People tell me that one of the strengths of District 9 is its South African setting: that it couldn't be set anywhere else. If you'd like to check out more work of which that could be said, here is a YouTube playlist of some of William Kentridge's videos.

Getting out the microscope ... the remainder of this post is quoted with permission from a friend's school paper on the role of Kentridge's cat in the video "Sobriety, Obesity, and Growning Old" (1991) [with notes in brackets by me]. Here's that particular video, which is the fifth in a series....

[More info, from the paper, below.]

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Janet Koplos (Art in America, December 2002) wrote: "One of the fascinating things about William Kentridge's films is how they let the process show. Because he draws, shoots, erases and shoots again to create his imagery - rather than painting animation cells or digitally developing scenes - I am conscious of his means, even his touch. It was Kentridge's genius to show how the directness of drawing could survive the indirectness of a camera-based art."

[Kentridge doesn't use scripts or storyboards.] In an interview with www.onepeople.com in 1998, Kentridge said about his film Stereoscope, “The work is very labor intensive. "Stereoscope" took 9 months to make - with some breaks for travel and exhibitions during that period. It takes a long time because there is no script or storyboard - the ideas are worked out in the making.” He also said, about Momentum, “Making the film is about finding the focus, finding what the film is about. If the film had been storyboarded, it would be difficult to maintain focus; but because it is thought out as it is done, that becomes part of the subject.” 

Kentridge has made several animated charcoal-sketched films with the characters Soho Eckstein and Felix Teitelbaum. Mrs. Eckstein also appears as a character in some of the films. Soho Eckstein is probably fun to draw in charcoal; his face is craggy and heavily lined, he has a pinstriped suit, and he smokes a cigar that makes interesting smoke. His activities and belongings allow Kentridge to draw clever visual jokes. In contrast, Felix Teitelbaum (who some reviewers say at least partly represents the artist himself) is most often shown naked. Usually the viewer sees only Felix’s naked back, but sometimes very explicit frontal views are shown (especially when Felix is with Mrs. Eckstein, or thinking about her). [For the full story of the Ecksteins and Felix, watch the sequence of films from the beginning; the playlist has them in order.]

Kentridge is a white South African of Jewish background. Although he has studied and travelled in many other countries, he was born and still lives in Johannesburg, and “All the places I've lived are within a four or five-kilometer radius of each other.” (Quotations from Interview magazine, May 22, 2001, “12 African Greats Speak Freely About Their Continent”.) It is interesting that both of his main characters in these films are also white Jewish South Africans. Over the years in which these films were made, the black majority gained more power and other important political changes took place. All of the films are set in South Africa as a context and they include visuals that show some of the changes that have taken place.

Kentridge says (in the same interview), “There was always a sense growing up of living in a society that was waiting to become an adult, to change. During the 1970s and '80s that seemed completely intractable, and it's that sense of waiting--which existed throughout my childhood--that had been a false expectation. Then when the transformation came in 1989 through 1994, this was a kind of vindication of all those expectations of childhood. I think one of the exciting things about South Africa after this transformation from apartheid is that it has an open-ended future…”

Elsewhere Kentridge has said, about leaving things open: “I am interested in a political art, that is to say an art of ambiguity, contradiction, uncompleted gestures, and certain endings; an art (and a politics) in which optimism is kept in check and nihilism at bay.” He is looking for balance, and one way he finds it is in the contrasts between Soho and Felix.

However, he does not seem to want to discuss the meanings of each character. In regard to Stereoscope, the interviewer from www.onepeople.com asked him, “Are the recurring elements (like the cat and the blue line, etc.) in your work symbolic of something? They seemed meaningful, but I wasn't sure of what.” His answer: “Re the cat…I never start with a meaning, so cannot tell you what the cat symbolizes, if anything - I simply knew that I needed a cat at that moment of the film.”

Another interview with www.onepeople.com included the following: “Has your work been critiqued abroad as a contemporary metaphor for this country?” “Yes . . . maybe a bit too much sometimes. You draw an iris and it's seen as a metaphor for the end of Apartheid. Sometimes an iris is an iris.”

Even though the cat in William Kentridge’s films is probably only a cat, it is interesting to follow its progress through the frames.

The film Sobriety, Obesity, & Growing Old (1991) has a dreamlike quality....Crowds of demonstrators (reflecting what was happening in South Africa at the time) appear at the very beginning, the middle, and the end of the film.  They surround or pass through the private lives of Soho Eckstein and Felix Teitelbaum. The only colours in the film are the light blue of water and just one of the demonstrators’ banners, which is pale red.

Soho Eckstein’s black cat moves through the film, sometimes turning into other objects that Eckstein needs (like a telephone or a megaphone), but mostly behaving just like a real cat. It is one of the elements in the film that shows the most realistic movement. It provides a link to reality when the story seems to get too much like a fantasy.

At the beginning of the film, Felix is listening to the world through a series of ear trumpets. In contrast to Felix’s many trumpets, Soho’s business headquarters has only one trumpet (although it turns around to try to hear in all directions). We first see the cat sitting on Soho’s desk, the desk from which he runs his “empire”. (A picture of his wife is on the desk; it becomes important later.) At first the cat behaves in a very cat-like way: it waves its tail, stands and mews…then turns into a telephone!

Quickly we move to the next scene which is a city skyline. The cat runs in front of the skyline.

When next we see the office, the phone is there, but it has a tail. When the phone rings, the tail moves.

While Soho sleeps alone, Felix and Mrs. Eckstein are holding each other, listening to South African music. Only one finger is moving. The cat frisks across the horizon in front of the couple.

In the next picture, the cat jumps onto the bed (in Mrs. Eckstein’s empty place). Catlike, it curls up. Soho pets it. Only one finger is moving. The cat jumps onto Soho’s face and turns into a gas mask (with cat ears).

Back at Soho’s desk, the picture of his wife now shows her and Felix in bed. Water and fish are part of their love story (as they are in other movies) but here the cat brings an element of realism back by trying to reach into the picture frame and catch the fish. After the cat fails to catch the fish it mews and turns into what looks like an embossing punch with the company seal. The handle of the punch is shaped a bit like the cat’s tail.

Soho’s empire dissolves, and Soho uses the cat-punch to explode various buildings within his empire. He is left standing alone on an empty plain. But not quite alone: the cat comes up to him, mewing again, and walking in and out between and around his legs, as any cat might do to show affection. A sign suggests poetically that Soho is sad about the absence of Mrs. Eckstein. The cat’s tail moves slowly and sadly. Soho picks up the cat and it turns into a speaking tube so that he can call, “COME HOME” repeatedly (in silent titles; although the cat mews several times, none of the human characters speak aloud).

The end of the film shows Soho holding his wife (she is naked, he is still in his pin-stripe suit that he always wears) lying out in the open with his arms wrapped around her. The marchers return to surround them, and the cat runs across the horizon behind them and sits, watching right to the end of the film.

[Other Kentridge links:]

http://www.barbarakrakowgallery.com/contentmgr/showdetails.php/id/335
http://www.gregkucera.com/kentridge.htm
http://www.gregkucera.com/kentridge_reviews.htm
http://www.onepeople.com/