A Laconic Film, Far From Silent

SAN DIEGO —  “The story of the film is very simple,” William Kentridge says of his newest work, “WEIGHING and . . . WANTING,” now on view in an installation at the downtown branch of the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego.

“It’s a man on his own who looks at a rock. In the rock he sees a relationship with a woman under stress, shattering, then reconstituting itself.”

Kentridge, 42, in town from his native Johannesburg to install the show, maps out the narrative framework of his six-minute, animated film with broad directorial gestures suggestive of his concurrent work in theater and, lately, opera. His explanation gradually shifts from outward description to the exploration of inner impulses, historical forces and dream images, and finally winds down to a pensive silence, but the dialogue seems to continue internally, behind the artist’s deep-set, vaguely melancholy blue eyes.

In the exhibition, Kentridge’s first solo museum show, “WEIGHING . . . and WANTING” is accompanied by a series of predominantly black-and-white charcoal drawings that comprise the visual fabric of the film. Lushly drawn and steeped in the emotional weight of private associations, the images of the male character’s changing psychic landscape transmute as Kentridge alters, adds and erases elements in the course of filming. In one sequence evoking the collapse of the relationship, the man appears first with his head in the security of the woman’s lap. Her figure dissolves and is replaced by a clunky, ringing telephone, which then metamorphoses into a smug black cat, a surrogate source of affection--all, it seems, that the man has left.

“The films are always made without a script or storyboard,” Kentridge points out. “They start from certain key impulses or images and they expand outwards.

“Unlike cel animation, where you have thousands of different drawings, here there are only about 20 drawings. Each drawing goes through many transformations, additions, erasures. The process is quite loose and there are often drawings that arise that are unpredictable. You could look at the drawings as indicative of the process and the route to making the film. You can also see the finished film as the complicated way of arriving at that particular suite of drawings. I hope it works both ways.”

The film is a powerful rush of indelible images, both tender and violent, a viscerally wrenching combination of imagery and sound. One of a series of short, almost wordless films that Kentridge has been making since 1989, and setting to the music of Dvorak, Duke Ellington, Monteverdi and others, “WEIGHING” is dense, sensuous and provocative, a visual poem on the themes of love, loss, power, vulnerability and dislocation.

One of the origins of the new film, he says, was a dream he’d had of being comforted by writing, by an image on the wall. The film’s title comes from an episode in the Book of Daniel, in which a disembodied hand writing a cryptic message on the wall appears to the Babylonian king Belshazzar. Daniel, summoned for his wisdom in interpreting dreams and visions, tells the king what the message means: He has been weighed in the balances and found wanting, for he has not humbled his heart before God; his kingdom has come to an end.

Kentridge, who calls this the most personal of his films, embodies several of its key persona. He is, at once, the dreamer who gives rise to the image, the one who writes on the wall, as well as the decoder who interprets the sign. Though Kentridge’s films never approach the subject of apartheid directly, the title’s reference to Belshazzar’s moral bankruptcy and abuse of power resonates with the downfall of South Africa’s oppressive system of rule.

“The series of films as a whole works a bit like a diary, where things of vastly different importance come together,” Kentridge remarks. “If one was keeping a diary, you might say, ‘protesters marching down the street outside my window today,’ or other things that struck you very forcibly in the day; but equally forcibly would be, ‘I had a fight with my brother which I must resolve--feeling depressed about it, anxious.’

“There’s a polemic within the process, an implicit one, saying that these subjective interventions are one of the ways that we have to understand the broader social questions.”

Five earlier films by Kentridge in the Museum of Contemporary Art’s collection can be seen in a separate gallery on video. In all of them, the landscapes and the crowds are specific to Johannesburg, the “spectacularly ugly, nasty city” Kentridge, his wife and three children call home, but the symbolism verges on the universal and the narratives remain open-ended.

In “Monument” (1990), based on Samuel Beckett’s 1982 play, “Catastrophe,” a newly unveiled statue turns out to be a living, shackled man, silenced and restrained by the powers that be. “Mine” (1991) contrasts the physical drudgery and slave-like conditions of mine workers against the material comfort and emotional detachment of their boss.

Throughout the films, Kentridge engages the same two primary characters. Soho Eckstein, a wealthy industrialist, always wears a pinstripe suit and smokes a cigar. Though he is reminiscent of George Grosz’s renderings of grotesquely lascivious German bourgeoisie between the wars, Soho also is derived from a family photograph of Kentridge’s paternal grandfather, a lawyer, sitting on the beach in a three-piece suit. When the familial origin revealed itself, he recalls, “Soho suddenly seemed much closer to home.”

Felix, by contrast, always appears unclothed, and bears a strong outward resemblance to the artist.

“I needed a face and there was a face, in the mirror. But in the end, because he looked like me, I thought I should take some responsibility for what he did or who he is. He’s much more passive, much more the observer, and obviously has elements of me in him, but once I realized that Soho was drawn very much from family folklore, they [the two characters] started getting closer and closer together. They are antagonistic. But what I thought were two completely different people, I’m sure now are different elements of not necessarily myself, but different impulses, energies, ways of dealing with the world.”

As impassioned and informed as any images in the long tradition of politically engaged art, Kentridge’s favor the rhythms of the individual over those of ideas. He credits Goya and the provocative German Modernist Max Beckmann as inspirations, but the diaristic woodcuts of the 20th century Belgian artist Frans Masereel and the more contemporary dark-edged humanism of Sue Coe echo in his work as well.

“One of the things that interests me,” he notes, “is trying to work within the paradigm of a political art, but without the enforced utopianism or happy endings that one normally associates with simplified agitprop or other kinds of political art. Can one do an art which is still political but as ambiguous and as contradictory as the world is and as one expects in artworks that don’t describe themselves as political art?”

The political situation in South Africa itself has turned murky and ambiguous since apartheid’s official collapse. Kentridge, who earned his B.A. in Politics and African Studies, believes the country will be “as complicated and in many ways more interesting, more complex” than it was before, though in terms of international attention, “the story, in a sense, is over.”

The pace of Kentridge’s own story has picked up dramatically, however, since the cultural boycott of South Africa was lifted. Museum director Hugh Davies had seen Kentridge’s work at Santa Monica’s Ruth Bloom Gallery in 1993 and had immediately contacted the artist about scheduling a show. Last year, Kentridge participated in Documenta X in Kassel, the second Johannesburg Biennale and toured Europe with a theatrical production interweaving Alfred Jarry’s absurdist, turn-of-the-century Ubu plays with documentary evidence from South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, established to examine the crimes of the apartheid era. This year, exhibitions of his films and drawings are in the works for London and New York. In May, he travels to Brussels to launch a tour of the opera, “The Return of Ulysses,” which he is staging using animated projection, a puppet company from Johannesburg and singers from throughout Europe.

Though he is active in several media at once, ultimately, Kentridge thinks of all his works as drawings--static, two-dimensional drawings on paper, two-dimensional drawings that move through time (the animated films), and drawings in three dimensions on the stage that also move through time, acquiring a fourth dimension.

“[Drawing] is such an irrational, odd activity to do, year in and year out,” he muses. “It has to do with having a profound need to leave some kind of trail or trace behind that is concrete.”

We all do leave traces, Kentridge concedes, “but they have to be found. They get obliterated and it’s an act of memory or action to try to hang on to them. So making a film in which they are explicitly there is, for one thing, a polemic for making that effort at remembering.”

“WILLIAM KENTRIDGE: WEIGHING . . . AND WANTING,” Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego/Downtown, 1001 Kettner (at Broadway), San Diego. Dates: Tuesdays to Saturdays, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.; Sundays, noon to 5 p.m. Ends April 12. Phone: (619) 454-3541.