REVIEW: William Kentridge’s “Ubu Tells the Truth.”

William Kentridge, the South African visual artist, is perhaps best known for his animated films—and for good reason. At his current exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, entire rooms are crowded with his films, each wall showing one—or several—at one time.
But one room displayed only one film: “Ubu Tells The Truth.” Comprised entirely of successive charcoal drawings, the film clocks in at a brilliant eight minutes. One of Kentridge’s most political works, the film was inspired the testimony giving by the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Kentridge’s art, for the most part, reference the political and social distress of apartheid South Africa, but this film makes it almost unbearably clear.
For the first several minutes of the animation, silhouetted characters progress across the screen, often carrying unwieldy objects and tripping as they move from the left to the right. Occasionally, there are large, grey shadows glowering—if faceless characters can glower—in the background, and at one point, the shadows get an entire scene to themselves, flitting and bouncing from one corner of the screen to another. The presence of the silhouetted characters is despondent, despite the bright, church-meets-folk/tribal music in the background; the presence of the shadows is ominous and uncomfortable. Are they ghosts? The physical interpretation of dreams or ideas? When I watched the film, the first thing to which I compared them was memories, for the way they hovered over the characters reminded me of the way only bad memories can uncomfortably linger.
But the silhouettes do not walk forever, for a rendering of an obese man—this one in grey with some detail, unlike the expression-less walkers—claims the screen, swinging an invisible lasso and shuddering when, off-screen, it assumedly catches something. After him the silhouetted characters continue their march, only this time, rather than people carrying objects, the characters are accompanied by dancing animals and objects moving themselves across the screen. The music changes from melancholy and then to a cheerful tune, to which the creatures seem to be dancing. In the middle of this upbeat progression, however, a brief clip of a blinking, rotating eye takes the screen.
From this point on, the film gets quickly more violent, until the silhouetted characters are being hanged, blown up, and beheaded by a cat as well as the obese, grayscale man. The scenes quicken until they’re moving so quickly the blur into one another.
When the animation finished, I was left mildly shaken and incredibly impressed. I know little of the apartheid, having not read much on the subject and never having been educated on it in school, but knowing the similar plight of African-Americans and other “non-white” residents of the United States, I was able to feel as if I knew, could almost feel, the perspective of each of the characters of Kentridge’s film.
I feel mildly shaken and compelled to read on the apartheid as well as become more familiar with Kentridge’s work. The film brought up questions for me: why do we not study such an explosive, important part of human history in school? Why do people do what they do to each other, and could it be any other way—could the situation have been reversed? What would have had to occur for that to happen? How have racial relations in South Africa improved since the making of the film and the apartheid? For that matter, how are racial relations here, in the United States, in California, in the Bay Area?
A discussion with a friend (prior to my viewing of the film) convinced me of (his own) theory of Upper/Middle Class White Man: Everyone Else:



The line is forever approaching the x-axis, but will never actually touch it. And while the subject of our conversation was originally women in relation to men in society, the graph can apply to nearly every "oppressed" people, from my point of reference, in the west--that is, anyone who isn't upper or middle class, white, and Christian (Catholicism disputable in the US), and male. This applies to: women, children, blacks, Latinos, Jews, Muslims, South Indians, East Indians... the list goes on.
What I respect about William Kentridge is that he's angrily commenting on this situation yet simultaneously displaying a truly beautiful work of art. I will be going back to the SFMOMA to watch the film again.

still from "Ubu Tells the Truth":




cited: ART REVIEW; Apartheid and Its Bitter Aftertaste
By GRACE GLUECK
Published: Friday, June 8, 2001
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9A01E1DD1F3FF93BA35755C0A9679C8B63&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=1

The Photograph as Art

“Only with effort can the camera be forced to lie: basically it is an honest medium: so the photographer is much more likely to approach nature in a spirit of inquiry, of communion, instead of with the saucy swagger of self-dubbed ‘artists’. And contemporary vision, the new life, is based on honest approach to all problems, be they morals or art. False fronts to buildings, false standards in morals, subterfuges and mummery of all kinds, must be, will be scrapped.”
-Edward Weston


"Pascal Dangin is the premier retoucher of fashion photographs. Art directors and admen call him when they want someone who looks less than great to look great, someone who looks great to look amazing, or someone who looks amazing already—whether by dint of DNA or M·A·C—to look, as is the mode, superhuman. (Christy Turlington, for the record, needs the least help.) In the March issue of Vogue Dangin tweaked a hundred and forty-four images: a hundred and seven advertisements (Estée Lauder, Gucci, Dior, etc.), thirty-six fashion pictures, and the cover, featuring Drew Barrymore."
"Picture Perfect." -Lauren Collins (http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/05/12/080512fa_fact_collins?currentPage=all)


When photography was introduced, first as a form of documentation and later as an art form, it was considered pure--what is in the photo is what actually existed. Yet what is often forgotten is that photography IS an art--and is, therefore, subject to the whims of the person behind the camera. Lighting, perspective, exposure all make a drastic effect on what appears in the photograph, and is often NOT what one would see had he been standing in the same place as the photographer when he took the shot.

Yet now, interestingly enough, photography is even more a painterly art form than it once was. Everything in a photograph can be idealized, from the color of the grass to a lengthening of the legs.

I feel that this is often forgotten. Frequent complaints are lodged against editors of magazines such as Vogue and Vanity Fair, claiming the human subjects in the magazines' images are misrepresentations of the true human form. Yet hasn't this been true for centuries, if not millenia? Painters, sculptors, artists of all kinds have interpreted and idealized the human form since they have been creating it. Now, however, the "photograph" is still considered "true," that it does not lie--yet the photographer is an artist, the photograph his art, and the camera (and computer) the tools with which he executes his pieces... and liberty should be afforded him.

For more information, an article written last year in the New Yorker on the famous image retoucher Pascal Dangin:
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/05/12/080512fa_fact_collins?currentPage=all