Oh to believe in another world
Numerous pieces of music have been composed especially for a silent film - Shostakovich himself lent himself to the exercise. William Kentridge reverses the paradigm and imagines a film based on the composer's Symphony No. 10 , a victim of the Soviet regime.
A great-grandson of a Jewish emigrant from Lithuania, committed against apartheid, the South African William Kentridge certainly recognized himself in part in the life and work of Shostakovich. A life of which the composer himself offers a musical metaphor in his Symphony n°10, for which Kentridge creates a filmic counterpoint. It traces four decades of Soviet history: the revolution of 1917, the death of Lenin in 1924, the suicide of the Futurist poet Mayakovsky in 1930, the assassination of Trotsky in 1940, and the death of Stalin in 1953. 1953 is also the date of composition of Symphony n°10, whose second movement is said to draw an acid caricature of Stalin. As for the finale, it sounds like a celebration of having outlived him.
