NOTES
- W Kentridge, “Director's Note: The Crocodile's Mouth”, J Taylor, Ubu and the Truth Commission, Cape Town: University of Cape Town Press, 1998, pp viii–xv.
- G Hartman, “Tele-Suffering and Testimony in the dot Com Era”, B Zelizer (ed), Visual Culture and the Holocaust, New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2000, pp 111–124.
- Hartman, p 117.
- See especially “Translator's Preface and Afterward to Mahasweta Devi, Imaginary Maps” in D Landry and G MacLean (eds), The Spivak Reader”, New York: Routledge, 1996, pp 267–286; also “Subaltern Talk”, Landry and MacLean, pp 287–308. The term “face-to-face” is introduced by S Ahmed in her gloss of Spivak's notion of encounter in S Ahmed, Strange Encounters: Embodied Others in Post-coloniality, New York: Routledge, 2000.
- See E Kosofsky Sedgwick and A Frank (eds), Shame and its Sisters: A Silvan Tomkins Reader, Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1995; especially Chapter 6, “Shame-Humiliation and Contempt-Disgust”.
- Sedgwick and Frank, p 134.
- J Derrida, “On Forgiveness” in On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness, New York: Routledge, 2001 (trans. M Dooley and M Hughes).
- Derrida, p 55.
- Derrida, p 55.
- Derrida, p 49.
- It is actually in another vignette focussing on the murder of white American student Amy Biehl that the film comes closet to extolling the transformative value of the face-to-face meeting. In this well-publicised story, Biehl's parents, displaying a remarkable generosity of spirit, are figured as engendering the transformation in the murderers of their daughter.
- Y Henry, “Reconciling Reconciliation: A Personal and Public Journey of Testifying Before the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission”, unpublished manuscript. I am grateful to Yazir Henry for providing a copy of this manuscript and for discussions on this issue. See also: Y Henry, “Where Healing Begins”, C Villa-Vicencio and W Verwoerd (eds), Looking Back, Reaching Forward: Reflections on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa, Cape Town: University of Cape Town Press, 2000, pp 166–173.
- A Hungerford, “Memorizing Memory”, Yale Journal of Criticism, 14:1, 2001, 67–92.
- Hartman, p 122.
- Hartman, p 120.
- Ubu Roi has been interpreted as an allegory of the Vietnam war and also of totalitarianism in Eastern Europe.
- Ubu Roi, as Keith Beaumont has suggested “arises from a superimposition of the characteristics of puppet theatre or guignol upon a subject, theme or dramatic framework belonging to traditional live theatre in its most serious and even heroic forms.”: K Beaumont, Jarry: Ubu Roi, Grant and Cutler, 1987, pp 30–31.
- Meschke's production of Ubu Roi was first staged in Stokholm and subsequently performed in over a dozen countries.
- The Grand Guignol tradition is, as Beaumont notes, carried on today through animation or cartoons: K Beaumont, Alfred Jarry: a Critical and Biographical Study, Leicester University Press, 1984. Kentridge has also developed an eight minute animation film, Ubu tells the Truth, which is shown independently from the play.
- In the stage play, Ma Ubu is given the rotund form and pointy head. The Ubu of the projected animation makes an appearance on stage as a life-size three-dimensional body puppet, representing Ubu's conscience.
- C Christov-Bakargiev, William Kentridge, Brussels: Palais des Beaux Arts, 1998, p 67.
- G Bataille, Eroticism, trans. M. Dalwood, Marion Boyars, 1987, pp 177–196.
- Deleuze contrasts the sadistic text with the masochistic text in light of such features: see G Deleuze, “Coldness and Cruelty” in Masochism, New York: Zone Books, 1991.
- R Krauss, “The Rock: William Kentridge's Drawings for Projection”, October, 92, 2000, 3–35, p 23.
- Kentridge, p viii.
- Bataille, p 188.
- Bataille, p 189.
- Bataille, p 188.
- B Jones and A Kohler, “Puppeteers’ note”, J Taylor, Ubu and the Truth Commission, Cape Town: University of Cape Town Press, 1998; pp xvi-xvii.
- Jones and Kohler discuss how the illusion of facial expression is produced on the roughly carved surfaces, well keyed for illumination: “under the lights, the movement of tiny shadows cast by the gouging chisel, particularly in the contrast between looking up, looking forward and looking down, assists in the illusion of changing expressions on an otherwise immobile face”. See Jones and Kohler, above.
- Bataille, pp 188–189.
- The translator is often positioned, incongruously, in a shower recess. This is the same shower used by Ubu to wash away his sins, evidence of which—rendered through animation—literally vanishes down the plug hole as he is caught in reverie.
- The published script, based upon actual TRC testimony, reads “he didn't have this of the head…”. Jane Taylor explains: “Many of these strategies emerged in the workshop, as we attempted to create a particular singularity in the modes of performance with each of the different testimonies. It is something of the shock of reception that the performances reach for, so that one cannot entirely anticipate the structures of one's own emotional engagement, within a relatively stable logic of ‘truth telling’.” Communication with the author, 29 January, 2002.
- B Brecht, “A Short Organum for the Theatre” (1948), trans. J Willett, in BF Dukore and DC Gerould (eds), Avant-Garde Drama; A Casebook 1918–1939, New York: Thomas Y Cromwell Company, 1976, pp 501–532.
- Brecht, p 518.
- B Brecht, Brecht on Theatre: the Development of an Aesthetic, trans. J Willett, New York: Hill and Wang, 1964, p 37.
- Andreas Huyssen has noted that a similar twist of the estrangement device occurs in Art Speigelman's Maus in which Holocaust memory is rendered in a cartoon, substituting mice for humans. Spiegelman himself says he uses mice as ciphers of humanity not to distance readers from the characters described, but to refocus attention on the experience of those characters. Like the creators of Ubu and the Truth Commission he is effectively expressing a lack of faith in mimetic representations—dramatisations or photographic renditions—which purport to offer us a privileged viewpoint onto the event and those affected by it, an illusion of a close relationship to its subjects. See A Huyssen, “Of Mice and Mimesis: Reading Spiegelman with Adorno” in B Zelizer (ed), Visual Culture and the Holocaust, New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2000, pp 28–42.
- I am quoting a paraphrase of Brecht from F Jameson, Brecht and Method, New York: Verso, 1998, p 25.