-Take a half a step this way.
That's it.
Okay, are we kind of–
Oh, I know what I'd better do is just check my sound on this.
It's– no, it's kind of nice. The black is good.
-Better? -Yeah. Yeah.
-There was one singer I knew Who used to– always first, she'd
start the day by checking if her voice was there, and she'd go...
[hums an arpeggio] -Okay.
-The high--those kind of crazy sounds.
-Okay.
-The piece that's being made here is designed to be shown on
the fire screen at La Fenice Opera House in Venice.
And the principle is that they get– have a projection on the
fire screen while the audience comes in and the orchestra is
tuning up.
[singing arpeggios]
[singing over cell phone]
Hello.
Hello, this is the–
this is the pianist calling, all the way from William's house.
[chuckles] So, Kim,
What I'll do is, I'll play you some chords,
and then I'm gonna kind of play along with you a little bit,
Okay?
-Okay.
-Hold on. I'm going to speak to you now.
Hold on. Okay, let's put that there.
Just talk a bit. Sing– sing a bit.
[singing in foreign language]
-Good. Hang on.
I'm just trying to line this up. That's all right.
Okay, all right, here we go. All right.
[plays arpeggios on piano]
Can you hear the– -Yes.
-Okay. When you're ready.
-Okay.
[singing opera music]
-Kimmy? Kimmy? Stop.
-Okay.
-Okay, let's just do that phrase...
[plays tune on piano]
-Let me just say something to you and Philip.
-Okay.
-Okay, to both of you. Phil?
Sorry, William here. One of the things that would be
good is to not so much repeat a whole phrase but to jump–
to break in the middle of a phrase and repeat.
So like where you've got, "Babbo, pieta,"
But to... Babbo pie–
Try this– when you complete it
at the "Ta," it feels too elegant as a completed gesture.
[singing in foreign language]
Yes. Okay.
-Make a stripe with the bias cut?
Or you prefer what?
- I don't know.
[both speaking quietly]
I work with a wonderful opera
singer who lives in Cape Town. so I called her, and I said,
"Kimmy, would you sing this arietta on the phone, and I'll
sort of sit at the piano and give you the key.
It has a sort of uncanny sound of both old and modern and
contemporary.
-Initially, he'd– I think he'd
done the recording on the cell phone as a guide track.
And then when we heard the recording on the cell phone, we
said let's keep it and work with that strange, caruso-esque,
old quality of the voice, which is why today there are–
we're working with images of Kimmy on the cell phone.
-It was just one of those
moments which happened when I work with William, where we
both went off and played, and the playing worked.
That's one of the things about working with William that
I enjoy so much is the ability to play and experiment.
[singing high notes] [voice breaks slightly]
[clears throat]
[crackly recording of Kimmy singing]
I suppose the first
promptings to work as an artist are still there.
The questions haven't changed.
How does one find a way of not necessarily illustrating
the society that one lives in but allowing what happens there
to be part of the work, part of the vocabulary,
part of the raw material that is dealt with.
South Africa is very much part of the work.
[Kimmy's singing continues] [singing fades out]
[somber instrumental music]
The important thing about the first animated films I made is,
they were done as a response to doing something which I thought
I understood, which was making charcoal drawings.
So they were done on the basis of trying to get away from
a program of doing drawings, having exhibitions, in which
I could see my life heading out ahead of me, 13 more solo
exhibitions of charcoal drawings.
So I decided I had to do something that couldn't possibly
fit into that context, that wasn't going to be in a gallery,
that was done for my own interest and pleasure,
and Soho and Felix came out of that.
There was no expectation they
would be part of the real work I was doing, that they would
have to be understood or justify themselves in a broader world
at all or that they had to even have a logic to them.
It doesn't matter if there isn't
a story because it's not trying to sell it to a producer;
it's not starting with distribution.
It's starting with its own crazy logic, so it doesn't matter
who these two characters are or what their names are.
They don't have to represent
anyone but themselves in the film.
It took me a long time to kind of understand that, and
that was the substantive work I was doing.
And so that experience gave me
a lot of confidence in the validity of working without
a program, without the essay being written in advance.
I made a decision I would never
ever write a script; I would never write a storyboard;
I would never ever write a proposal.
[water burbling]
The history of Jews in South Africa is quite complex in the
sense that there were, as there are in all parts of the world,
an absolute overrepresentative number of Jewish people who were
iInvolved in liberation struggles, in fights against
apartheid, who had very honorable, ethical,
and moral lives.
But there were also a large
number of Jewish people who did very well under the nationalist
government, who made a lot of money through it.
[faint, repetitive tapping]
The depiction of Soho and Felix, who are both Jewish,
so in the– Soho's a Jewish businessman.
It has to do with that double edge.
It would have been very easy to have done– say, "Okay, I'm gonna
draw a terrible Afrikaner and make him entirely separate and
distant from myself."
Whereas, the Soho is a kind of
understanding that that's part of who I am.
The pinstripe– someone who always wears a pinstripe suit
is from a photograph of my grandfather.
The two names came out
of a dream, and it came out of the period when I said, "I'm
making this film for myself.
I don't have to question
who these names are or what they mean."
[cat meows]
I then understood later on that they're both a kind of
self-portrait, a self-portrait in the third person,
and a place self-portrait.
So the films have had to
Either defend themselves or ignore, but they've certainly
been accused of anti-semitism.
In many ways, the work seems
unbearably semitic to me, in the sense it deals endlessly
with memory, with loss, all the kind of cliches that you think,
"Oh, this is what a Jewish artist is going to be talking about,"
and it's kind of distressing for me that they get
stuck in that terrain, but that is where they are.
The films opened an enormous doors because they gave me
a sense that it was possible to work without a program
in advance and that it was possible to make a film without
first having written a script...
[woman singing] That if you work
conscientiously and hard at it and there is something inside
you that is of interest, that is what will come out.
You yourself will be the film. The film will always be you.
I think a lot of the work that I've done since then,
even if it's not using that technique, has certainly
used that strategy, the understanding that images
and movement as well as static images are a key thing
for me to be working on.
The provisionality of drawings,
the fact that they're going to be succeeded by the next stage
of the drawing, was very good for someone who's bad at knowing
when to commit something to being finished, to say,
"When is this drawing finished?"
Here, the drawing would go on
till the sequence was finished in the film, and that would be
the end point of the drawing...
[faint rumbling]
Understanding of the world as process rather than as fact.
And temperamentally, all of those things made sense to me,
And intellectually they made sense to me.
And somehow this technique and
this medium emphasized or allowed that to come forward.
[cat meows]
In the anamorphic film
What Will Come Has Already which is about the
Italian-Ethiopian war of the 1930s,
works on the principle that what is distorted in the projection
gets corrected in the viewers' seeing of it in a mirror.
So the distortion is the
correction, and the original is the distorted.
One of the things of doing the film, or doing the drawings,
was learning the grammar of the transformations that happen when
you go from a flat surface to the curved mirror.
So that, for example, to draw
a straight line is relatively complicated because every
straight line is in fact a curve, whereas every straight
line that you draw becomes a parabola.
So loops, telephone wires are very easy.
Simply draw a series of straight
lines on the drawing, and the lines will loop themselves
around the surface of the cylinder.
Whereas if you want a straight line, you've got to calculate
a not obvious curve on the sheet of paper.
[festive folk music]
I'm interested in machines that tell you what it is to look,
that make you aware of the process of seeing and make you
aware of what do you do when you construct the world by looking
at it, but more, as looking and seeing being a metaphor, or
a broad-based metaphor, for how we go through the world,
how we understand the world, for thinking or understanding,
When you look through a stereoscopic viewer,
you're aware that you have two completely flat images and that
all that is happening is that your brain– not the images,
but your brain– is constructing an illusion of three-dimensional depth,
which is very clear when you look at the stereoscopic
viewer because you know you're seeing two flat images.
What's much less obvious is that
that's we're doing all the time in the world.
Our retinas are each receiving
flat images, and our brain combines the two images from our
retinas into this illusion of coherent depth, and because we
do it so well, we believe that's what we see.
We believe we are simply seeing depth rather than
we are constructing depth out of two flat images in our eyes.
So that, again, is both interesting about the phenomenon
and the wow factor of stereoscopes always, but it's
more about the agency we have, whether we like it or not,
to make sense of the world.
When the metropolitan opera said
they wanted me to do an opera, we spent a long time trying to
find one that seemed appropriate.
They suggested Shostakovich.
I said yes to Shostakovich, but first prize for me would be The Nose.
I've always wanted to do
a Russian project, which is to say, a project in which all
those different things could be looked at, which is the
political history, the formal elements of modernism and
cnstructivism, and the poetry and the writing.
They all come into the The Nose;
Not all of them into the opera,
of course, but chunks of them into what we had at Sydney,
I Am Not Me, The Horse is Not Mine
and various other iterations of the material.
There'll be houselights on and
all the projections off when people come in.
Then he'll switch the houselights off, and I think
the two side lights onstage will be on.
Some of those numbers are references rather than things
that are actually happening in them.
Like, from the dive, it runs to the end of the whole tape.
-Yes, right.
-Okay.
-Can I have your autograph for my program?
-Sure.
The Sydney piece is a series of eight projections in one room at the same time.
I Am Not Me, The Horse is Not Mine, With music by Philip Miller.
And you want to understand that these are simply torn pieces of
black paper arranged in a certain way, and is it about
a generosity of viewing to see these torn pieces of paper
make a coherent whole, or is it an inability of
ourselves to stop these fragments coming together?
This is a section of
I Am Not Me, The Horse is Not Mine.
And the title comes from
a Russian peasant saying– denying guilt.
If you were accused of something, you'd simply say,
"I am not me. The horse was not mine."
or that "I didn't steal the horse."
Who wrote these notes?
I mean, this is– none of this makes sense.
What is our page?
They're satellite pieces, but they're not only satellite pieces.
It's material that's been excavated while working on the
opera that then has its own place.
So it's either like a kind of
a footnote to the opera or an essay about the opera.
I'm not meant to be doing this stuff.
What am I doing on top of this ladder the whole time?
None of these is any good.
Here.
Brackets.
Prolonged laughter.
Uproar in the room.
[chaotic instrumental music]
But in some ways, you can turn it on its head and say the whole
opera production is simply a provocation to arrive at this
piece because in fact the opera had seven performances.
After that, that's it.
Whereas this already has had
a much longer life than the opera will ever have.
Let's try it.
-Compilations.
-No. That's all right.
Just wanted to use this for the soundtrack.
[faint chaotic music playing]
The first passage is just the horse by itself.
And then the horse is going to come in and stand like a circus horse.
And then he's going to rear up, at which point I disappear,
and the front stepladder disappears, and it's just my
legs with an animated horse on top.
The back horse rears, and then I leap up.
-This is coming on now.
-Yeah, but they're on
together, obviously, at the same time.
-They come– they follow each other on?
-See, that's what I forgot about: that damn ladder.
Oh, no, it's actually possible to make that right.
When that guy at the back does his lean up, then the front guy
disappears, and we just have the ladder by itself.
[chaotic circus music]
So here, I advance the image one, two frames and then shift
the horse– the paper horse– along.
And when I shoot it with
a camera to reshoot what's being projected with the
addition of the extra elements, I'm also shooting two frames.
We're allowing a similarity of shape and tone to make the
viewer not understand that we suddenly changed medium.
Hi. Hi, boy.
-It's lunchtime. -Okay. Thank you.
We will just get this guy up, and then we'll stop.
I think one does think with one's hands, and I think that's
why a keyboard is not a good place for me to think.
So people think very well on a keyboard.
I need kind of the fidgeting of charcoal, scissors, or tearing
of something in my hands, as if there's a different brain
that is controlling how that works.
There's an uncertainty of what you're doing, an imprecision,
so that what you do when you look at it is not to know
something in advance which you're carrying out
but rather rely on recognizing something as it appears.
What I can do, but only as well as anybody else in the world
can do, is recognize things as they appear.
So it's not that I'm better at recognizing eight pieces of
paper as a horse than anyone else.
What I do do is allow myself the
luxury of saying, "This is going to be the way I'm going to spend
months and years of my life is arranging stupid pieces of
paper and then saying, 'Ah! A horse,' every day,
as if it's something fresh."
Okay, here we take a pause for lunch.
Come on, Tamino.
[whistles]
Here, come on.
The seriousness of play is important in the work I do,
and it's important as a strategy for allowing images and ideas to emerge.
It's about saying in the looseness of trying different things.
And it is– you know, it's
terrible that one associates that looseness or open-endedness
with childhood, that after that, that possibility of exploring
something not knowing quite where it will lead to,
understanding one can do things lightly and quickly,
isn't exactly frowned upon, but it's not the norm.
All the interesting ideas I've ever had, or interesting work
I've done, has always been against ideas I've had.
It's kind of been in between the
things I thought I was doing that the real work has happened.