William Kentridge's Shostakovich Animation Stuns at Baku Festival

William Kentridge's hour-long animated film Oh to Believe in Another World is screening at the Baku International Arts Festival in Azerbaijan, performed with live orchestral accompaniment of Shostakovich's 10th Symphony. The Guardian's reviewer called it "perhaps the most amazing animation I have ever seen."

Kentridge is 71. He is a South African artist and film-maker, represented by Marian Goodman Gallery, and his cine-musical creation is a collage animation with live-action choreography. The Guardian review describes the work as a marvel of puppetry, dance and humour that explores humanity, grief and idealism.

The Baku presentation carries a double dedication. It honours, in part, the 120th anniversary of Shostakovich's birth this year. It also honours the composer's reportedly unrequited love — and lifelong friendship — for his student, the Azerbaijani pianist and composer Elmira Nazirova. The choice of venue gives that personal history a local resonance: Nazirova was Azerbaijani, and the festival is staged in her country's capital.

What does the 10th Symphony hold?

The Symphony No. 10 was inspired by Stalin and premiered shortly after the dictator's death. The review notes that Shostakovich had likely been at work on the score for some time before that premiere — long enough, the writer suggests, for at least some of the composition to have been conceived without any sense of Stalin's death.

This timeline raises an unresolved question about the music's origins. Could part of the symphony, the review asks, have been originally intended as an obediently dramatic tribute to Stalin? The question is speculative. The source offers no documentary answer, only the logic of dates.

What the review does argue, at close range, is the score's emotional doubleness. The music arguably combines fear, awe, revulsion, and a hysterical reaction to the mad energy of Stalin's genocidal tyranny. The reviewer hears in it a darkly ambiguous respect for the dictator, whose victory in 1945 was a mainstay of the postwar dispensation.

There is also grief in the music's swirl. The reviewer suggests a feeling that a great and terrible era has passed away — and, with it, a kind of mourning for all that had been sacrificed to it.

What does this change for audiences?

For festivalgoers in Baku, the event offers a rare format: a full-length Kentridge animation synchronized with a live orchestra. The work runs an hour. It is not a screening with recorded soundtrack but a performed event, closer in spirit to a staged ballet of animated and choreographed images than to a conventional film show.

The Guardian's headline frames the result as a ballet of "black comic pain" — a tension that matches the material. Kentridge's collage technique, his puppetry and his live-action choreography meet a symphony whose own meaning remains contested between tribute and terror.

For Kentridge's international audience, the Baku presentation confirms the artist's continued expansion of the cine-musical form well into his eighth decade, and it ties his practice to one of the twentieth century's most ambiguous musical legacies.