The Metropolitan Opera: The Nose

The Metropolitan Opera: Lulu

William Kentridge’s multi-layered production of Berg’s masterpiece stars charismatic soprano Marlis Petersen in the title role—the enigmatic and alluring woman who is equal parts femme fatale, innocent girl, and abused victim. The men around her, whose lives she forever alters, are Johan Reuter as newspaper publisher Dr. Schön; Daniel Brenna as his composer son, Alwa; Paul Groves as the Painter; and Franz Grundheber as Schigolch. Susan Graham sings Countess Geschwitz, and Lothar Koenigs conducts Berg’s landmark score.

Self-Portrait as a Coffee Pot

Pioneering artist William Kentridge chronicles his creative process during COVID. Interconnected episodes explore culture, history, politics, and profound truths through art-making, inviting viewers into his studio.

Second-hand Reading

A film constructed from a succession of drawings on old books.

Tide Table

The film sees a businessman (the Soho Eckstein figure from Kentridge's earlier films) standing on a hotel balcony watching the waves. Time passes, as the sea rolls back andforth in endless repetitions. We as viewers observed from his point of view. Then the scene shifts to a large drawing of a man, still in his business suit but now alternately sleeping and reading a newspaper at the water's edge in a deck chair. The drawing is folded into a series of images that provide a visual mediation on time's passage, on industry, on ildeness. Kentridge's work is often densely allusive, and here the film alludes to the Old Testament. The artist expressedly indicates that biblical accounts has informed his thinking. It is what he refers to as being 'over-determined' in that the motif arises from several distinct sets of meaning.

Mine

A journey into the mines provides a visual representation of a journey into the conscience of Kentridge's invented character, Soho Eckstein, the white South African property owner who exploits the resources of land and black human labour which are under his domain. Throughout the film the imagery shifts between the geological landscape underground inhabited by innumerable black miners and Soho's world of white luxury above ground. When Soho, breakfasting in bed, pushes down the plunger of his cafetière, its movement is transformed into a rapid descent through the tray, through the bed and into the mine-shaft. Here the miners' world of overwhelming misery is depicted in claustrophobic tunnels where they are trapped digging, drilling and sleeping, embedded in rock. Above ground, Soho sits at his desk in his customary pin-stripe suit and punches adding machines and cash registers, creating a flow of gold bars, exhausted miners, blasted landscapes and blocks of uniform housing.

The Metropolitan Opera: Wozzeck

Berg’s 20th-century shocker stars baritone Peter Mattei in the title role, with Music Director Yannick Nézet-Séguin on the podium and soprano Elza van den Heever as the long-suffering Marie. Groundbreaking visual artist and director William Kentridge unveils a bold new staging set in an apocalyptic wasteland.

Automatic Writing

Charcoal animation, taken from from Point of View: An Anthology of the Moving Image (2003).

Zeno Writing

William Kentridge (1955) was inspired in this case by the novel by Italo Svevo The Conscience of Zeno (1923). Kentridge concentrates on the main character whose fears and interior torments reflect the social violence and the brutality of the First World War. Through Zeno, the artist explores the development of notions of history and belonging as well as the way in which our identities are defined by social and political changes. Unlike traditional animated cinema based on thousands of drawings, Kentridge composes his work using a small series of drawings which are successively erased, redrawn and photographed throughout the various stages of creation, which he then mixes with paper cut-outs and archive images. This technique, which he has made his own, thus perfectly illustrates the process of memory which erases, alters and gives rise to multiple images.

10 Drawings for Projection, 1989-2011

An outdoor performance and film screening that brings together all of the short animated films from internationally renowned South African artist William Kentridge's Soho Eckstein series.

Journey to the Moon

In KENTRIDGE’s cross-disciplinary, cross-media world of artistic creation, images are not merely background supporting characters for theatre or installations, but are seen as an important intermediary to understanding the world. Taking Plato’s ‘Allegory of the Cave’ as an example, he feels that the prisoners in the cave believed the shadows on the wall represented reality not because they were controlled by hallucinations, but because silhouettes projected onto walls by firelight were the beginning of mankind’s understanding of the meaning of the world.

Mozart: Die Zauberflote

From the Queen of the Night's vocal pyrotechnics to Papageno's chirpy birdsongs, The Magic Flute is one of Mozart's most charming and engaging operas. However, its fairytale surface conceals the mysteries of an initiation ritual and a multi-layered plot, packed with allegories to fire up the imagination. This celebrated production by artist William Kentridge joyfully bursts onto the stage of Teatro alla Scala in Milan, featuring the dazzling Russian coloratura Albina Shagimuratova as the Queen of the Night, and Italian bass Alex Esposito as Papageno, one of the most sought-after artists of his generation.

Shadow Procession

In KENTRIDGE’s cross-disciplinary, cross-media world of artistic creation, images are not merely background supporting characters for theatre or installations, but are seen as an important intermediary to understanding the world. Taking Plato’s ‘Allegory of the Cave’ as an example, he feels that the prisoners in the cave believed the shadows on the wall represented reality not because they were controlled by hallucinations, but because silhouettes projected onto walls by firelight were the beginning of mankind’s understanding of the meaning of the world.

Notes Towards a Model Opera

William Kentridge’s Notes Towards a Model Opera (2014–15) is an 11-minute video work that pulses with visual ingenuity and historical resonance. Crafted for Beijing’s Ullens Center in 2015, it dissects the Cultural Revolution’s eight model operas—propaganda ballets and plays designed to forge Mao’s ideal revolutionary spirit. Kentridge transforms their rigid ideology into a fluid, multi-screen meditation on revolution’s dreams and failures, blending China’s past with global echoes.

Johannesburg, 2nd Greatest City After Paris

William Kentridge’s ironic tribute to his hometown, animated on the basis of 25 drawings, is the first film of his “Drawing for Protection” cycle, in which he unfolds the triangle between Johannesburg building tycoon Soho Eckstein, his wife, and the dreamer Felix Teitelbaum. In this film he introduces the central characters of his meta-narrative which, located in a South Africa of the last days of a crumbling Apartheid, becomes an allegorical reflection on socio-political power relations.

More Sweetly Play the Dance

The new work made by William Kentridge specially for EYE is a 45-metre-long frieze that depicts an endless parade of figures who collectively form a kaleidoscopic image of people on the move. These are pictures that hit us every day through the media, of people fleeing from hunger, war and sickness, which Kentridge sublimates into an impressive procession that evokes their sadness yet also conveys their vitality.

Wozzeck

A study of a man's physical and mental limitations. In the 24 quite harsh and grueling fragments of the unfinished drama, a body and a mind are tested as far as they can be pushed before their owner goes over the edge. Is there just one thing that proves to be too much for Franz Woyzeck, or is it an accumulation of miseries and torments of a wretched existence? Woyzeck is perhaps not so much a bleak account of how miserable life can be as how much strength is required to deal with the daily vicissitudes of life and how delicate and fragile a balance the human psyche rests on.