Hey everyone! If you are into art that completely blows your mind and makes you rethink what animation and music can do together, you need to hear about this. Down in Azerbaijan, the Baku international arts festival has been showing off what might just be the most incredible animated project out there right now. It is a one-hour visual and musical journey called *Oh to Believe in Another World*, crafted by the brilliant 71-year-old South African artist and filmmaker, William Kentridge.
This whole creation is a stunning mix of puppetry, dance, and humor, and it is designed to be experienced alongside a live orchestra playing Shostakovich’s 10th Symphony. The timing of these performances isn’t random, either. It ties right into the 120th anniversary of the composer’s birth this year, while also nodding to Shostakovich’s lifelong friendship and unrequited love for Elmira Nazirova, an Azerbaijani pianist and composer who studied under him.
To really get what makes this piece so special, we have to look at the music it was built around. Shostakovich’s 10th Symphony was inspired by Stalin and made its debut shortly after the dictator’s death. Historians and music fans alike have long wondered about the timeline here. Did the composer start writing it while Stalin was still alive, maybe even intending it as a dramatic tribute to appease the regime? Whatever the original intent, the finished music ends up capturing a wild mix of genuine fear, awe, revulsion, and a sort of hysterical reaction to the sheer madness of Stalin’s tyranny. There is this haunting, dark ambiguity to it—a feeling that a massive, terrifying era had finally passed, accompanied by a deep grief for everyone and everything that was sacrificed along the way.
For his visual accompaniment, Kentridge decided to build physical models and masks representing some of the most famous and infamous figures of the Soviet era. We see faces like Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, and the poet Mayakovsky. In fact, Mayakovsky’s own words give the project its title and supply the on-screen intertitles, featuring heavy slogans like, “We’ll chase humanity into happiness with an iron fist.”
Kentridge’s approach to these masks is fascinating. Some are heavily scribbled and blurred, while others are simple, stark outlines that look like constructivist cutouts. Lenin looks suitably severe, Trotsky appears oddly pained and outraged, Mayakovsky looks genuinely haunted, and Stalin sports a mild, unsettling half-smile. Some of these faces are attached to miniature models, while others are life-sized and worn by actual human dancers. When the human bodies and the miniature models move, they take on this bizarre, two-dimensional cartoon-grotesque quality. Their noble or stern facial expressions totally clash with their absurd, rickety flatness, making them look like moving posters or placards marching through a dark, theatrical landscape. It truly feels like a *danse macabre* of history and tragedy.
One of the coolest technical tricks in the film is how Kentridge uses green screens. He places these models inside meticulously crafted miniature interiors. Suddenly, you feel like you are peering into a tiny dollhouse diorama—similar to those famous Thorne Rooms at the Art Institute of Chicago that once captivated Orson Welles—before the scale shifts and the little models suddenly match the height of full-size humans in a hyperreal effect.
As the film rolls on, we catch glimpses of a dusty old Soviet museum, an abandoned auditorium where a newsreel keeps playing, and an eerily empty swimming pool with Lenin standing right at the edge of a high diving board. During the first movement, the Moderato, we see a gallery of faces flash by—ordinary people whose lives were destined to be crushed by the state. A title card appears, reminding the audience of just how tragic and heroic it is to believe in anything at all in times like those. Even Shostakovich himself pops up as a puppet cutout, sinuously conducting his own symphony.
As the tempo picks up in the second movement, the Allegro, the film starts to channel the kinetic energy of Vertov’s classic *Man With a Movie Camera*. In the third movement, the Allegretto, we catch sight of Nazirova dancing. But this is also the moment where the animated Stalin—still wearing that calm, unchanging poster-face with its mild half-smile—pulls out a gun and starts shooting. By the final movement, the Andante and Allegro, the masks finally come off, and Kentridge’s own giant hand physically reaches into the frame.
Now, you might expect a piece about Soviet tyranny and the horrors of Stalinism to be a pure, unrelenting tragedy. But what catches many viewers completely off guard is how genuinely funny it is. Seeing Stalin’s massive, monumental face plastered on top of a dancing human body—and watching that expression remain completely serene and focused on the horizon while the body beneath thrashes and leaps about—is absolute comedy gold. It has the same hilarious, absurd energy as Terry Gilliam’s animations for Monty Python.
Of course, this raises a big question: is it actually supposed to be funny? Charlie Chaplin famously proved that the best way to strip a monster like Hitler of his terrifying power was to laugh at him. Kentridge and his version of Shostakovich are doing something very similar with Stalin, creating an artistic ballet driven by black comic pain.
Many of us have been to live orchestral screenings where a new score is played along with a classic silent film. Those events are usually wonderful, but often you walk away feeling like the music and the visuals are running on slightly different tracks, sometimes washing over the action without a perfect fit. *Oh to Believe in Another World*, however, completely flips the script. This film was meticulously created to serve the music. The entire heartbeat of the project is that desperate yearning expressed in the score: the desire to believe in another world, a better world.
The original October revolution was fueled by people who dared to dream of a completely new world and actually lived to see it take shape. Yet, under the crushing weight of Stalin’s regime, those exact same dreamers found themselves yearning all over again—hoping for yet another world that could somehow rise up and overturn the nightmare they were currently living in. In the end, the music and the art stand together to mourn that lost idealism, while quietly reminding us that finding the courage to dream of a better world is still entirely necessary.
source: theguardian.com (www.theguardian.com)