backdrop of thorn trees and acacia bushes. There is a strange, halfrecognized, clicking sound: in part the chirp of insects, in part a human sound of admonishment or regret.

A hadeda paces among the graves, wings folded behind its back like a scrupulous undertaker. As it dips its beak, stabbing the dry earth for grubs, the clicking takes on a more syncopated beat.

A cluster of buildings at the foot of the mine dump. We sense that they have been abandoned, that this is their last stand before the encroaching vegetation takes over. In the foreground is a strange, 1950sâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; modernist concrete canopy, punctuated by perforations of different sizes to give it a more space-age look. Some

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viewers will recognize this remarkable piece of urban architecture as the entrance to the Top Star Drive-In (the screen of which is located at the top of this mine dump, right on the edge of town).

The buildings squatting alongside must therefore be the old toilet block, or the place where once upon a time one could buy a hot dog and a cup of flat Coke for 50 cents.

A bird flying past leads us from town to Saxonwold in the northern suburbs of Johannesburg where the statue of the Angel of Peace, commemorating the Anglo-Boer War, stands sentinel over the Zoo and the War Museum.

The drive-in screen again, a white cut-out against the charcoal sky, but the parking bays and the poles with speakers for each car are all gone. Instead, the ground drops away in front of the screen, scooped away by the diggers and front-end loaders eating away the mine-dump, bite by bite, in an effort to find and extract the last scraps of gold from the sand.

In his Le Corbusier houseâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;a flat box bisected by the spiky vertical of a cypress tree and rounded by a bay window like the snub-nosed prow of a postwar linerâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;Soho Eckstein moves about, faintly visible from the outside.

Inside, Soho is at the window, looking out. We see him from behind, hands flat against the panes. It is not clear whether the

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house is a prison from which he is trying to break free or his sanctuary from the outside world.

The clicking voice sings a few tentative notes. Outside, invisible creatures move through the grass or flit between the trees, disturbing the foliage with their hidden life.

Back to the ledger, back to the stock-taking. Now the word ‘carapace’ appears in the careful script of some bygone, long-forgotten clerk of accounts.

Dots form on the page, then gather into the portrait of a woman, old and exhausted. She lies in bed, partly raised on a nest of pillows, the blankets pulled up to her chin. Her eyes are open but it is impossible to know what she is seeing or thinking.

Bruises and lesions appear—red lines transecting the quadrants of the brain.

The lines transmute into a street map of the old uitvalgrond of Johannesburg—literally, the ‘land left-over’ when the city was first laid out—at the intersection of Jeppe and End Streets aptly renamed Error Street in the film. Cars move about like ants hurrying to spilled sugar. The air is full of the sound of traffic, hooters blaring unceasingly as cars and taxis jostle for position. A prophet has set up for business; a doctor’s surgery has squeezed in next to the red and white sign of the Joburg Mall, a wholesaler’s emporium which 370

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welcomes hawkers. The pavement is crowded with refugees from other processions: miners with spades, people stumping along under formless burdens.

There is a sound like a shot but it is just the amplified click of a camera shutter. A street photographer is shooting portraits, posing his subjects against a white backdrop, a sheet tacked up against the side of a building. His first customer is a woman in a floral doek who watches him warily as he lines up the shot, her expression severe and suspicious. Now we see the photographer with the camera to his eye, a bionic extension of himself. He is dressed in an old hound’s-tooth coat, reminiscent of Harry, the vagrant last seen in Johannesburg and Monument. The photographer shoots again, this time a young man who tilts his head at a jaunty angle and looks at the camera with a challenging expression.

On the edge of the street, three old men sit beside the barred doorway of the Horn of Africa, watching the world pass by with the patience and the resignation of the Fates themselves.

Back on the grid, trouble is approaching. Two cars—moving black squares, like the counters in a board game—are on a collision course. To the chords of a guitar we hear tyres squeal, the sound of a smash and breaking glass, and then see the cars spin off the road into the curb. A bird’s-eye view sees onlookers throng round

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the wounded vehicles within seconds, gathering like the crowds who marched through the streets of Johannesburg in the dying days of apartheid. We hear voices calling, clicking; the excitement of the drama—the schadenfreude—pushes up the volume.

The drivers get out of their cars—a black man in a suit, his face grim with anger and, across a swirl of bystanders, Soho Eckstein himself, his face registering alarm and shock. It’s impossible to think in such a din—the hooting from cars and taxis held up by the crash is overwhelming. Soho loses control; his face contorts with rage and he screams at the other driver who yells back, his words, resolving themselves into the unambiguous phrase: ‘YOU FUCKEN WHITE MAN!’ Somewhere nearby, the photographer snaps away. His latest subject, calm and proud, lifts his chin above the vulgar fray (but at the last moment closes his eyes and spoils the shot).

In the ledger, we read the phrase, ‘I am nothing, but should be everything.’ Soho’s cry is both an ironic echo of Marx’s definition of defiant revolutionary consciousness1 and a great curse of frustration. How is it possible, he wonders, that I who once embodied such potential, who literally held the world in my hand, can be brought to this, can be so harried and beset by the endless failures, the pointless, pitiful skirmishes and petty humiliations of life?

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People gather on balconies overlooking the street to watch as Soho and his antagonist continue to shout abuse at each other.

Carefully positioned in front of the sheet, a man in a hat waits for his picture to be taken, eyes flickering as the temperature rises all around him. â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;The Widow, the Orphan, the Strangerâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; announces the ledger.

Now the crowd is screaming too, a dangerous mob armed with sticks and clubs, but the photographer is unaffected. An island of sanity against a growing mood of madness, he continues to capture his subjects for posterity: a woman in long earrings, head bowed, her face etched with grief and care; a man with a smile so broad, so in love with life and the world that he practically eats the viewer . . . We see the buildings, the barbed-wire fences . . . the photographer presses the shutter.

Now things change. The present slides back into the past.

The screen is filled with broken lines, smudges and flicking images while the soundtrack switches to the unmistakable whirr of an old reel-to-reel Super 8 projector spooling forward to show home movies from 50 years ago. A maid holds a baby in a smock on a bed of fat white pillows; here she is again, effortfully pushing an old-fashioned pram along a garden path as the baby pokes his head out and waves his fists about like an infant pasha. Here are

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pictures taken at poolside: a girl in a black cap; a woman lying across a lilo of ridged canvas, chin resting on her hands, kicking gently as she drifts across the water. Now a young woman with a wide, white headband appears; behind her, a glimpse of a shadowy man in a hat.

We shift back to the present. The bleached, over-exposed images become more hard-edged, more familiar in style.

Now another couple. The old woman, whom we saw earlier etched across the pages of the ledger, is now lying propped up by pillows in a chair, her thin body swathed in a rug that reaches to the floor. An old man in glasses and a suit is sitting beside her, reading, cradling her left hand in his right. In the foreground we see the corner of an open book; the ledger perhaps, or a sketchbook balanced on the knee of an artist sitting just out of sight of the camera.

These are Sohoâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s parents, grown old.

The ledger becomes the night sky. It is November 1955â&#x20AC;&#x201D;the burning coals of a brazier shine whitely among the stars and are then replaced by a new constellation, the woman in bed, a white outline against an inky black firmament.

At the drive-in, a film is counting down in revolving circles: 3, 2, 1 and the home movie starts up again. We see the young woman, 382

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standing over a boy of about four or five. The camera work is shaky—the top of her head has been lopped off, and the bottom of his.

On the screen new words appear: ‘That Which Is Not Drawn’, then an image of Soho holding a baby sphinx, fists, legs and tail waving as he cradles it in his arms. Then the words ‘Healing to All in Global’—the words of the prophet written on the drive-in screen.

Outside the Horn of Africa, the three watchers have departed but the camera man is still there, only now he is photographing Soho’s mother on her bid of pillows, her hand plucking at the coverlet. Soho and the other driver are still screaming, Janus-faced, at each other, standing back to back, divided by a red line which bisects the screen.

Loudspeakers and blurting traffic lights blare out the flash and din of rage—the pack is on the move. ‘JUST GET OUT OF TOWN’ screams a newspaper headline, both reporting and stoking the rage of the mob. A man stands quietly, stoically to one side. Is he their target? Soho is no help—his face is covered by a page torn from the ledger, so what can he see?

Snapshots of violence: a hand; a sparkplug used to smash the windows of cars halted at red lights and Stop signs; a gun.

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Back at the vlei, with the mine dump in the distance, a man is dancing with spades. He could be a miner, a gardener or a grave digger. The whirling shovels transform into a set of eagle wings spread wide, and he bows his head, an angel preparing for lift-off.

Someone is digging. His feet firmly planted, the head of the spade picks up its load, the sound of metal biting into earth. The hadeda looks on, its gravitas intact.

But the landscape is on the move. The mine dump is eaten away. The Angel of Peace spreads her wings as a bird flies by gracefully, from nowhere to nowhere, like an image revolving round a magic lantern. On the pages of the ledger, a miniature version of the dancing spade man pivots and stamps.

The megaphones continue to pour out their vituperation while in the accounts book, garbled words, numbers and symbols fill the pages, crowding each other like the language of madness until all the signs have become a single, indistinguishable black smudge.

Soho, looking old, stands behind a barrier like the one he erected around himself in Stereoscope. On the other side, the noise and violence beats itself out impotently. He stands beside the steel girdersâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;all that is left of the drive-inâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;while, above him, an imprisoned bird flies desperately back and forth across the screen, unable to escape. In his arms he holds the little sphinx. His mother

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in an elegant white jacket, grown young again, places her hand upon his shoulder, just as she had comforted his five-year-old self 50 years before.

As the Super 8 film blots and lines flicker and die, the last bites are scooped out of the mine dump and the screen crashes down in an implosion of dust and debris.

A bird, drawn in crude strokes, takes off and flies away.

‘Finish,’ says Other Faces.

It’s finished.

ORIGINS: THAT WHICH IS NOT DRAWN About three-quarters of the way through the film the words ‘That Which Is Not Drawn’ appear. In a film, in a series, that is above all about drawing, this phrase has not been chosen at random but refers to a particular idea about the artist’s relationship to his audience, to his creations and to himself. ‘That which is not drawn’ is what we, the audience, do not see—all the elements of the story that the artist has chosen not to show. These are the parts we have to fill in for ourselves: Why was Soho driving in that part of town at precisely that time? What is the back story to the different scraps of home movie we see? Or, crucially, what happens next: Soho, an antagonist, anger rising, shouts becoming yells, onlookers transforming into

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an armed mob . . . and then? It’s up to us to fill in the missing pieces.

But if we are unsighted, so too is Soho. He is constrained by the narrow path that the artist has created for him to walk. He has only partial vision about his life—we know this because often his actions are extreme and his responses seem bizarre and inappropriate to us. We know, too, that he has limited understanding of, and empathy with, others, a theme picked up in many of the films and repeated here.

‘That which is not drawn’ also refers to those feelings and memories which Soho hides from others as well as from himself— a private world of anxiety, shame, regret, grief. In History, the walls of denial were so thick that they rendered him comatose; in Weighing, denial was a monstrous boulder, crushing all possibility of happiness or redemption until he found the courage to break free. In Other Faces, though deep memories stir, there is a line he will not cross and a depth of feeling he will not bring himself to acknowledge. This is most stark in the scenes which show Soho’s parents as they are today. We know that what we see, we see through his eyes, but Soho is not an active participant; we merely sense his presence somewhere off-screen, an observer selfprotected from direct involvement.

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But if ‘that which is not drawn’ signifies both the consciously withheld and the subconscious themes of Soho’s life, it also refers to all the avenues the artist himself has chosen not to follow, all the alternative paths he could have explored but did not. As we have discussed before, Kentridge does not start work with a storyboard but allows the narrative to unfold organically driven by impulses and sudden thoughts and ideas. Change any part of this process and something different will emerge. ‘That which is not drawn’ is Kentridge’s acknowledgement of the capricious way in which the films are created and all the ghostly possibilities renounced in favour of this particular story.

It is interesting that the words are followed by a short scene showing Soho holding a baby sphinx, an image out of keeping with the rest of the film. At one level, it is a straightforward reference to a similar drawing in a recent exhibition by Kentridge in the Egyptian rooms at the Louvre—and we know that he likes to pull motifs from other works into his films (the bird taking flight, to take another example, reprises a sequence from Learning the Flute, a film made during the creation of The Magic Flute for Opera Monnaie in Brussells).

However, in the context of this film, the image presents another interpretation—we can read the baby sphinx as a metaphor

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for the soul, at once so precious, adorable, fragile and cosseted and yet so dangerous. Beneath the downy fur and baby face something monstrous lurks. Our way in life is determined by our ability to keep this hideous thing—the thing which we hide, that which is not drawn—in check.

ZECHARIAH 7.10 In May 2008, after more than seven years of simmering resentment, townships around South Africa erupted in an explosion of xenophobic hatred. This was the worst violence seen in the country since the internecine warfare between Inkatha and the ANC 15 years before.

Armed gangs coursed through squatter settlements looking to flush out foreigners: Nigerians, Zimbabweans, Mozambicans, Malawians, Congolese. No one was safe.

In Other Faces, the onlookers who gather to watch as Soho and the other driver scream their epithets at each other rapidly morph into a baying crowd armed with the weapons of the mob: clubs, sticks, pangas. ‘Just Get Out!’ the screen yells, mimicking a shameful and infamous newspaper headline of the time which, while professing merely to report the mood of the attackers, in reality added fuel to the violence.

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On screen, these words are replaced by the phrase ‘The Widow, The Orphan, The Stranger’, a reference across centuries of biblical time to the book of Zechariah, a minor prophet but no less authoritative for that. Against hatred, xenophobia, cruelty and the oppression of the weak by the strong, stood Zechariah. He laid down for us the duty we owe each other, particularly those in greatest need of protection, repeating a theme expressed again and again throughout the 39 books of the Old Testament: ‘And oppress not the widow, nor the fatherless, the stranger, nor the poor; and let none of you imagine evil against his brother in your heart.’

The madness of the crowd is one thing but what of Soho himself? Once upon a time, the widow, the orphan and the stranger were given short shrift indeed. Remember the contemptuous megalomaniac in Johannesburg, tossing the soiled scraps from his table at the ranks of the poor with insolent disdain? But this is a different man who, across the span of the last five films, has grown increasingly introspective and self-critical. What he knows now is that attitudes and actions matter. Even if he cannot predict the outcomes, what is certain is that there will be consequences not only for him but also for others; consequences which cannot simply be ignored or brushed aside.

Somewhere, not far perhaps, in Soho’s future, the dancing gravedigger awaits. The crunch of shovel on earth is an auditory 403

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memento mori as distinctive and unmistakable as the sound of surf on sand. The Soho of Other Faces knows this all too well. He stands on the edge of eternity and probes the tender places in his soul as one works a troublesome tooth with the tip of the tongue.

For at the end of life there is judgementâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;be it that of heaven, or of ourselves. The ledger will be opened, there will be a reckoning.

And at that tribunal, holding our fate in the balance, stand these three witnesses: the widow, the orphan and the stranger.

FRENCH PHILOSOPHY All Kentridgeâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s films are personal but some, like Other Faces, are more personal than others.

The title of the film is a tip of the hat to the French-Lithuanian philosopher, Emmanuel Levinas, whose life spanned the twentieth century. Levinas, who lost much of his family in the Holocaust to the murderous troops of the Lithuanian SS, espoused a moral philosophy founded on compassion and the duties and obligations that extend from one person to another or, to put it more personally, from me to you and from you to me.

The key idea is that of the Other, by which Levinas means someone who is not me and cannot be defined by me. Even if you can never truly know the Other, you nevertheless define yourself

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(or, more formally, your Self ) in relation to that other person. This paradox—the gulf between us, and yet the bond between us—is an essential element of what it means to be human: I am who I am precisely because I am not, and cannot be, anyone else, and yet I am bound to define myself (my Selfness, if you like) in relation to all these Others.

For Levinas, however, it is not enough simply to know the Other, to recognize his or her otherness from oneself. No, that recognition, in itself, implies a requirement—to treat the Other with delicacy and compassion, for the mere presence of the Other imposes a set of moral and ethical obligations on one.

The embodiment of the Other is the Face, ‘the source from which all meaning appears’, according to Levinas. The face is both the physical face we see in the mirror every day but also the first and most expressive way of signifying otherness—theirs to us, ours to them—for when we encounter someone else the first thing we see is the Face. Before we can know anything else, we understand at the deepest level of our ancient brain that we are in the presence of another person.

Levinas sees encounters with the Other—coming face to face with the Face—as charged moments, filled with pathos: The skin of the face is that which stays most naked, most destitute. There is an essential poverty in the face; the 407

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proof of this is that one tries to mask this poverty by putting on poses, by taking on a countenance.2 The face imposes itself, but does so precisely by appealing to me with its destitution and nudity—its hunger—without my being able to be deaf to that appeal.3 Above all, Levinas understands the moral code laid down by Zechariah: The first word of the face is the ‘Thou shalt not kill.’ It is an order. There is a commandment in the appearance of the face, as if a master spoke to me. However, at the same time, the face of the Other is destitute; it is the poor for whom I can do all and to whom I owe all.4 The nature of our relationship to the Other pervades these 10 films. Kentridge has always been interested in questions of identity—who we are, who we could have been, how we came to be who we are—and the claims of obligation—what we owe to the world, to specific individuals, to ourselves. He has explored these themes at a personal level using Felix and Soho as alter egos (literally ‘the other I’—the Self and the Other in one) and through the way in which his characters (Soho in particular) relate to and interact with the wider world.

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In Other Faces we are shown Soho’s response both to the nameless individuals and pulsing crowds who cross his path at random— by turns suspicious, hostile, angry, fearful, guilt-struck, withdrawn, indifferent—and his relationship to those whose otherness is so much more personal, people whose lives have shaped and defined his own. In Kentridge’s portrait of Soho’s mother, we see her both as a memory, a Super 8 movie of her former self, alive with beauty and youthful vigour, and as the person she is today, cruelly reduced.

We see her under a carapace of rugs, confined to the limited universe of bed and chair, eyes once so dark with wit and intelligence now gazing vacantly at a world grown strange and opaque.

And we sense, more than see, Soho’s anguish and helplessness in the face of this reversal, his inability to break through to the proximity and protection she once provided to him and which he should now be providing her.

But Other Faces is not only about our limited understanding of even those to whom we are most close, nor is it simply a parable about growing old and the ruin that Time can visit upon the strongest and most vital of us; it is also about the opposite. In this, his 10th film, Kentridge presents us with a vision of true closeness, of twin souls and the qualities that lie at the heart of Levinas’ moral philosophy: love, devotion, fidelity.

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The most powerful image in the film shows Soho’s father sitting beside his stricken wife, holding her hand, just being with her in a moment of utmost tenderness and intimacy—the Self and the Other conjoined.

They sit together as if time and change are of no consequence; as if death and the judgement of posterity are mere sideshows. For the message of that scene to Soho and to the rest of us, in tribute to Levinas, in support of Zechariah, in echo of the last line of Philip Larkin’s ‘An Arundel Tomb’ (1964), is this: ‘What will survive of us is love.’

Notes 1 In The Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right (1843), Marx laments the fact that no class in Germany has the necessary boldness to shout these words.

2 Emmanuel Levinas, Ethics and Infinity: Conversations with Philippe Nemo (Richard A. Cohen trans.) (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 1985), p. 86.

3 Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay pn Exteriority (Alphonso Lingis trans.) (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 1969), p. 200.

4 Levinas, Ethics and Infinity, p. 89.

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Coda: The Making of Other Faces

In March 2010, Kentridge’s production of The Nose, by Dimitri Shostakovich, premiered at the Metropolitan Opera in New York.

With this mammoth undertaking—five years in the making— brought to triumphant conclusion, he could finally, for the first time in eight years, turn his attention back to Soho Eckstein.

On 13 July, Kentridge began the first drawings for the film that would become Other Faces, knowing that he would have to work in short, intensive bursts of activity, interspersed with a wide range of other projects, all with equally pressing claims on his time. First, however, he allowed himself three weeks to focus full time on establishing what the film would be about and finding some of the key images to create a framework for the story. The film needed to be well underway before he could turn to other projects; it was important to know the elements that would make up the film and have a sense of how they would come together.

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But when one works without a script or storyboard, the final product is inevitably different from the initial impetus. If we look at the order in which the drawings were made for Other Faces, and compare that to the order in which they appear as scenes in the film, the gap between first idea and final outcome is clear: DRAWING

ORDER DRAWN

GAP BETWEEN FILMS

Prophet Schuma

1

14

Wholesalerâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;Addis Ababa

2

15

Clothes

3

n/a

Top Star Drive-In

4

7

Observatory

5

n/a

Modernist House

6

8

War Memorial

7

6

Soho Barking (Road Rage)

8

26

Sky Map (Ledger)

9

50

Hadeda

10

4

Cemetery Landscape (West Park)

11

3

Man Barking Back (Road Rage)

12

27

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There is a black desk diary in the studio in which Kentridge records the day’s activities: the projects underway, the drawings made and the direction of travel as the work unfolds. Flipping back through nine months of entries, Kentridge can recreate both his initial thoughts and impulses and the way in which the story evolved over time.1 At first I said I’d give myself three weeks of just drawing Johannesburg. I drew the Top Star drive-in, the War Memorial in Saxonwold, the Observatory, the modernist suburban house that became Soho’s house, the hadeda and one of the street scenes in Jeppe Street. It was like I was saying to myself, ‘OK, here are the raw elements.

What film are you going to make from this?’

I wasn’t working to a storyboard, but often, at different stages, potential stories would suggest themselves. I knew I wanted to draw old Johannesburg and the Ethiopian Quarter,2 and I could imagine a possible story in which Soho goes to a coffee bar and has a relationship with a woman there. I took millions of photos in an actual coffee bar in the Ethiopian Quarter, and Bella3 took pictures of me sitting there as Soho, but, as I moved on to drawing the next set of images, this initial idea was never fleshed

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CODA

out. It remains as a ghost, a hint of a possible narrative, but as more pictures are drawn, there’s always another possible story, another possible fleshing out.

I did know that I wanted to include xenophobia, and road rage—something I’d observed in a parking lot. That raised the question of how to draw a car crash. It’s a strategic decision, and in the end I decided to do it using a map, showing the approach and impact diagrammatically.

So, when I was still going to get to the whole relationship, I first had to have the car crash and the road rage, and that became the whole film.

And with the Ethiopian coffee bar: I also wondered what would the film be? Would I spend my life hanging around the coffee bar? I went there several times thinking I might make a connection or at least be able to have some sense of it, but temperamentally I’m not able to do that.

I’m someone who’s alone in my studio and that’s where the film happens.

In the final film, there are only one or two drawings of the woman. She can be seen on one of the cash pages and in one of the portraits—a very elegant woman with long drop earrings. Even though there was an original

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sense that she could be a locus for the film, in the end I couldn’t see where it was going, what it would become or what images I’d draw.

The whole idea ended up as an element, a note. You’re never inside the coffee bar, you just see the outside of the building. In fact, apart from a few scenes inside—some strip lighting, Soho at the window, a close up of a head on a pillow—it’s an exterior film.

Then I thought, ‘OK, OK, I know we’ve got burials in the film,’ so the hadeda was there quite early on, as soon as there was a sense of grave. And a grave needs spades, so the spades became a spade dance. There are lines in the grave at different angles which, I think are there because there was another drawing meant to happen using the lines. They would be the structure of it, but it was never done. In fact, a lot of the grave-digging in the film was taken out of the final version.

Once I’d got to the cemetery, I thought that maybe there could be another whole world underground with Felix and the woman from the coffee shop and I wondered, ‘Do I start drawing that?’ But then I thought, ‘No, I’ve already drawn lovers underground in Weighing and Wanting.’ I wondered

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CODA

if the hadeda would dig deep into the earth or if the grave should just go down for ever, but then I thought again, ‘No, I’ve done that with the coffee pot going into the earth in Mine, so I can’t just have it going down, down, down.’

The mine dump and the drive-in came in early on.

Catherine Myburgh4 had some footage from years ago, actual documentary footage of the implosion of a drive-in screen. I used this as a visual reference because, in fact, the Top Star was dismantled—it didn’t topple it over.

Once the drive-in screen emerged I knew there could be a film within it (I originally thought there might be a film within the film on the photographer’s sheet). I still wasn’t sure if the film would be the love affair of Felix or Soho with the woman from the Ethiopian coffee bar, but in the end I used home movies. I’m not sure where the home movies came from exactly but it was a key moment, obviously. I think it was because I did not only want to show Soho’s mother in her current state but also as she had been before.

And then there are the things that didn’t make it.

There was a phase when Firewalker5 was going to be in the film, but in the end you just see her brazier in the sky, and,

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MATTHEW KENTRIDGE

if you look hard, a ghost of Firewalker goes past in one of the crowds. She was going to be a whole character but ended up as a shadow, a silhouette.

There was also going to be a whole sky sequence with the Observatory, but in the end all that remained was the carapace drawing of Soho’s mother which appears twice, one positive with black lines on a white background, and once negative—white lines on black.

In all, Kentridge drew 63 different scenes for the film and it was only at the end of the editing process that the final version emerged as one by one the pieces fell into place. The film we eventually see is ultimately a mixture of lively happenstance and artistic alchemy containing, in its layered depths, the ghosts of all the possible storylines which, had the cards fallen differently, might have appeared in its place.

Notes 1 Described in conversation with the author, November 2011.

2 A relatively new enclave which has taken root as more and more Ethiopian migrants have come to Johannesburg in the past 10– 15 years. The Ethiopian Quarter is located in one of the oldest

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parts of the city, at the western edge of the original central business district.

3 Kentridge’s younger daughter Isabella.

4 The editor of Other Faces and a long-time collaborator with Kentridge on many film projects.

5 Kentridge’s 11 m–high public sculpture of a woman balancing a brazier of hot coals on her head.

421

Acknowledgements

Many people have contributed to this book, and I thank them sincerely: First, my profound gratitude to Anne McIlleron, who works in William Kentridge’s studio in Johannesburg, and who collaborated with me at all stages of this project, finding images and clips, guiding thinking on illustration and layout and shepherding the book to completion. Thanks too, to Anne’s colleagues in the studio—Lisa Cloete, Natalie Dembo, Taryn Hackett and Linda Leibowitz—for help of all kinds and particularly for making the studio such a warm and welcoming place.

Thanks to Ross Douglas who first digitized the films and encouraged me to write about them; to Thys Dullaart for photographing the individual frames so we could recreate animated sequences in the pages of the book; and to Zana Marovic for find-

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ing, editing and organizing the clips used as augmented reality inserts to animate the text.

My thanks to Sankalpo Ghose for first raising the idea of embedding film clips into the book and then following through to turn the idea of augmented reality into—well—reality; and, especially, warm thanks of course to the team at Seagull Books for their enthusiasm and immense skill in transforming the raw text and images into the beautiful artefact you hold in your hands.

Finally, I want to thank my brother William Kentridge for many things—more than I can list here. But, above all, I am grateful to him for believing that this book was a worthwhile project. If there is one thing I know—as true now as it has been over the whole arc of my life—it is this: when William thinks that something is worth doing, it gets done.

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