The Baku International Arts Festival in Azerbaijan is currently showcasing "Oh to Believe in Another World," a cine-musical creation by 71-year-old South African artist and filmmaker William Kentridge. Described as a marvel of puppetry, dance, and humor, the hour-long collage animation features live-action choreography performed alongside a live orchestral accompaniment of Dmitri Shostakovich's 10th Symphony. The event serves a dual purpose: it honors the 120th anniversary of Shostakovich's birth and commemorates the composer's reportedly unrequited love and lifelong friendship with his student, Azerbaijani pianist and composer Elmira Nazirova.
Shostakovich's 10th Symphony, inspired by Joseph Stalin and premiered shortly after the dictator's death, likely contains compositions conceived before Stalin passed away. The music is interpreted as a complex blend of fear, awe, revulsion, and a hysterical reaction to the genocidal tyranny of the era, while also expressing grief for the sacrifices made under that regime. To visualize these themes, Kentridge has created models and masks representing notorious Soviet figures such as Stalin, Lenin, Trotsky, and the poet Vladimir Mayakovsky. The work's title and intertitles are drawn from Mayakovsky's poetry, featuring maxims like "We'll chase humanity into happiness with an iron fist."
The visual presentation utilizes a mix of blurred, scribbled, and blank-faced masks that resemble constructivist cutouts. These faces, ranging from small models to life-sized attachments on human dancers, are characterized by stern or noble expressions that contrast sharply with their absurd, flat bodies. Through green-screen technology, these figures are integrated into meticulously crafted model interiors, creating a hyperreal effect where tiny dollhouse-like dioramas expand to life-size proportions. The animation depicts a bizarre landscape including a dusty Soviet museum, a wrecked auditorium playing newsreels, and an eerily empty swimming pool where Lenin appears on a diving board.
The narrative unfolds across the four movements of Shostakovich's symphony. The first movement, Moderato, displays photographs of faces belonging to people destined for state elimination, while Shostakovich himself appears as a puppet conductor. The second movement, Allegro, accelerates in tempo with visual references to Dziga Vertov's "Man With a Movie Camera." In the third movement, Allegretto, Nazirova is shown dancing, but the scene turns violent as Stalin, depicted with his characteristic mild half-smile, draws a gun and begins shooting. The final movement, Andante Allegro, features the removal of masks and the intrusion of Kentridge's own giant hand into the frame.
Critics note that while the work deals with heavy historical tragedy, it possesses an unexpected humor reminiscent of Terry Gilliam's animations for Monty Python or Charlie Chaplin's satire of Hitler. The juxtaposition of monumental faces atop dancing bodies creates a preposterous effect that defies the gravity of the subject matter through black comedy. Unlike many silent film events where music struggles to match the screen, this production was specifically created for the music. The piece captures the yearning for "another world," reflecting both the idealism of the October Revolution and the subsequent desire to overturn the Stalinist tyranny that followed.
Sources: The Guardian Film.