The Triumph and Laments of William Kentridge imagine...

Yeah!

Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah.

CHOIR SINGS SLOWLY

Come with me here.

I hadn't thought of these as being kind of being utopian machines,

machines of failed utopia.

They should have changed the world, but really don't.

PLAINTIVE SINGING

Sometimes you come across an artist

whose work you're completely unprepared for.

William Kentridge amazed me from the start.

He was born in South Africa shortly after the imposition of apartheid.

His career has coincided with the most turbulent period

in his country's history.

HIGH-PITCHED CHANTING

I met Kentridge in Rome where he was working on an installation

to celebrate the founding of the city, called Triumphs And Laments,

for which he's created a massive frieze

that stretches for half a kilometre along the banks of the River Tiber.

The opening performance included two orchestras,

two choirs and 200 volunteers.

LOUD CACOPHONY OF MUSIC

Like William himself,

it was both profound and playful at the same time.

He may be dedicated to his art,

but he never takes himself too seriously.

Can you describe your life as an artist?

Can you rather say, what it was that you did today, to give us some sense

of how you fill your hours between waking and sleeping every day?

Can you tell us about what inspires you...

If there was enough time, I would be able to do so many different things

that one could begin to spin out for everyone here.

But there's such a shortage, hard to explain...

He's not saying anything that's interesting at all.

I mean, he's not talking about truth or truth and beauty.

What makes you tick?

JOYFUL SINGING

In Rome, William took me to his studio to show me

the drawings he'd done for the giant frieze along the Tiber.

-Quite a space.

-It is. It's a kind of....

All light, it has a beautiful clear light in it.

One feels... I feel I should be doing drawings

nine meters high like the ones on the river.

And then these are just the...

miniature versions of the stencils that we used

to actually wash the figures out.

Is this the sequence?

No, that's a section of them.

That's a collection, they're not...

Here there are, two, four, six...ten of them.

And there are 52 on the wall.

So, if you extended this five times around,

that would get the proportion.

These are all drawings for shadows that people will carry

in the procession.

At the opening we have two bands -

a band playing triumphs and a band playing laments.

They start at opposite ends and they kind of come together

and have this chaos of the interaction,

and then pass through each other.

SLOW GENTLE SINGING

The title, Triumphs and Laments, refers to the darker side

of the city's history as well as to its achievements.

Triumphs and Laments is my theme.

It came from a sudden realisation

that in art school one had learned about the glories

of the Italian Renaissance, St Peter's,

Michelangelo's design, architecture and painting.

And later, I understood about the ghetto in Rome.

-The Jewish ghetto.

-The Jewish ghetto.

And I'd always assumed that that in fact was a medieval project.

And so the shock was discovering, no, it's a project of modernity.

The ghetto's established in 1570,

the same time they're building St Peter's Cathedral.

This heroic history of Rome and the shameful history of Rome

came together.

So, it's that imbrication of triumphant and lamentable moments

that becomes the theme.

And you could say that's the theme of life anyway.

For every success, or for every win, there's a loss.

I mean, coming from South Africa, it's obviously

a sense of understanding histories as shameful, not just heroic.

And this sense of the colonial history, of Africa's relationship

with Europe, all of that is also, I imagine...

It is, because particularly in Europe now,

you have a sense that these migrants are seen as coming from nowhere,

-from outside of history into a pure Europe.

-Yes.

And the historical memory of Europe's hunger for the world

outside of Europe - in Africa, in the Middle East, in Asia,

in South America - which was happy for hundreds of years to say,

we will turn ourselves into this astonishingly wealthy,

tiny section of the world.

But as soon as the people in the area from which you've taken

have come knocking at our door, we lock the gates.

What is the background here? The backdrop, if you like?

There's something much nicer about drawing on this paper

-than on this paper.

-Mmm.

-So, are you always on the lookout for...

-I am.

I mean, here are the books that I found here.

So, this is a Latin-Italian dictionary from 1814.

-Which has this very good tooth for charcoal.

-This is so funny.

The idea that there's this beautiful book

-and you're looking at the texture of it...

-It is.

It's very odd to go into a bookshop and they say,

"What book are you looking for?"

I say, "I'm looking for a book about this fat."

And they say, "About what subject?" And I say, "Not important."

-It's what age it is.

-Age and the quality of the paper.

But this is quite a good...

I mean, 1750 is a much nicer paper than 1814.

-I'm actually feeling this texture.

-The texture is good.

# This frag-fragile me

# Under, under, under the stars

# Be, be je-jeal-jealous

# You plucked, plucked plucked beside and then... #

William gives these old books a new life by transforming them

into his touching and surprising short films.

And this one...

This is a geographical dictionary.

Quite a good... Where's the eraser?

That's quite a good tough paper.

Rub this into grey.

Leaves quite a strong grey. The text, in fact, rubs off.

Yes, I see that. The text's rubbing off.

In Johannesburg, it's very hard to find beautiful books like that.

I've been through all the second-hand bookshops

and raided them. Some of them I just take home to Johannesburg.

# Is this fra-fra-fra fragile me, me, me

# Under the stars, under the stars under the stars

# Be jealous. #

William Kentridge is the product of another city

with a triumphant and lamentable history of its own.

He grew up in Johannesburg during the apartheid era

when South Africans were separated according to their race.

-TV COMMENTARY:

-Parts of Johannesburg are so modern they're almost like

an American skyscraper town.

80 years ago, before the gold, there was nothing here at all.

Now there is a rich town - sunlit, wide and spacious.

But always at the back of their minds, Europeans have a fear

that non-Europeans will somehow crowd them out of it.

In 1989, William made the first of a series of hand-drawn

animated films that he calls Drawings For Projection.

Set in Johannesburg,

they're both highly personal and unsettlingly universal.

"Johannesburg, the 2nd greatest city after Paris" was the first film.

And when it was made in 1989 there was no understanding at all

that it will become part of a series that would be going on for 26 years.

And ongoing.

The title came from this absurd dream phrase -

at that stage I was keeping a dream diary, and I woke up

with an image of a group photograph and the caption said,

"Soho Eckstein," don't know where the name came from,

"with 120 artists and photographers who've spent eight hours

"recording Johannesburg, the 2nd greatest city after Paris."

The central character is a ruthless industrialist called Soho Eckstein

who buys up most of the city and builds a huge business empire.

Felix Teitlebaum is a romantic artist

who is based on Kentridge himself.

Felix, needing to be another character by default,

became me looking in the mirror.

If I'd known I was going to be stuck with this character for the next

20 years I may well have just let me use some other person.

And then I thought, we've got these two characters,

Felix and Soho, how do we make a connection?

So the connection was made by putting Mrs Eckstein,

Soho's wife, between the two.

-There are scenes of sexual activity going on.

-There are scenes.

When the film was shown at a film festival in Johannesburg

in the late '80s, it had to go to the Publications Control Board,

as the Censorship Board was known at the time.

It came back with a report saying,

"The film contained scenes of intercourse and fellatio,

"however, they are sufficiently badly drawn not to give offence."

And they were allowed to remain.

William's grandparents came to South Africa from Lithuania,

part of a wave of Jewish immigrants fleeing persecution in Europe

before the First World War.

They quickly became successful and were able to move

to the comfortable northern suburbs of Johannesburg.

William still lives here and works in the studio he's built

in the garden of the house he grew up in as a child.

This is the book that I bought in Rome.

This 1814 Latin-Italian dictionary.

Which I'm dismembering and drawing in.

It's, in a way, almost a list of things that I've drawn before.

So the Eurasian tree sparrow from a project

about the Cultural Revolution, Madame Mao also.

Bismarck, just as a historical figure because I came across

this remarkable photograph of Bismarck taken just after he died.

SPLASHING

Drawn in charcoal with the occasional use of colour,

William's lyrical films are almost ostentatiously handmade.

The result of a laborious frame-by-frame process

that he calls Stone Age film-making.

How did you discover this... what you call Stone Age film-making?

Stone Age film-making.

It started, I suppose, because I was already making charcoal drawings

and I thought, what would it be if one filmed the process

of making a drawing?

So, I start with a blank sheet of paper and under the camera,

frame by frame, you see the drawing constructing itself.

It was a record of a drawing making itself.

But then I realised if once the drawing was made

you continued the drawing, and erasing, and drawing, erasing,

and filmed it, the drawing could have a narrative and a life

beyond simply its construction.

But what is remarkable about these animations of yours is

they do feel the kind of human... They feel...

They're certainly not made by a machine, this kind of...

You would be hard-pressed to get a machine to do it

as roughly or as badly.

If you're drawing for an animation, the image is there

for a 25th or a 12th of a second and then if it changes,

even if it's going wrong, it's fine, you can rescue it.

It's constantly there to be rescued.

So, I'll do a test filming today to see if it's working in principle.

It depends how long each sequence takes but it can be an ongoing thing

until I run out of pages.

So, it will be like a dictionary.

A soft dictionary.

PLAYFUL MUSIC

This is really testing this paper,

this kind of rhythm of dust and cloud.

And then there's different pieces of music.

It's nice to try things that feel completely wrong.

See what they do.

This is Brazilian music described as music for lift girls

and taxi drivers.

ALAN CHUCKLES

Turns into much more of a dance.

HIGH-TEMPO BRAZILIAN MUSIC

You were brought up in this house

and you've been living in it since when?

Well, I lived in the house from when I was nine

through when I left at 21.

And then I came back when my parents emigrated to London,

back to England.

I had a family and children.

We moved in here 20 years ago.

William's home movies show an idyllic, privileged childhood,

full of sunshine, picnics and seaside holidays.

A world which he's also drawn on in his films.

The Tide Table, I'd had an idea of Soho on the beach.

The idea of the deckchair,

the man in his three-piece suit, was key to it.

-Your grandfather.

-My grandfather.

In the photograph my father is an eight-year-old child

sitting next to him on the sand.

So you have my grandfather and my father.

In the film, that shifts because we have Soho in the deckchair

and that is based on photographs I took of myself in the deckchair.

And my eight-year-old son Sam became the model for

the child in the film.

So you had in a way four generations,

as about our relationship to our younger selves.

That's an image very much of my old nanny and myself on the beach.

Of course in my childhood, until 1990s,

beaches were segregated.

There were white beaches and there were a few dangerous

small beaches for black people. So nannies could look after

-the white children on the beach, but...

-They were allowed to do that.

-But not to go into the sea.

-Right.

-Not beyond their ankles.

And this is your inscription. 7th of August 1930.

It's my mum's years. It's a memorial for my mother.

-Oh, it's a memorial for your mother.

-Yeah.

-June 2015.

-1930 to last year.

-Felicia.

-Yeah.

INDISTINCT

Is this an area where Soho Eckstein

-and the wealthy plutocrats would have lived?

-It is.

It was from the 1920s, it was one of the desirable suburbs.

I was born a few kilometres away

and I went to school just on the other side of the hill

and to university 3km this way.

So this area and the area closer to the city

has been my terrain for the last 60 years.

Was it an exclusively white area?

Well, everything outside the townships was designated

as a white area.

But there were always servants who lived in the back-yards of houses.

-It was not...

-They were allowed to live here, were they?

They were allowed to live in the back-yards of houses

if they were servants.

Otherwise they would either have to live in the townships

or if they didn't have a stamp in their pass book

they would be, as it was called,

endorsed out, sent back to the rural areas.

So it was assumed that the rural areas would be like holding areas

for a working population that would come into the city when needed

and be sent back out of the city when not needed.

You had this extraordinary contrast between these leafy suburbs

of both irrigation and privilege

and then the much more bleak areas just outside.

William's parents were both committed opponents of apartheid.

His mother Felicia helped set up the Legal Resources Centre

which gave advice and support to victims of the regime.

His father Sydney was one of the country's leading barristers

who successfully defended many of South Africa's black nationalists,

including Nelson Mandela.

As always even in an abnormal situation, if that's what you're

living in, it feels like the default natural circumstance.

It didn't feel odd when I was at an all-white school

that swimming pools or cinemas were for white people only.

It took a while to understand the unnaturalness of it.

I think for me it was earlier

because of my parents' connection to law

and through law to politics and so forth.

-And human rights.

-And human rights and people that came.

And I suppose it was really through my mother's rage

and ongoing undying rage against what was happening here.

And then through the cases that my father,

as a lawyer, very involved with different political trials.

What did you study?

I did a BA, bachelor of arts in politics and African history.

And at the same time I went to a private art school in the evenings.

I saw myself drawing for a while while I worked out what I was

-going to be when I grew up.

-ALAN LAUGHS

And then I gave it up for some years. I decided I didn't have

the way with... I didn't have the right to be an artist.

And then I tried to become an actor and failed at that.

Went to theatre school and failed at that.

And after some years I found I was back in the studio making drawings.

Kentridge's 1991 film Mine is about the industry on which

Johannesburg and Soho Eckstein's wealth is based.

The gold reef that stretches for over 50km

was the richest gold deposit in the world.

It made fortunes for some.

It was extracted by an army of black miners

who were paid virtually slave wages.

Even today, mining is the largest industry

in the area around Johannesburg.

Where are we now? Where are we travelling?

We are now going east from the centre of Johannesburg

basically following towards Germiston and Benoni

the line of the reef of gold.

Johannesburg, remember, is built on what's under the ground,

which is the gold under the ground discovered in 1886.

BELL

The landscape is still scarred by the mine dumps that are now

being demolished and processed.

The orange hill there is simply earth that's been taken out

of the ground from the mines, the leftovers of the mines.

The gold has been taken out

but because it's an imperfect and was an imperfect process,

there was a certain minute percentage of gold left in the dump,

-as it is called.

-That's the dump.

That's the dump there.

But what's happening now, you can see there's earth-moving equipment

on top and what they're doing in fact is scraping the whole

of that mountain away because they now have new metallurgical processes

that can leach out the last 0.001% of gold that's still in that hill.

And you also sometimes see in this area these zama zamas,

these illegal and former miners in the informal economy,

who walk across carrying bags of rocks, either from the tailings

or from mines themselves, which they will physically reprocess,

to hope after some weeks' work to get a Coke bottle capful of gold.

So over here you have what was an old shaft from an official mine.

It's probably from 1905 or something. It's now been abandoned.

-Don't fall in.

-Right.

It's probably a few hundred feet open, unprotected hole.

Let's try that one. We should be able to do the maths to count it.

Let's just see.

One Mississippi, two Mississippi, three Mississippi,

four Mississippi, five Mississippi, six Mississippi,

seven Mississippi, eight Mississippi...

God, it's still going.

About eight seconds.

-It's still going.

-It's still going down.

Next to the abandoned shaft we met Daniel, an illegal miner,

who was digging at the rock face in the hope of finding gold.

Hi. Hello. Hello. How are you? Are you having any luck

finding some gold?

-This is it.

-This is it. Gold.

-This is pure gold.

-That's about a gram, you think?

-Yeah.

-Gosh, that's good. Can I feel it?

-Yes.

So that's the weight of the gold.

Great.

'Daniel was panning for the gold

'which he can sell for 450 rands a gram,

'about £20, enough to feed his family for a week.'

-This is more gold.

-That's gold at the edges.

-Yes.

That little piece there. Gosh, so it's black,

-it's not gold shining. It's not shining.

-It's not really shining.

Stand right there.

This is like the start of the next film.

ALAN LAUGHS

-I'm Soho Eckstein.

-Just to get a proportion, yes.

Just look down sideways. I just want to take a picture.

Soho at the edge of one of these holes.

I used to always think what an ugly landscape we had

around Johannesburg.

There aren't grand trees, there's not rivers, there's not mountains.

All the things one would associate with beautiful landscape.

But having said that, once I started to draw it, the way this terrain

in front meets the process of drawing became very exciting.

Now you cannot find me an ugly enough piece of landscape

that I do not find beautiful.

INDISTINCT CHATTER

In Sobriety, Obesity and Growing Old Soho Eckstein's industrial

empire is collapsing in the face of forces that are beyond his control.

It was 1991 and the film reflected a seismic change

that was taking place in South Africa at the time.

Should Parliament adopt the government's proposal,

the South African statute book

will be devoid within months of the remnants

of the racially discriminatory legislation

which have become known as the cornerstones of apartheid.

In 1990, the new nationalist prime minister, FW De Klerk,

astonished the world by setting the country on the path to

becoming a multiracial democracy.

So this is after the big transformation.

1990 is when the president announces that the ANC will be unbanned,

Mandela will be released, and we understand South Africa

is starting this process of transformation.

So it was a period in which there were a lot of these huge,

fantastic marches through the city with all the different banners.

The red banners of the Communist Party

that had been banned all those years.

-ARCHIVE:

-'And the crowd getting excited. There's Mr Mandela,

'Mr Nelson Mandela, a free man,

'taking his first steps into a new South Africa.'

The political changes ushered in a period of uncertainty

as South Africa took a step into the unknown.

-And this is again Soho Eckstein's...

-Empire.

-Empire, yeah.

An empire which will soon not be Soho Eckstein's.

Yes, and in this film it's very much about the impossibility of

him knowing what to do.

MOURNFUL BALLAD

UPBEAT MUSIC

Downtown Johannesburg was a no-go area for years but it's now

beginning to be transformed, and Kentridge has built

another studio in a disused warehouse

in an inner-city neighbourhood called Maboneng

that's become a new creative quarter.

The studio is populated with the everyday objects that make up

his familiar iconography.

-Hi. Good morning.

-This is your new home.

The new home. The other home.

-I love that.

-This is in the piece on Trotsky, O Sentimental Machine.

-Yeah.

-But we've now modified it to have a kind of proximity receptor

so it switches itself on and off...

-So as we passed it...

-As we passed it

it recognised us and it beats its heart for a few seconds

and then it will stop.

It will come back on when you go.

CHIMING AND BLARING

The larger studio gave William the space to construct new inventions,

adapt found objects, and make models for the operas

he directs in opera houses round the world.

So it's a mixture of drawings that we used in Lulu, and filmed

performers and actors and dancers, which we filmed for Lulu

but really hardly used, didn't use.

But this for example was Jack the Ripper in the opera,

an image of him.

CHANTING

BRASS BAND PLAYS

The new studio also allowed William to make his films

on a much bigger scale.

Working with local performers and musicians, he created a multiscreen

projection that fills an entire gallery,

called More Sweetly Play the Dance,

an epic procession that combines live action and animation.

And did you rehearse More Sweetly here?

More Sweetly Play the Dance gets filmed

along a long platform along the edge of the wall,

lighting the wall to give us a neutral background

and then it's matted onto a drawn animation.

And this is used in that for all the scenes that happen on trolleys.

The trolleys in the film are an everyday sight in Johannesburg,

pulled by an army of recyclers who sift through the city's rubbish

and survive on the very edge of society.

The extraordinary thing that the trolley recyclers show you

is how much human labour power is still the engine of

so much of work and industry in South Africa.

So you have the informal economy, which are these people who

go through the rubbish, put it on these piles and drag it

physically uphill and down the hills to the recycling depots.

And you understand that they have no protection at all.

There's no health benefit, they're not employed by anyone.

If they're sick they just starve.

And they are intimately connected to the large-scale recycling companies

whose workers are unionised, have all the benefits of unionisation.

But that big company in the formal economy is only possible

through the work of everyone in the informal economy.

So that mixture goes throughout industry, throughout the country

and is a vital part of the logic of the whole country.

A CAPPELLA BALLAD

STRINGS

CHANTING

-ARCHIVE:

-'A slaughter of innocents. Babies as well as men and women

'gunned down at point-blank range or hacked to death.

'Victims selected at random, many of them as they lay in their beds.

'Victims of a township war that's become an ugly

'but inescapable aspect of politics in South Africa.'

South Africa's transition to democracy in the early 1990s

was nearly derailed by violence on all sides.

Bombings by the far right and a series of township massacres

threatened to plunge the country into full-scale civil war.

The impulse behind it came from a whole lot of police photographs

of bodies in the landscape. Bodies in the film.

And the specific individual figures that are drawn are based very much

on these police photographs of these people

who'd been killed, some of them

in ordinary criminal violence, but a lot in political violence.

-This was a very difficult time, wasn't it?

-This is 1994.

This is the period just before our first democratic election

which at the time was very much in doubt.

The lead-up to the election was mired in blood and deaths.

And one of the questions I had was, after this is over, when we've

got our transformed society, in what ways this is remembered.

Do these people still have a place?

Will they disappear in the way the bodies disappear into the landscape?

Those bodies in the veld are forensic photographs

I saw then in 1994, but also memories of photographs

I'd seen in my father's study

of people shot at the time of the Sharpeville massacre in 1960,

when I was five or six.

-And your father was...

-My father was a lawyer for the families

of the victims at the inquest into the Sharpeville massacre.

BRASS BAND PLAYS SOLEMNLY

-ARCHIVE:

-'From time to time in history, the name of

'an insignificant place

'burns itself into the memory of mankind

'simply because of something that happened there.

'Places like Guernica, and Lidice, and Belsen.

'And today there may well be another.

'Sharpeville near Johannesburg in South Africa.'

So where are you taking us to now?

We're going south of Johannesburg, about an hour south of Johannesburg,

to Vereeniging, an industrial town on the edge of the Vaal river which

is most well known for the township outside of it called Sharpeville.

-ARCHIVE:

-'More than 60 Africans, including women and children,

'were killed and more than 170 were injured when the police

'opened fire on a crowd estimated at 20,000

'which had surrounded Sharpeville police station.

'The shootings happened

'during a demonstration against the so-called pass laws.'

BRASS BAND PLAYS

William was taking us to Sharpeville because the brass band that

performed in More Sweetly Played the Dance comes from there.

His wife Anne, who is a practising doctor, came with us.

-So, Anne, why did you come with us today?

-William wanted me to come.

Why did you want Anne to come today?

I wanted her also to see the brass band.

The band is so fabulous.

Brass bands are an integral part of township life.

They play at weddings and funerals and form the kind of

public processions that appear so often in Kentridge's work.

BRASS BAND PLAYS

-ARCHIVE:

-'It has been a day of endless queues, of confusion,

'at polling stations which didn't open, and others which ran out of

'ballot papers, but above all it has been a day of hope.'

On 27 April 1994, South Africans of all races

voted in the country's first truly democratic election.

CHEERING AND APPLAUSE

I'm very happy about the election. We've been waiting very long.

I'm excited. I want to look forward for the new South Africa.

The election was won overwhelmingly by the ANC

and Nelson Mandela became the new president.

I was very happy that we're doing the right thing.

I, Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela, do hereby swear,

to be faithful to the Republic of South Africa.

So help me, God.

BRASS BAND PLAYS

CHORAL SINGING

This film was made in 1996.

1996 was the period of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission,

of looking at responsibilities for crimes against humanity

during the apartheid era.

And in a way this film looks at

questions of responsibility or guilt.

The images in the film very much come from lying in bed

next to my wife Anne, and she in bed with medical textbooks,

and she explained that when you take a history of someone,

their medical history, you take a history of the main complaint,

the main thing that's wrong with people.

So "a history of the main complaint" is a technical medical term.

But it's obviously so evocative of things beyond the medical

that it became the title.

What is the main complaint of our society?

The painful history that we have.

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission was set up

in 1996 to investigate atrocities that were committed

during the apartheid period.

It took them nine hours to burn his body.

Dirk Coetzee further says that whilst they were burning his body

the flesh was smelling good.

Victims were given the opportunity to testify, and perpetrators

were allowed to apply for amnesty if they confessed to their crimes.

It became a very painful public outpouring of anger and grief

on all sides. BELLS RINGING

The relationship of forgiveness. What is the impossibility?

And the impossibility of the idea of forgiveness.

What is it that you have to give to be forgiven?

What does it mean to forgive?

To relinquish giving or to take the giving?

MOURNFUL STRINGS

How long do the films take to make? And do you decide on the music

before you embark on the project or do things change as you go through?

Generally an animation, eight-minute animation will, say,

will take nine months of drawing to do.

But at many stages along the way rushes will come back,

30 seconds of film, a minute of film,

and I would look that with the composer Philip Miller,

and with Philip we will very often test a range

of different pieces of music with these different film fragments

and find what kind of music, what sort of music we should be using.

And then the music has six months to develop

while the rest of the film is being made.

So this huge space, where is your Triumph Orchestra

and where is your Lament Orchestra?

My Triumph Orchestra is the furthest room.

For the performance in Rome, Kentridge's frequent collaborator,

the composer Philip Miller, worked with two orchestras,

one for triumphs and one for laments,

which would play simultaneously on the night.

You can hear the music.

Take the cue from the music that we're hearing.

We keep Triumphs and Laments far apart for the moment

to really get the sense that they are these two opposing forces

or energies, and at some point we are going to then put them together

which ultimately will be

where the two groups eventually meet on the river.

-So these two processions...

-These are processions.

And then here of course they are making the clothes and preparing

-the shadows.

-It's very much in William Kentridge fashion.

Many things happen in one space at the same time.

This is truly the way he often works

is that you'll have costume designs being made in one room,

engineer building sculptures in another,

which can create havoc for a composer.

And then you have musicians working as well.

So all of this is happening in this huge tremendous space.

ORCHESTRA PLAYS WITH CHORUS

This commemoration of Rome,

this is also every year the time of Passover, 21 April,

so the Passover is the big migration from Egypt of the Jews as well.

Exactly. What drew me to the story of the Jews going into exile

was my thoughts around exile and Exodus,

of course thinking constantly

about the images of people being forced into exile, whether

it's Syria or Ethiopia, it's clear that with the last few years

we see people walking with their suitcases,

trudging along in huge processional lines across Europe.

ORCHESTRA PLAYS

Philip used a Zulu troubadour

and African singers and instruments

to bring to life the monumental frieze

that William has created along the river.

So here is the she-wolf.

This is the famous she-wolf which is in fact an Etruscan image,

pre-Roman image, but then Romulus and Remus

and the little familiar sculptures

are in fact an addition 2,000 years later.

-So Romulus and Remus...

-Become these two vessels.

So it needs to be the original image but with a slight twist.

And the texture here of the wall, it does evoke what you've been

-showing me...

-In those books.

-In those books.

-And on the other side of the black gap...

-What is the black gap?

The black gap - that which I do not remember.

It stands both for acknowledging the sense of partial history

but also for those parts of history

that we either choose not to remember

or are blocked from remembering.

Well, it's a reminder also about memory

and about how much is forgotten.

It is... And the wall does that because the wall is both

like a present memory now and then it will fade away

after five years or so and it will be like

something you should remember but it's kind of gone.

So this is half a kilometre that we've walked.

This is half a kilometre that we've walked.

So this is again a contemporary image that we've seen both

throughout Africa, but in the last years,

of people making their way to Europe.

BALLAD

The same obsession with migration and the chance to experiment

with scale drew Kentridge to a medium that might seem unlikely.

Now we're driving north from Johannesburg.

And halfway between Johannesburg and Pretoria is the area Diepsloot

where Marguerite Stephens has her weaving studio.

The tapestries themselves are a way which one can work

in the way you work with a projection.

You can start with a small drawing and then throw

a projector and it gets enlarged to the size of a wall.

There's a way in which tapestry is also an enlargement of

an initial drawing that might be that size.

And then gets enlarged to be a wall-sized image.

There's such dexterity. It's a bit like watching a harp being played.

All right. Hi.

-Hello.

-Hello.

-Hi. This is Alan Yentob.

-How do you do?

Marguerite Stephens. This is her studio.

The studio is run by master weaver Marguerite Stephens.

She employs 13 highly skilled local women weavers.

The hugely detailed tapestries are based on everything from

Russian constructivism to migration and polar exploration.

We are weaving a tapestry called South Polar Regions.

I think it's wonderful.

-This is based on one of the stencils from Rome.

-Yeah.

Of the procession of refugees.

Many of the tapestries relate to the operas that William

has designed and directed in Europe and America.

Nose is the opera by Shostakovich, based on the short story by Gogol,

that was produced, that I directed at the Met Opera in 2010.

In New York.

This was first done as a banner, printed as a banner,

and then the banner we translated into the tapestry.

The legend at the bottom was the phrase used,

it was the English phrase used in Soviet films of the time of Stalin,

where they all had to have what was called a "kheppi ending",

a happy ending. "Another Kheppi Ending."

If you wouldn't mind coming to help her.

INDISTINCT

There is a sequence in the opera

in which the Nose goes on its own journey,

and we had a lot of the Nose riding different horses

so it's a fragmented horse. A horse that shouldn't really be ridden.

There used to be a tapestry, like the Gobelins tapestries

were the most valuable artworks ever made.

So if you were a king marrying a queen,

a suitable gift from another king or queen would be a tapestry.

An oil painting was like giving someone a vase of flowers.

It was of no value.

But old tapestries, because they embodied so much human labour time

in their making...

So tell me about all these ladies who are working on it.

Treasure is one of my senior weavers.

William's work is a bit difficult but at the same time it's very good

and challenging. So sometimes you have to feel what you're doing

because art is about feeling. You cannot just weave anything.

You also have to understand it yourself before you do anything.

And I notice that your name, along with other names,

is on those tapestries,

so do you feel that you are one of the artists as well?

Yes, I am.

And I know myself that's what I'm telling people,

I'm also an artist because whatever I'm doing

I'm paying a lot of attention and I'm also making myself available

and trying to be artistic myself

because I cannot just weave a tapestry,

I have to relate to it, so I'm also an artist, definitely.

SHE LAUGHS

A CAPPELLA BALLAD

William, how much has Johannesburg changed since you were growing up?

That's 60 years. I think it's like so much in South Africa.

There are two things.

It's changed enormously, but huge areas of it have stayed identical.

The basic structure of the leafy, privileged white suburbs

being to the north of the city

and the majority of the working class living in Soweto

and in the townships around Johannesburg

is fundamentally the same.

There are some pockets in which the new black middle class

has moved into, but essentially they remain as white suburbs.

-That's what I sense.

-Astonishingly so.

The one thing you can see is a kind of an archaeology of fear

with the height of walls that have grown.

When I was a child they were very low, walls were waist-high.

There was a sense that danger was kept 20 miles away in Soweto,

outside the city.

And that from each political ruction in South Africa

has changed the nature of garden walls.

22 years after the first democratic elections, South Africa

is a very different place, but for the majority

life has barely improved and racial tension continues.

So Other Faces, which is the most recent of the Soho Eckstein films,

it's shot around 2010-11 in Johannesburg, and The Rage,

a piece of road rage which I witnessed

between a black driver and a white driver

over a very minor dispute, but the quality and quantity

of rage was so much larger than the event.

You felt that a whole history was boiling away inside.

-Still not forgiven.

-Still not forgiven at all.

And the big questions of race and reparation which have never

been completely dealt with and which sit there

still very present in South Africa today.

INDISTINCT

With its shameful past and perilous present, South Africa

is a complex and disorientating place.

William has spent his life here and its striking,

often painful contrasts lie behind all his work.

South Africa is complicated.

On the one hand everybody has a nostalgia for elements of

their childhood, tastes which one had as a child

which one never recaptures, which one's always longing for.

But also an understanding of the unnaturalness

and the distortion that that childhood necessarily had

because of the circumstances in which it was lived.

So there's always a guilt associated with nostalgia as well.

-Is this Soho Eckstein crying?

-It's Soho leaking.

It's something much more than just tears.

It's like a real inside spreading out and flooding him.

INDISTINCT

If you're telling someone else to do it

you have to have the illusion of knowing...

William Kentridge is an artist of global stature

whose work is shown in museums and opera houses around the world.

His production of Alban Berg's Lulu opened recently

at English National Opera to huge acclaim

and his current exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery in London

is on till January 15th.

'29 seconds. 31 seconds.'

People say, "Well, how does art function?"

-It kind of functions like this.

-Yeah.

It's an unnecessary, useless activity that is vital.