South African artist, born 1955,
Johannesburg. Though active in numerous fields, including
opera,
drama, and
drawing, Kentridge's ouvre is
animation. In 1988 he was a founder member of the
Free Filmmakers Cooperative. Kentridge's
short films are devastatingly beautiful, spontaneous, and fluid, because he draws each scene on a
single piece of paper. That is, as the scene progresses, he erases and redraws on that piece of paper to portray movement, as opposed to drawing each
frame entirely anew. So, for instance, when a sheet of paper flutters down a deserted street, its path remains visible, only partially erased. The films are typically in black and white, with some use of blue (for water), and occassional red and purple.
Kentridge's work often concerns the modern South African
identity. The artist himself is
white and
Jewish, and his films' protagonists are white South Africans on the benifiting end of
apartheid. In a film cycle he made in the 80s and 90s these characters- the bloated
industrialist Soho Eckstein, his wife
Mrs. Eckstein, and her lover, the melancholy
dreamer Felix Teitelbaum- and their sexual
soap operas, are constantly contrasted with South Africa's miserably
poor underclass.
The films in this series were:
Other important film installations have been:
- UBU TELLS THE TRUTH- multimedia film installation, in which Ubu, from the satirical play Ubu Roi, appears before South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission (1997)
-
ECHO- triptych projection, in which three different screen project animated and non-animated scenes related to the human body- i.e. a close up of some sort of surgery, the artist's hands, and a body morphing into a tree (1998)
- MEDICINE CABINET- film installation on a screen inside a medicine cabinet, portraying among other things, the contents of the cabinet, Soho Eckstein in the mirror, and a bird trapped inside the cabinet (1999)