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tornquix favorited a video
(3 months ago)
William Kentridge home recording Venice biennale 2005
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tornquix favorited a video
(3 months ago)
Sobriety, Obesity and Growing Old is the fourth film in the series. It w...
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Sobriety, Obesity and Growing Old is the fourth film in the series. It was made from twenty-five drawings and features Dvorak's String Quartet in F, Opus 96, choral music of South Africa, and the M'appari aria from Martha by Friedrich von Flotow, sung by Enrico Caruso. It picks up the narrative and themes begun in Kentridge's first film, Johannesburg the Second Greatest City after Paris (Tate T07482), and follows the development of the relationships between his cast of invented characters, Soho Eckstein, his wife and her lover, Felix Teitelbaum. These relationships reflect, metaphorically, the changing political situation in South Africa at the time the film was made. Demonstrations and marches in opposition to the apartheid régime together with the governmental relaxation of most of the State of Emergency regulations and restrictions heralded the beginning of a change in the country's power structure (and white attitudes towards black African rights). Soho, a symbol of South African white power, develops the capacity for awareness, longing and love and the potential for guilt and repentance. This is played out through the loss of his wife to Felix (his emotional alter-ego) which climaxes, through the couple making love, in the crumbling of the buildings of Johannesburg as megaphones declare a state of emergency. Soho is left alone with a cat in a vast open landscape and the words 'HER ABSENCE FILLED THE WORLD'. In the final scene of the film Soho has had to recognise the magnitude of his grief and longing, and lies, still wearing the business suit which symbolises his social position, embracing his naked wife in the middle of a field, where they gradually become submerged under rising waters. Crowds of black protestors, who had appeared marching through a 1950s version of Johannesburg earlier in the film, have receded to a respectful distance as Soho has found a connection to his feelings and hence his land.
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tornquix favorited a video
(3 months ago)
Mine is Kentridge's third film, although it is often shown by the artist...
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Mine is Kentridge's third film, although it is often shown by the artist as second in the series, before Monument (Tate T07483). It was made from eighteen drawings and is set to Dvorak's Cello Concerto in B minor, Opus 104. In it, Kentridge develops the analogy between landscape and mind begun in the earlier films. A journey into the mines provides a visual representation of a journey into the conscience of Kentridge's invented character, Soho Eckstein, the white South African property owner who exploits the resources of land and black human labour which are under his domain. Throughout the film the imagery shifts between the geological landscape underground inhabited by innumerable black miners and Soho's world of white luxury above ground. When Soho, breakfasting in bed, pushes down the plunger of his cafetière, its movement is transformed into a rapid descent through the tray, through the bed and into the mine-shaft. Here the miners' world of overwhelming misery is depicted in claustrophobic tunnels where they are trapped digging, drilling and sleeping, embedded in rock. Above ground, Soho sits at his desk in his customary pin-stripe suit and punches adding machines and cash registers, creating a flow of gold bars, exhausted miners, blasted landscapes and blocks of uniform housing. At the end of the film a tiny, live rhinoceros is carried up from underground to appear on Soho's desk. This, like the image of a Nigerian Ife head which appears at the beginning of the film, alludes to exoticising colonialist attitudes towards Africa and its people, which reduce human and animal resources to trinkets and symbols of wealth. It also refers to the ecological damage caused by industry, a theme common to this series of films.
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tornquix favorited a video
(3 months ago)
South African artist William Kentridge has attracted international atten...
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South African artist William Kentridge has attracted international attention for his innovative animated films in which simple charcoal drawings seem to magically come alive to tell deeply personal stories that function as broadly allegorical tales for our times. William Kentridge: Weighing and Wanting is an installation of charcoal, pastel and gouache drawings and a film transferred to laser disk which is based on the drawings.
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tornquix favorited a video
(3 months ago)
History of the Main Complaint is the sixth film in the series and is bas...
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History of the Main Complaint is the sixth film in the series and is based on twenty-one drawings. It was made shortly after the establishment in South Africa of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, headed by Archbishop Desmond Tutu. It was set up to conduct a series of public hearings into abuses of human rights perpetrated during the apartheid era. The hearings, in which individuals told their stories of personal suffering, were held in order to make reparation for abuse and in the hope of creating reconciliation between peoples. The underlying theme of this film is a (self) recognition of white responsibility. This is played out through a 'medical' investigation into the body of Soho Eckstein, the white property-developing magnate and greedy-capitalist protagonist of most of the preceding films, which provides the starting point for a revelation of conscience.
In the beginning of the film Soho lies in a hospital bed in a coma. A Monteverdi madrigal plays on the soundtrack. Clone Sohos appear in pin-stripe suits to examine the recumbent body and penetrate it with stethoscopes. This activates the machinery of Soho's office desk (seen in earlier films) - paper punch, telephone, adding machine, ticker tape, rubber stamp, typewriter - suggesting a journey into the layers of memory which constitute the unconscious. The film cuts repeatedly between the clacking and ringing world inside Soho's body-mind and the view through a car windscreen as he drives along a night road. As his body is tested, the brutally violated bodies of black Africans appear at the side of the road. Red crosses appear at points of impact, on the victim's skull, and then on Soho's. Finally a figure runs across the road and is hit by Soho's car. As the body is flung up against the windscreen, Soho, in his hospital bed, awakens from his coma. He has discovered 'the weight keeping him unconscious' (Kentridge quoted in William Kentridge 1998, p.112) and, through its discovery, is restored to strength and power back at his office desk. However, this restoration is a return to a position which was shown, in an earlier film in the series, Mine 1991 (Tate T07484), to be one of abusive white authority and it is therefore not clear that he has made any moral progress. Kentridge has left this deliberately open-ended through the bowl of blue water (symbolising emotional connection and healing in his films) in Soho's hospital room, which remains untouched throughout the film. In the exploration of memory portrayed in this film Soho has not actually found the truth of his complaint (a complaint which is also a complaint against him). The investigation into the troubled, amnesiac, white South African psyche, explored by Kentridge in his films, has not yet been completed in life or in art. Tate T07481 provides a later development of Kentridge's themes.
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