William Kentridge in "Compassion" - Season 5 - "Art in the Twenty-First Century" | Art21

-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–

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.