Kentridge Brings Shostakovich's 10th Symphony to Baku — SkimNews
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- Oh to Believe in Another World is an hour-long collage animation with live-action choreography by 71-year-old South African artist William Kentridge, screened with live orchestral accompaniment of Shostakovich's 10th Symphony at the Baku international arts festival in Azerbaijan.
- Shostakovich is the occasion for the event on two counts: it partly marks the 120th anniversary of his birth this year and partly honours his reportedly unrequited love and lifelong friendship with Azerbaijani pianist and composer Elmira Nazirova, who dances in the third movement.
- Kentridge built models and masks of Stalin, Lenin, Trotsky and Mayakovsky — whose verse supplies the title and intertitles, including "We'll chase humanity into happiness with an iron fist" — and green-screened the models' miniature interiors into lifesize spaces likened to the Thorne Rooms at the Art Institute of Chicago.
- Stalin appears as a mild half-smiling poster-face atop a dancer's rickety body, and in the Allegretto, where Nazirova dances, he takes out a gun and starts shooting; the closing Andante, Allegro strips the masks off and lets Kentridge's own giant hand intrude into the frame.
- Jonathan Jones has already written on Kentridge's film, but the review's author says what they had not anticipated was how funny it is — the unchanged monumental face on a capering body is like Terry Gilliam's Monty Python animations, making the piece "a ballet of black comic pain."
- Shostakovich's 10th Symphony premiered shortly after Stalin's death and, the review argues, mixes fear, awe, revulsion and hysteria at the dictator's genocidal tyranny with grief for a passing era; unlike previous live-orchestral cinema events, this film was created for the music rather than scored onto the action afterwards.
- Shostakovich himself enters the film as a puppet cutout conducting his own work, in a sequence that opens with the Moderato's photographs of faces of people destined for elimination by the state and accelerates into the Vertov-like tempo of the Allegro.
Why it matters: For the Baku festival marking Shostakovich's 120th birth anniversary, Kentridge has delivered the live-orchestra cinema event the reviewer had never encountered: an hour-long film built for the 10th Symphony rather than scored onto existing images. The anniversary commemoration thus becomes a piece of visual music as well as an orchestral performance.
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