Actor, director, set designer, puppeteer, printmaker, draftsman, and filmmaker, South African artist William Kentridge seems a consummate moralist. Trained as a political scientist and working as an artist, he reports feeling skeptical about political art. Kentridge's purposefully disjointed, highly personal narratives reverberate with references to the physical devastations and person indignities associated with apartheid and the moral dilemmas that continue in its wake. His acute awareness of the South African predicament is rooted in his family history and its tradition of social engagement. More than a century ago, his ancestors emigrated from Lithuania to South Africa, and he is the son of two and grandson of three prominent lawyers. His father, Sydney Kentridge, represented the families of the Sharpeville victims, investigated Stephen Biko's death, and was involved in the Mandela trials.
The four animated films, Johannesburg-2nd Greatest City after Paris; Monument; Mine; and Sobriety, Obesity, and Growing Old, are the first in Kentridge's Drawings for Projection series. Each revolves around two central characters, Soho Eckstein and Felix Teitelbaum, who at first appear to be alter egos as they play out contradictory moral positions of white South Africans. In all four short animated films, Eckstein, the voracious, ruthless, self-indulgent industrialist, is shown as a stocky tyrant in his tight-fitting, pinstripe suit worn as a uniform. This character contrasts with Teitelbaum, the artist dreamer, who is disarmingly characterized as tentative, circumspect and vulnerable. In fact, physically Teitelbaum is a self-portrait of Kentridge, and Eckstein is a portrait of the artist's grandfather. Together, these two Jewish antagonists play out the uncomfortable irony of a white Jewish minority in its privileged position in a racist society.
In the first three of these films, we see Eckstein amassing power and wealth at the expense of black South Africans who are essentially reduced to slave labor. Eckstein indulges his appetites, disregards his wife, abuses his workers, and devastates the South African landscape. While the thoughtful Felix wins the heart of Mrs. Eckstein, in Sobriety, Obesity, and Growing Old, she returns to her husband-the first instance in the continuing series where Eckstein begins to show pangs of remorse. "Magical" best describes the way Kentridge transforms the animate into the inanimate and vice versa - the way he morphs objects, people and landscapes. "Terrifying" best expresses what they represent. The bleeding, wounded, and dead melt into the South African landscape; a cat turns into an atavistic stamping machine, its tail into the handle; a plunger coffee pot transforms into a pneumatic tube that descends hundreds of feet down a mine shaft; a microphone metamorphoses into a sprinkler. In subsequent films in the series, the two antagonists begin to take on each other's characteristics and morph into each other. Evidently, the collapsing together of the virtuous and the malevolent results from Kentridge's feeling that there are neither heroes nor innocents in the physical and social devastation that embodied apartheid South Africa but only victims.
Kentridge's animation technique is unique but simple; he calls his process "Stone Age." Capitalizing on his masterful draftsmanship, he creates large-scale charcoal drawings that he films in their process of transformation. Kentridge makes images and then erases them on the same sheet of paper every day creating scores of changes to propel the visual narrative. His erasures leave traces of past images that contribute to the moody depictions and infuse them with a melancholic sense of lased time. This method-drawing, filming, erasing, and drawing anew-is a way of thinking, a means of writing, a method of questioning. Kentridge's drawings and films become metaphors-communal, national, and personal-that remain purposefully stranded at the intersection where memory meets history.