William Kentridge: Journey to the Moon
- Gallery TPW in collaboration with TIFF
- Until Sept. 19, 56 Ossington Ave., Toronto; gallerytpw.ca
On a recent long-haul flight, I noticed that one of my film choices on the back-of-the-seat flat screen was F.W. Murnau's 1922 silent classic, Nosferatu. How strange to be able to see this once-revolutionary film surrounded by, and via, technologies that were wholly unimaginable to Murnau and his collaborators.
Why do silent films continue to hold sway over us, when, on every level, they exist as documents of a primitive, or at least nascent, technology? It can't be nostalgia, because anybody who may have seen a silent film in its first run is likely dead. Is it because such films' visuals-driven narrative strategies - direct, febrile, and as close to live theatre as film ever got - appeal to our overloaded, 3-D-tolerant senses?
If so, silents can only increase in popularity as cinema becomes an increasingly immersive, full-body experience.
William Kentridge's film installation, Journey to the Moon, is a response to another silent classic, Georges Méliès's sci-fi short Le voyage dans la lune - an enormously influential, and much copied, special-effects wonder from 1902. Kentridge remakes the film, literally, in his own image, positioning himself as a lonely artist who is trapped in his studio but dreams of faraway places.
The wanderlust and longing for new terrains that haunted the Victorians, an obsession so comically skewered by Méliès, is inverted by Kentridge. His self/not-self character does not suffer from an Icarus-like hubris but from the opposite: He can't seem to leave the room.
Kentridge's "voyage" is performed with kitchen-sink props: a coffee cup that acts as a telescope; an espresso pot that becomes a spaceship; star charts illustrated by ants crawling across food-splattered paper; a saucer-plate moon; and visions of moon dwellers made with animated stick figures cut from rough paper.
Kentridge's solitary explorer, frumpily dressed in a white shirt and golf-dad pants, is a comic delight, wandering around his messy studio fidgeting with his toys like a bored child or a madman. At one point, he balances a chair on his fingertips, waiting for something, anything, to happen, make a noise, crash his pity party.
Later in Kentridge's tribute, a nude woman appears. She is either a ghost or a lover, or both. Kentridge's character seems desperate to connect with her, and yet unable to establish lasting contact. The metaphor of the moon as a woman is obviously being hauled out here, but that does not detract from the palpable yearning played out between the two characters.
Like the moon, the nude woman is both visible and inaccessible, a reminder to Kentridge's character of both what he wants and what he cannot have. Tellingly, at one point in the film, Kentridge's solitary man flips through a dictionary and lands on the word "exorcism."
While Kentridge's tribute takes up all of the back space at Gallery TPW, the Méliès film runs continuously on a monitor in the front hall. It's great fun to move back and forth between the two works and build the connections yourself.
The Méliès film is so frantic, full of slapstick and clowning, that it makes Kentridge's, although busy enough itself, seem almost asleep. Perhaps what Kentridge's homage longs for most is the silent era's limitless vitality?