Made between 1989 and 2003, William Kentridge’s nine Soho Eckstein films are a haphazard chronicle of the life of a (probably) Jewish businessman in South Africa. We follow Eckstein from his early days as a property developer, engaged in a battle with his rival Felix Teitlebaum (who is also a rival for the affections of Mrs Eckstein), to his eventual retirement on the beach at Muizenberg.
This is an entirely inadequate summary of Kentridge’s marvellous work, of course. From the first film, Johannesburg, 2nd Greatest City After Paris, to the last, Tide Table, Kentridge presents us with an incredibly rich, detailed mythology, part personal and part pastiche. The sweep is extraordinary and the subject matter is at once South African, European and what could pass for universal.
There are two reasons for a re-evaluation of Kentridge’s films. The first is that they have been restored to film format and presented as a single, chronological body of work. Screened at the Spier Amphitheatre in Cape Town, with Philip Miller’s compositions played by the Sontonga Quartet with pianist Jill Richards, the experience is powerful and exhausting. The second reason: the unified product has been set to launch the Constitutional Court development to the public.
The fact that one can now see these films out of the very specific framing of a gallery adds a new dimension to the experience. A big screen changes the way you read the characters. As art works they are representations of static moments, more easily read as satire or irony. When the films become a chronologically ordered narrative, you are far more drawn to the characters. This has the effect of highlighting that the films are deeply, inescapably about race.
The stereotypical Jew exploits downtrodden blacks — what could be more racist than that? It’s a crude reading — of the same ilk that sees JM Coetzee’s novel Disgrace as being a condemnation of post-1994 South Africa. But as Coetzee has pointed out in his ineluctable essay in the Phaidon study of the artist, Kentridge’s project “progresses beyond the stereotypes in which it had its origin, to a deeper human sympathy and a high level of inventiveness”.
As such, the fact that a still from Kentridge’s animation is to be part of the Constitutional Court art works collection should come as no surprise. Our Constitution is deeply, fundamentally racial, if by racial we mean overwhelmingly aware of race. Like Kentridge’s work, the Constitution has the courage to face the language of race, and it could be argued that this is one of the great positives of the South African character, both political and personal.
As Jacques Derrida has written of Europe: “What is proper to a culture is to not be identical to itself.” Having Kentridge’s lurching, tragic white property magnate next to a tapestry by Willie Bester showing two township women on a bench is an effective way to act out this axiom. And in the same way that Kentridge’s work must always look to Europe, so does the Constitutional Court remain inescapably entwined with European ideas of democracy, public opinion and representation.
Kentridge’s films are not comfortable art. In his opening speech at the premiere at Spier, he said: “There is a structure of uncertainty, doubt and incoherence built into the films.” As with his other work, most obviously the plays Ubu and the Truth Commission and The Confessions of Zeno, the viewer is given no answers, but is provided with a few more tools with which to engage in the daily battle of understanding what it means to be a South African. As Kentridge points out: “The films demand the generosity of the viewers to make sense.”
Sitting under a large white moon in the tranquil surrounds of the Spier farm, Kentridge’s films seem bizarrely wrenched out of context. The leering mine dumps, oppressed masses, disgusting capitalist appetites and modernist architecture flickering across the screen seems at once far removed and all too near. I imagine a similar experience will occur at the Constitutional Court where Kentridge’s work of anxiety and uncertainty will be introduced into a place steeped in authority. This is what Kentridge’s art is about. To quote the artist in Phaidon’s William Kentridge: “To say that one needs art, or politics, that incorporates ambiguity or contradiction is not to say that one then stops recognising and condemning things as evil.”
William Kentridge’s 9 Drawings for Projection is showing at the Old Fort, Constitutional Hill, Kotze Street, Braamfontein, from March 22 to 24. Tickets cost R100 at Computicket