Nine Fragments for Nine Films

William Kentridge

Thick Time

7 Fragments for Georges Méliès

7 Fragments for Georges Méliès 2003 (installation of seven films, shown with Day for Night and Journey to the Moon) 16 mm and 35 mm film transferred to video, colour, silent Video editor

Catherine Meyburgh

Invisible Mending, 1:30 minutes Balancing Act, 1:20 minutes Tabula Rasa I, 2:50 minutes Tabula Rasa II, 2:10 minutes Moveable Assets, 2:40 minutes Autodidact, 5:10 minutes Feats of Prestidigitation, 1:50 minutes Day for Night, 6:32 minutes 16 mm film transferred to video, colour, silent Video editor

Catherine Meyburgh

Journey to the Moon, 7:10 minutes 16 mm and 35 mm film transferred to video, black and white, sound Video editor Music Piano

Catherine Meyburgh Philip Miller Jill Richards

Right: Still from Journey to the Moon, 2003 Overleaf: Installation view of William Kentridge: Fragments for Georges Méliès, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 2006

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Day for Night Journey to the Moon

Invisible Mending

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7 Fragments for Georges Méliès

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Balancing Act

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Tabula Rasa I

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Tabula Rasa II

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Moveable Assets

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7 Fragments for Georges Méliès

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Autodidact

Feats of Prestidigitation

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7 Fragments for Georges Méliès

Day for Night

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Journey to the Moon

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Overleaf: Installation view of William Kentridge: Fragments for Georges Méliès, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 2006

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Iwona Blazwick

Nine Fragments for Nine Films ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONISM Blots, splashes, smudges and lines – spiralling, undulating, bleeding – are as much a part of William Kentridge’s oeuvre as the figuration for which he is renowned. Like Hans Namuth’s 1951 film of Jackson Pollock dripping paint onto glass, 7 Fragments for Georges Méliès is a record of action painting.

Tabula Rasa I starts with blank paper lying flat. The artist’s hand enters the frame with a stick of charcoal to make one dot, then two, connecting them to create a line. For a moment they are co-ordinates, forms of mapping. Suddenly, the second dot and the line are erased, leaving the first dot alone. It is joined by a blob. Next, an arabesque line snakes out to connect the two.

More lines appear, followed by a sequence of numbers, 1 to 5.

Kentridge’s dynamic kinetic black and white forms recall Mark Rothko’s conceptualisation of abstract shapes: They are unique elements in a unique situation.

They are organisms with volition and a passion for self-assertion.

They move with internal freedom, and without need to conform with or to violate what is probable in the familiar world.

They have no direct association with any particular visible experience, but in them one recognises the principle and passion of organisms.1 Kentridge’s mathematical glyphs represent quantities. Yet they do not progress along the lines of an equation, but are scattered across space, connected by a swarm of undulating lines.

With a brush of the artist’s hand, they are replaced by letters of the alphabet. Suspended in white space, numbers and letters are decoupled from meaning while still signifying as an autonomous system or ‘organism’.

In Tabula Rasa II, the action commences with a black rectangle invading blank paper. The artist pulls a cloth across the surface, each expressive gesture removing some pigment. He reverses the painterly process to reveal the lyrical swirls and splashes from which the monochrome is comprised. As the film plays in reverse, we discover the source of Kentridge’s painterly abstraction – a pot of coffee, into which the black liquid obediently rushes back. It leaves behind a cosmic halo of tiny dark splashes around a white epicentre, like a supernova in reverse. A thousand tiny dots leap into a dish of paint being whisked by the artist, the humble origin of this big bang.

He overlays the sheet of paper with another black monochrome created from charcoal. Here his brush is a feather duster that sweeps across the sooty surface, obliging each particle of carbon dust to be absorbed in its fluff y embrace. Black is returned to white, all becomes tidy and clean – good housekeeping, a tabula rasa.

The fluidity of ink, the smudginess of charcoal, the explosive force of a splatter, the controlling contours of a line: 7 Fragments is in part a joyous portrayal of the physical properties, protean energy and expressive potential of mediums and their power – unleashed by the artist/alchemist – to become symbol, gesture or image. Filling the screen, a splash can take on cosmic proportions – Kentridge links the micro and the macro, demonstrating universal principles of matter. The gestures also foreground the relation of medium with the body, expression with the psyche.

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THE CAS

Fig 1 Still from Journey to the Moon, 2003

Fig 2 Still from Day for Night, 2,,3

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7 Fragments for Georges Méliès

Kentridge is the chief protagonist of 7 Fragments and its companion films, Day for Night and Journey to the Moon, accompanied by a lively cast. Among them is one other human – his wife Anne Stanwix, who makes fleeting appearances in the flesh and as a drawing. She adopts a traditional studio role of the Nude and Muse. In Journey to the Moon she appears in silhouette, seated or following the artist – but never in dialogue with him. She walks naked behind the clothed Kentridge as if echoing the myth of Orpheus leading his lost wife Eurydice out of the underworld; to free her, he must not look at her [FIG. 1].

There are also the ants, who make their debut in Day for Night [FIG. 2]. Having invaded Kentridge’s studio, their tendency to congregate and to form lines saved them from insecticide: the artist decided to capitalise on their animated mark-making and give them starring roles. Following lines of sugar water they swarm and scatter across the picture surface; reversed white out of black, their tiny spiky bodies look like stars at night.

Things in Kentridge’s studio – inks, brushes, pencils and charcoals – have agency. Like the objects and animals in fairy tales, they are imbued with magical properties. An athletic ladder is the protagonist in Balancing Act and a levitating chair in Journey to the Moon. A drawn hat makes several guest appearances, a nod perhaps to that worn by the father of performance art, Joseph Beuys. An animated compass dances menacingly across the screen in Tabula Rasa I. Collaged figures that we recognise from Kentridge’s shadow figure processions, such as a person rowing a boat, also fl it across the picture surface.

Books and sheets of paper take flight, swooping like birds into the artist’s hands.

But it is coffee and its accoutrements that take ‘best supporting role’. Coffee provides the opportunity to caffeinate, procrastinate and meditate. Here it is both prop and performer. In Tabula Rasa I the coffee cup and saucer dash across the surface of Kentridge’s papers, scooping up and dispensing liquid. In Journey to the Moon, the coffee cup acts as both microscope and telescope. We join the artist in peering through the bottom of the cup at pages of text; it reveals a bustling world of drawings skipping across the page.

Three cups together become a telescope that reveals the cosmos.

The saucer becomes the moon rising across the night sky, while the coffee pot, transformed into a space rocket, crashes on its surface.

The coffee pot, cup and saucer have their antecedents in the still lifes of artists such as Braque and Picasso, who pictured the detritus of a café table or of the studio itself to shift the nature morte from its role of vanitas to verité. Yet Kentridge also imbues coffee and its instruments with hallucinogenic, even alchemic, properties that become analogous with the imagination. By animating tools, bugs, physical materials and processes, Kentridge also offers a meditation on the fast time of material culture and technology, and the slow time of nature, evolution and entropy.

Fig 3 Still from Invisible Mending, 2,,3

HE DOUBLE Kentridge once remarked that it was in the making of 7 Fragments that he realised there are two of him. There is William Kentridge the artist, hesitant, fallible yet irrepressible, while the other William Kentridge is a witness. He had reflected this duality in earlier works, where he developed the alter egos Soho Eckstein and Felix Teitlebaum. By contrast, 7 Fragments features the artist and his consciousness as subject. Kentridge the observer films Kentridge the artist as he paces around the studio waiting for inspiration and looks over his shoulder as he attempts to create art [FIG. 3]. Tirelessly editing, rewinding, making improvements, it is Kentridge the judge who forces so many of Kentridge the artist’s drawings to be scribbled over, rubbed out or even ripped up.

Invisible Mending shows Kentridge catching pieces of paper flying up from the floor and reattaching them to form a drawn self-portrait that had been scrawled across and torn into pieces.

Having been magically restored, the drawing then miraculously comes to life, in an eternal cycle of representation and reality.

Could we understand this doubling by thinking about Jacques Lacan’s ‘mirror stage’, the moment when an infant first conceives of itself as an autonomous image through its reflection or representation? At a time when the infant is uncoordinated and vulnerable the image appears unified, an ideal self. ‘This imago is established as an Ideal-I toward which the subject will perpetually strive throughout his or her life.’ 2 Kentridge as artist is a projected subjectivity, ‘the ego in anticipation’ at once a source of failure and aspiration.

As in literature, the double may also represent a Manichean divide between the civil and the savage, the rational and the irrational, consciousness and the id. The double may also leave its twin in the confines of the studio, to undertake a voyage of the imagination.

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LYING

ILM

Conversely, Kentridge’s cast members also have an exhilarating propensity for flight. The word ‘flight’ may translate as escape, or as a dream – as in a ‘flight of fancy’ – or light-mindedness as in ‘flighty’. In Tabula Rasa I and II liquids free themselves from the surface of a sheet of paper and surge through the air to return to their source. Texts and books fly to the artist in Autodidact, offering up their stores of knowledge. In Journey to the Moon, an entire group of drawings defy gravity and levitate up onto the studio wall, while a chair dances on Kentridge’s fingertips.

Kentridge makes an imaginary extra-terrestrial flight in his ‘journey to the moon’. From Vladimir Tatlin’s 1929 Letatlin flying machine, to Gustav Klucis’ 1910s collages of flying acrobats, defying gravity was a key trope for early modernists. A defining military feature of twentieth and twenty-first century mass destruction, flight also defined Cold War propaganda with superpowers competing for space itself with the race for a moon landing. Kentridge’s Journey to the Moon, with its delightfully low-tech space rocket, decolonises it, making the moon once again the locus of dream and fantasy [ IGS. 5 & 6].

Fig 4 Still from Balancing Act, 2003

FALLING Kentridge’s objects and images have an unpredictable relationship with gravity. In Balancing Act, the artist carries a ladder and leans it up against the studio wall, where some drawings of ‘still lifes’ – flower studies, a chair and a hat – are pinned up. They will not be still for long. Kentridge climbs the ladder and ascends out of the image. The drawing of the hat takes the first leap into the void, flying into the air and then wafting to the ground.

The other drawings soon join in. The ladder metamorphoses into a drawing, makes a spectacular somersault and collapses into pieces on the floor. The artist follows suit, tumbling head over heels from the top of the image, like Icarus dropping to the sea [FIG. 4]. The word ‘fall’ can, after all, be extended to the word ‘fallible’.

In Moveable Assets trees rush out from backstage towards the viewer, running from the horizon of a landscape and toppling to the bottom of the image like skittles. There is comedy, even catharsis in the collapse, but also frustration, anxiety and loss. The trees in Kentridge’s landscape can’t stay rooted. In traditional African or nomadic cultures, a good life was understood to be one where humans left no trace. Western civilisation is characterised by territorialism and accumulation. Trees will be felled, replaced on the South African veldt with oil derricks, mine shafts, shanty towns and cities. And in our drive for territory, communities will be displaced. The fall might therefore also be understood in the biblical sense of Adam and Eve’s fall from Eden.

32 7 Fragments for Georges Méliès

7 Fragments, Day for Night and Journey to the Moon are a tour de force of cinematic technique – animation, time-lapse and stop-motion photography, substitution splices, multiple exposures, dissolves, motion reversals and the eponymous ‘day for night’ (night scenes made by underexposing film or processing stock to make the negative positive). A tribute to the French pioneer of these methodologies, Georges Méliès (1861–1938), the sequence includes Kentridge’s remake of his 1902 film Le Voyage dans la lune (Journey to the Moon). A piano score by composer Philip Miller, in the musical style once played live to dramatise silent movies, accompanies it.

All the ‘fragments’ were filmed using a 16 mm film camera and a 35 mm animation camera. Reversals in time and tone were made with a domestic digital video camera, which the artist has observed, ‘functioned as a kind of sketch-book’.4 Cinema in Africa has a distinct political history. In the immediate postcolonial era, many newly independent countries looked to the Soviet Union as a model for society. During the Cold War, the USSR seized the opportunity to push forward its ideological frontiers by funding African students to make film. The Russian avant-garde had grasped the political power of the camera as early as the 1910s, and cinema had become a primary tool of propaganda. Russian filmmakers such as Dziga Vertov, an influence for Kentridge, had also pioneered a revolutionary visual language. His Kino-Pravda focused on everyday life and technological progress. Man with a Movie Camera of 1929 used montage and dynamic geometric angles to celebrate a new machine age and became the paradigm for an aesthetic of progress. Cuba and Yugoslavia were among the communist countries that established film schools on the African continent and radical independent filmmakers such as Jean Rouch ran workshops. African filmmakers also travelled to Russia to study cinematic technique.5 Until the fall of communism in 1991 and the withdrawal of Soviet support from African nations, film was practised as a revolutionary medium. Kentridge acknowledges this history with his animated cameras that metamorphose into megaphones and mounted guns.

In my head while making the film, there was inescapably Jules Verne’s book [From the Earth to the Moon] … , 2001: A Space Odyssey … the Wallace & Gromit film, A Grand Day Out, and of course Méliès … If the seven earlier fragments are about wandering around the studio waiting for something to happen, Journey to the Moon was an attempt to escape. 3 Throughout these films, drawn and painted lines also fly across monochromes. Suggesting unknown territories of potential image-making they take us on an intoxicating journey through creativity itself.

Figs 5 & , Stills from Journey to the Moon, 2003

GESTURE Méliès was also known as an ‘illusionist’ and Kentridge’s seventh film is titled Feats of Prestidigitation. This archaic term means a ‘sleight of hand, manual dexterity in the execution of tricks, a conjuring trick or deception’., The moving image, indeed the very making of a drawing, where a line can become a face or an apple, is spellbinding. And like a conjuror Kentridge draws our gaze with his hands. These silent films, where mime must replace speech, are animated by gesture. In Tabula Rasa I the artist uses his hands to rehearse potential images. In Moveable Assets he gesticulates sternly at the landscape drawing that keeps running away.

In Autodidact he paces with his hands in his pockets. Aimless pacing is analogous with thinking. Kentridge pulls out texts from his pockets that unfurl like a magician’s doves; he catches flying papers and balances piles of open books, which he studies intently – his dexterity becomes an emblem of absorbing knowledge [ IG. 7]. Drawing a line, tearing paper or erasing a mark with one motion of his hand, he dramatises the act of creation and destruction. In Journey to the Moon he caresses a drawing of Anne.

While he sits staring into space, she appears behind him and places her hand on his shoulder in a moving gesture of affection.

The artist Jeff Wall who, like Kentridge, stresses figuration as a radical form, has written about the expressive gesture as emblem: ‘Gesture’ means a pose or action which projects its meaning as a conventionalised sign. This definition is usually applied to the fully realised, dramatic gestures identified with the art of earlier periods, particularly the Baroque, the great age of painted drama … gesture as the bodily, pictorial form of historical consciousness.7 Kentridge is interested in the photography and graphics of revolution both in Russian Constructivism and Maoist China, where the raised arm and pointing hand became a symbol of stru(le, of machine-age man and of the direction of progress towards a utopian future. At the same time, his early training with Jacques Lecoq’s ‘physical theatre’ and his collaboration with the Handspring Puppet Company in Johannesburg all combine in his performance, where gesture evokes emotion while also functioning as expression and symbol.

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7 Fragments for Georges Méliès

U OP(A The possibility of reversing film or tape is so seductive because of its immediately revealing what the world is like if time is reversed, what it would be like if we could remember the future. Film reversed shows a utopian perfection of one’s skills. Throw a pot of paint and when you catch it in reverse, not a single drop is spilt. Tear a sheet of paper in half and it restores itself without the smallest crease. There is an extreme politeness of objects; pull a book out of a shelf and when you replace it, the books at each side at the last instance shift just the right amount to make space. From chaos there is return to order. The page of text returns letter by letter, word by word into the pen, leaving the load of ink pregnant with infinite possibilities.A Fig 7 Still from Autodidact, 2003

THE STUDIO I spent some time looking at the early films of Bruce Nauman, films of him walking backwards and forwards in his studio, of him bouncing a ball, walking in slow motion, walking with contraposto ... Perhaps it was the athletic body in jeans and T-shirt that reminded me of the films of Jackson Pollock painting in his studio. It was as if Pollock’s canvas had been taken away and Nauman’s left, with the studio as canvas and himself as brush and mark in one … When I came to work on the fragments for Méliès, the given, the parameter, was the artist in the studio.8 The studio is stage, laboratory, sanctuary, prison, archive, factory and film set. 7 Fragments shows it in all these guises.

Kentridge’s notion of Nauman as the brush and mark against the blank walls of the studio posits it as the tabula rasa. Yet in these films it is a palimpsest. The camera angle is fixed either in front of a wall bearing the inked edges of previous works, or above a cluttered surface. The studio is a capsule of time and space. Time is marked by the flotsam and jetsam of previous works and processes, and is reversed and travelled through film.

Space is delineated by the dimensions of wall, surface and lens – space as vertical and horizontal plane, as limit and portal.

The studio is biography and memory. However, it is also a utopian space of new beginnings [ IG. 8].

Included in the 51st Venice Biennale in 2005, 7 Fragments, Day for Night and Journey to the Moon were projected life-size, each film screened simultaneously side-by-side and on a loop.

The cycle from disorder to perfection produced by reversing film became continuous, and so order collapsed back into anarchy.

The possibility of both is central to Kentridge’s work. It pays tribute to the utopian futures promised by twentieth century fantasies of space travel and life on the moon, of Communist revolutions, of the search for Truth and Reconciliation, of the blank sheet of paper and the promise of a line. These miraculous films also show the essential paradox of utopia, of humanity itself, prey as it is to fallibility, absurdity and the contingencies of external forces. Yet through expression there is resistance and hope. The freedom to mark and erase intimates the freedom required to transform social and cultural structures.

1 Mark Rothko, ‘The Romantics were Prompted …’, Possibilities, I, New York, 1947, p. 84. Cited in Charles Harrison and Paul Wood (eds.), Art in Theory 1900 – 1990: An Anthology of Changing Ideas (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1993) p. 5:3.

2 Defi nition, Lacan and the Mirror Stage, www.english.hawaii.edu/criticalink/lacan (accessed March, 2,1:).

3 First published in William Kentridge, BAC Baltic Art Center, Visby, Sweden, 2,,3 n.p. Reproduced in William Kentridge, exh. cat. (Turin: Skira, 2,,4) p. 1A3.

4 Ibid, p. 1A,.

5 Things Fall Apart: Red Africa, an exhibition and season of fi lms and talks at Calvert 22 Foundation, London, 4 Feb – 3 April 2,1: featured historical archives, photographs and fi lms documenting this cultural phenomenon. A book is in progress at the time of writing. : The Oxford English Dictionary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1AA1) 7 Jeff Wall, ‘A Diff erent Climate’, exh. cat. (Düsseldorf: Stadtisches Kunsthalle, 1A84) in Jeff Wall (London: Phaidon Press, 1AA:) p. 7:.

8 William Kentridge, 2,,4, p. 1A2.

Fig 8 Still from Balancing Act, 2,,3

A Ibid

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