William Kentridge has spent decades building a visual language for historical atrocity — charcoal erasures, puppet theatre, the aesthetics of collapse. Oh to Believe in Another World is where that language meets its perfect subject: the Soviet 20th century, with Shostakovich's 10th Symphony as both spine and accusation. The formal conceit is the whole argument. Kentridge creates masks and models of Stalin, Lenin, Trotsky, Mayakovsky — some tiny, green-screened into painstakingly crafted miniature interiors, others life-size and strapped to actual dancers. The result is a persistent absurdity: Stalin's great monumental poster-face, bearing its mild half-smile, sitting atop a dancer's body mid-exertion. The face never changes. The body capers. It is, as Peter Bradshaw notes, hilarious — and the hilarity is doing real work, not decorative relief. This is the Chaplin maneuver: defiance through ridicule. But Kentridge and his Shostakovich are doing something slightly more ambivalent than Chaplin did with Hitler. The music itself is ambivalent — composed in the shadow of Stalin, premiered just after his death, combining what Bradshaw reads as fear, awe, revulsion, and a hysterical energy. There may even be grief in it, for the lost idealism that Stalin's terror consumed. The animation doesn't resolve that ambivalence; it inhabits it. The formal range is extraordinary. The film moves through a dusty Soviet museum, a wrecked auditorium with a newsreel still playing, an empty swimming pool with Lenin on a high diving board. Shostakovich himself appears as a puppet cutout, sinuously conducting his own symphony. Mayakovsky's verse provides the intertitles — 'We'll chase humanity into happiness with an iron fist' — and the faces of the condemned appear as photographs, not caricatures. The scale shifts constantly: models become lifesize, the miniature becomes hyperreal, the hyperreal becomes flat cartoon. Each movement of the symphony generates a different visual register. What makes this genuinely unusual among live-orchestral cinema events is the reversal of the usual hierarchy. Normally, even the best such events suffer from a gap: the music washes over the screen without quite locking in. Here the film was made for the music. The relationship runs the other way. Shostakovich's 10th is not accompaniment — it is the thing being illustrated, argued with, embodied. That inversion is the structural decision that makes everything else possible. The work is showing at the Baku International Arts Festival, in part to honor the 120th anniversary of Shostakovich's birth and in part to honor Elmira Nazirova — the Azerbaijani pianist and composer who was Shostakovich's reportedly unrequited love and lifelong friend. She appears in the third movement, dancing. It is the movement where Stalin, still smiling, takes out a gun and starts shooting. The fourth movement shows the masks coming off, and Kentridge's own giant hand entering the frame — the maker becoming visible, claiming responsibility. That intrusion is the right ending.
