TV eye

Introspection on tape by William Kentridge

By Jenna Russell

Contemporary video art by William Kentridge shows at the Bowdoin College Museum of Art through March 18, (207) 725-3743. A lecture on Kentridge by Bowdoin visiting professor Julie McGee begins at 4 p.m. Wednesday, Feb. 7, in the museum.

“UNTITLED,” from “WEIGHING . . . and WANTING” by William Kentridge, 1998.

There was a steady stream of visitors to the William Kentridge show at the Bowdoin College Museum of Art one day last weekend, but few of them sat down to watch the artist’s two short films in their entirety. Most people stood at the doorways of the gallery’s two small temporary viewing rooms, peeking in at the images onscreen with uneasy expressions.

Their reluctance was surprising, and not just because I never stand when I can sit. The twin theaters in the basement space probably startled some museum guests, who came downstairs expecting paintings, but it’s not as if the format — moving pictures on a screen — isn’t one near and dear to every American.

Kentridge is South African, the son of one of that country’s most prominent anti-apartheid lawyers, and his films are animations made from scores of individual charcoal drawings. The effect is fluid and hypnotic, the product of painstaking manual assembly, and the style — part Rembrandt, part Disney — is like a more sophisticated version of the hand-made animation flip-books crafted by children.

It’s almost over-complication to say Kentridge’s films are “about apartheid”; in fact, the themes are often more essential and more intimate, concerning the nature of human perception and self- consciousness. The scale is personal, and the rough-sketch quality of the drawings is immediate and authentic in a way that feels fresh in an era defined by sleek computer graphics. The films’ accessibility is enhanced by the human characters at their center, most often a balding businessman — a kind of everyman — who Kentridge calls Soho Eckstein. The pictures are accompanied by music, and some industrial hisses and clatters, but there is no spoken dialogue.

The Bowdoin show offers two films, “WEIGHING . . . and WANTING” (1998) and “Stereoscope” (1999), and includes some of the individual drawings that were part of their production. Each lasts about five minutes, and both run continuously in separate spaces. Repeated viewings are recommended. Because the artistic phenomenon onscreen is mesmerizing in a purely visual sense, it’s easy to become entirely absorbed in that level of observation, while missing links in the narrative.

In “Stereoscope,” the businessman reads columns of numbers inside a factory. Someone plugs a wire into a switchboard, and suddenly all the parts of his black-and-gray world are strung together by fast-moving, purple-blue lines of electric current. Much of the action is seen on a split screen, so there are two businessmen, two offices, two ringing phones. At one point the blue current between the frames splits wide open to reveal violence in the streets, gunfire and shouting that rises over the haunting piano music. In the end, bombs — disguised at times as blinking black cats — explode to blank out the landscape, and as the dust settles, Kentridge transmits an unambiguous message: the word FORGIVE appears in purple capital letters, fading and reappearing again and again.

In the final scene, blue water pours from the pockets of the businessman’s suit, enough to fill the room he stands in, a lifetime’s tears, maybe, or an entire nation’s.

Kentridge has called “WEIGHING . . . and WANTING” the most personal of his films. Its title comes from the book of Daniel: “You have been weighed in the balance and found wanting.” It concerns a man weighing his own life, again seeking to heal a fragmented history, as an X-ray of his brain becomes a window to memory. The man lays his head in a woman’s lap, her lap becomes a telephone, and we guess that he has sacrificed personal relationships for the seeming urgency of commerce. The woman then appears in a kind of cave underground: underground, in Kentridge’s world, has a great deal going on, invisible but essential to the upstairs realm. When she tries to stand up, the resulting tremor rumbles across the landscape. A row of industrial towers crumbles, actually vanishing as their charcoal forms revert before our eyes to smoky, blurred erasures.

These are not easy pieces, not the political equivalent of Saturday morning cartoons. The Bowdoin curators might have been wise to post more detailed guidance to each film; a few Kentridge quotes, from a book on hand in the gallery, provide insight. His work “tries to find a way through the space between what we know and what we see,” he said in one interview. He calls drawing “a testing of ideas, a slow motion version of thought,” and points out that “what ends in clarity does not begin that way. ” The same can be said of poetry, a creative form that seems closer in spirit to Kentridge’s work, with its accumulated images, than painting does.

The starting point for Kentridge is always “the desire to draw,” he says, not the desire to make a political statement. For this reason, the films are as much a joy to watch as they are a starting point for reflection, and those visitors hovering outside need not be afraid to enter. The drawings describe, in the Expressionist tradition, the pain of human error — and the hope of improvement. It’s a universal story, requiring no subtitles. Step inside, and remember, what ends in clarity does not begin that way.

Jenna Russell can be reached at russelljenna@hotmail.com.