The Jewish Museum Experience
Artist’s Technique
William Kentridge’s four films – Johannesburg, great 2nd city after Paris, Mine, Monument, and Sobriety, Obesity, & Getting Old are all very gloomy and desolate. He achieves this kind of appearance by using charcoal to give a smudged look. According to the written explanation, he films every scene individually after erasing previous images and redrawing it, which is a technique called rotoscoping. He films the transformations one by one; this is why in some scenes you can see some traces or remnants of past images.
His choice of color palette is mostly grayscale, with limited use of other brighter colors. I noticed that he uses colors mostly for the background or large empty areas, or for certain things that he wishes to emphasize such as a ringing phone, or the sound coming off the speakers on the streets. Nevertheless, the general color scheme in his films is black and white, which contributes to the moodiness of the films.
Kentridge portrays certain things in a way that they’re used to symbolize something else while giving off a more magical, haunted sensation. He makes random objects morph into unexpected things that symbolize something significant. For example, a cat turns into a melting pot, while a bed turns into a pipe that drills down into the miners and their workplace.
Some of Kentridge's other drawings done with charcoal
Narratives of the Films
The main characters, Soho Eckstein and Felix Teitelbaum, are portrayed in a strikingly contrasted manner. They themselves reflect the contradictory lifestyles consumed by the two different “castes” existing in South Africa; the white superior minority, and the common people – Soho representing the ruthless rich authority, and Felix the helpless poor. Soho is portrayed as greedy, selfish and negligent of his people, including his own wife, whereas Felix is illustrated as vulnerable and dreamy. Black African laborers being exploited in mines and other dangerous worksites while the authority, mainly white, does nothing to help them, was commonplace in South Africa. Kentridge wisely focuses on this aspect of society and shows through various symbols and images the gravity and irony of the situation.
He represents the two main characters in various ways. Sometimes he uses direct texts to explain their characteristics and actions, such as “captive of the city,” or “civic benefactor,” but most of the time he implies these images in his drawings. I think Kentridge created these films from Felix’s, or the “poor people”s point of view; the ideas conveyed in his films portray the rich in a negative light, and emphasize their immoral deeds in many different areas of society, whereas he presents the poor in a more sentimental, sympathetic way.
My favorite moment was in Sobriety, Obesity, & Getting Old. I liked the part where Soho cries out to his wife to return, where his voice echoing out into the city is shown by the image of speakers with blue soundwaves coming out of them. She finally comes back, and the image of them lying down together is presented. This was my favorite part because it shows Soho finally getting more humane after being so materialistic and greedy. He begins to feel emptiness in the absence of his wife, and no longer takes her for granted, which was the case in the other three films. This was a big change in Soho, unseen in any other film, and I thought it was quite memorable and possibly the most emotional moment in all four.
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