Ubu Tells The truth: An animation based on the play Ubu Roi

Ubu Tells The Truth: An animation based on the play Ubu Roi 

By Areeba Adeeb

Over the years art and literature have been tightly bound, whether it is Goya, the painter, taking reference from a Greek myth to create Saturn Devouring His Son or Sandro Botticelli creating 92 pages of illustrations for the manuscript of Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri. With the progress of cinema, directors have been inspired to recreate the scenes from famous paintings into shots or frames in films (Harrison). For example, director Akira Kurosawa recreated the painting White Field With Crows (1890) by Vincent Van Gogh, as one of the scenes in his film Dreams in 1990. Similarly, the film, Shirley: Visions of Reality (2013) recreated the scene of the painting, New York Film (1939) by Edward Hopper. Through the interplay of art and literature, artists, writers, readers as well as audience have been able to explore, adapt and improvise in their own spheres. “It is a relationship that both refuses and defines the boundaries between image and word, upsetting the ways in which artists and writers invest in their media (Corser). Therefore, in order to study this interaction, this paper elaborates on a short-animated film, Ubu Tells The Truth made in 1997 which was closely inspired by a play titled Ubu Roi that was performed in 1896 in Paris, France.

Ubu Roi is a play written by Alfred Jarry, which was first performed at Théâtre de  l’Œuvre in Paris, France on December 10, 1896. The play revolves around the story of King Ubu, who under the influence of his wife, murders the King of Poland and most of the members of the Royal Family. However, the King’s son, Bougrelas, and the Queen escape but the latter succumbs to death. The ghost of the king appears in the son’s dream asking for revenge. Back in the palace, chaos ensues, and King Ubu starts taxing people heavily, murdering nobles, and throwing his henchmen into prison after they are no longer of use to him. A henchman escapes prison and flees to Russia and convinces the Tsar to declare a war on Ubu. While Ubu fights his enemies, his wife uncovers a treasure in the castle and decides to steal it only to be “driven away by Bougrelas, who is leading a revolt of the people against Ubu”. She runs to Ubu, who is now defeated, has been abandoned by his followers and attacked by a bear. She approaches him in disguise of Angel Gabriel, in order to persuade Ubu to forgive her to steal from his palace. Ubu is not fooled and both fight which is interrupted by the arrival of Bougrelas, who is after Ubu’s blood. Ubu then knocks down Bougrelas and both husband and wife flee to Paris.

The play cites references from various works of Shakespeare as a form of parody. Pere Ubu and Mere Ubu play the characters of those in Macbeth where Lady Macbeth instigates her husband to murder the King in order to access the throne and “is then challenged by the dead king's son. We see the ghosts of ancestral kings as in Hamlet and the queen’s premonitions of the ruler’s pending death from Julius Caesar. There is the endless treachery of Richard III and even the bear attack from the Winter's Tale” (Hurwitz).

Alfred Jarry was a French symbolist. The character of Ubu Roi was a parody on one of his teachers named Felix Herbert. “Jarry used satire in a distinctly 20th century way to attack society, the rules, the norms, those in power and practically everyone else a rebellious youth might want to savage” (Hurwitz). The character of Ubu is the representative of “everything that is wrong with the modern world” (Hurwitz). The hunger for power, the constant desire for money, selfishness, impulsivity, misuse of power, stupidity and arrogance make way into the play mirroring the society. Jarry’s work included a “variety of hybrid genres and styles, prefiguring the postmodern, including novels, poems, short plays and opéras bouffes, [sic] absurdist essays and speculative journalism. His texts are considered examples of absurdist literature and postmodern philosophy” (Alfred Jarry).

The opening night of the play on December 11, 1896, caused quite a stir in the audience when “Actor Firmin Gernier stepped forward to speak the opening line “Merdre!”. The audience erupted in pandemonium. It took nearly fifteen minutes to silence the house and continue the play. Several people walked out without hearing any more. Fist fights broke out in the orchestra. Jarry’s supporters shouted, “You wouldn’t understand Shakespeare either!” (Shattuck). Out of the many known personalities that attended the play, one of them was W.B Yeats who remarked, “[W]hat more is possible? After us the Savage God.” The shouts and violent interruptions continued throughout the play.  

Three accusations were made against the play, “the first focused on the plays (sic) alleged vulgarity and obscenity. Secondly, perhaps in view of the political atmosphere of the time, critics condemned the play and its performance as the theatrical equivalent of an anarchist bomb attack as an act of political subversion. The third accusation levelled against the play and its performance was that they in no way constituted as “serious” piece of literature or theatre but a gigantic hoax” (Beaumont).  

The controversy about the nature of play is still in debate. But “those who study late nineteenth century theatre do agree on is that Jarry attacked theatrical realism head-on and things just haven't been the same since” (Bookrags). “Ubu is at once a commentary on and a revolt against the world in which Jarry lived” (Rainey). The harsh reality of politics, power, filth and obscenity with a pinch of sarcasm and parody was not acceptable to late 19^th century audience, hence it was not accepted well. However, there were a few critics who saw Jarry’s work as ground-breaking. They saw it as the first work that could shake the consciousness of the people and change the course of theatre forever. “Once Pere Ubu waddled to the middle of the stage and uttered his scandalous, foul-mouthed opening line, the theatre could never be the same again. The entire dramatic experience had been fashioned into something new and different. Jarry opened a Pandora's Box and neglected to close the lid” (Bookrags).

Ubu Tells The Truth is a short animated film made in the year 1997, by a South African artist named William Kentridge who specializes in charcoal drawings and makes animations using the illustrations by making slight changes in the progressing frames. 

Ubu And The Truth Commission was a play written by Jane Taylor and directed by William Kentridge and performed first in 1997 in South Africa during the Apartheid era. The play follows the plot of Pa Ubu whose long absences from home and a different odour on himself is being suspected as ‘supposed infidelity’ by his wife. However, Pa Ubu reveals that the long absences are because he is an agent of the governmental death squad and the odour on him is that of blood and dynamite. The wife is relieved knowing that her husband doesn’t have a mistress but is ironically untouched by the fact that he is out there killing harmless civilians. With the abolition of apartheid, “the Truth and Reconciliation Commission is set in motion. Amnesty is offered those war criminals who come forward and offer full and truthful testimony regarding their infractions. Ubu, suspecting a trick, is unsure of what to do. The play follows his indecisive actions as they lead his path finally to a convergence with that of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission” (Wikipedia)

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission, set up in 1966, was a court like restorative body of justice formed after the end of Apartheid in South Africa. “Witnesses who were identified as victims of gross human rights violations were invited to give statements about their experiences, and some were selected for public hearings” (Wikipedia, Truth and Reconciliation Commission South Africa). Perpetrators of violence and government officials who were involved in mass killings were also asked to testify and request Amnesty from both civil and criminal execution. "The Commission itself is theatre," wrote William Kentridge, "or at any rate a kind of ur-theatre [...]. One by one witnesses come and have their half hour to tell their story, pause, weep, [sic] be comforted by professional comforters who sit at the table with them. The stories are harrowing, spellbinding. The audience sit at the edge of their seats listening to every word. This is exemplary civic theatre, a public hearing of private griefs [sic] which are absorbed into the body politic as a part of a deeper understanding of how the society arrived at its present position" (Kentridge).

“In the late 1990s, Kentridge was invited to participate in an exhibition entitled "Ubu + 100". A whole series of narratives about the character was produced by him,  fitting the iconic villain into a South African context” (Wafer).  In these etchings, Kentridge created the classical form of Ubu as represented by Alfred Jarry along with a separate naked form of him stuck inside his body. The two distinct forms represent the differentiation between “public and private self” (Wafer) of Ubu. “The absurd but devastating despot is pictured in chalk white outline, wielding his sword and pontificating through a megaphone, while the nude figure is shown trapped within, subsumed by his outer persona but constantly trying to rid or cleanse himself of his public actions” (Wafer). Kentridge used his 8 etchings and created a series of 30 drawings along with images from documentaries to create an animated film depicting violence in the Apartheid era. 

To set the point of view, the film begins with a charcoal figure of Ubu entering into the frame and encountering a human eye which is depicted as the ‘all seeing eye’. Reminding us of Chien Andalou, Ubu slits open the eye, extracts the eyeball and wears it on himself eventually transforming into a camera tripod. The camera tripod keeps flashing into real human eye. “By visually linking the animated eye to the human eye gaping in terror, Kentridge mediates this external point of view through an emotional paradigm: we are about to see terrible things” (Nordstrom). The camera tripod serves as a witness to various torture, killings and bombings of civilians and protesters, which is depicted by the bones and severed hands along with weapons going down the drain under a shower. Through the course of animation, Ubu is seen transforming a number of times, sometimes with the Ubu head on top of a tripod, and sometimes as a radio affixed to the tripod, with the only indicator of the archetype existing as a spiral” (Nordstrom). Using simplified lines, Kentridge creates a bizarre and violent effect in his narration. In one instance, a pig head is blown up by a Walkman which is the depiction of “a well-known assassination in which a black, activist-lawyer was killed in such a manner” (Nordstrom). Interestingly, Kentridge animates not the assassination, but the testing of the device, which was, in reality, tested on pig heads. After a series of violent actions, it led to a scene where Ubu is sitting around a table with conspirators. A packaged bomb is made by them that sails through a map and drops on the door a family, killing the mother and the child, then sails and drops in a bar among unsuspecting civilians, killing all. We then see a series of violent tortures, footages from documentaries based on Apartheid torture. In the last scene we see the tripod camera bringing out a gun in place of its lens and killing the civilian and bombing it multiple times and the film ends with a sign of Ubu up in the sky.

Both the animation and the play serve as the mirror to the society in different time frames in history. Both deal with the theme of power, torture, and unjust practices in the hands of authority and the state. The play in the late 1800s attacks the conscience of the people, making the audience face the harsh reality of the society, so much so that it difficult for the people to accept them. The animation on the other hand makes the audience feel the same but instead of using Ubu as the main character, he created a tripod who is the “witness of all the human right violations under apartheid” (Ando). The last scene of the film that depicts the tripod camera shooting a civilian, is the representation of the viewers who refuse to speak against the violence and play a significant part in supressing the people, in fact worse than that of oppressors. The violence depicted in the film is used as a "focal point for young, educated, white South Africans to protest the injustice of apartheid" (Molesworth). Both Jarry and Kentridge use their work of literature and art respectively to rebel against the system, attacking the conscience of the people and inspiring them to speak against them as well. Two different art forms from two different eras, come together to inspire the other in order to fight the wrong and the prevailing conformity.

By examining the play and animated film and the works related to it, one can say that art and literature can exist as both dependent and independent entities. The interplay between them forms a chain of influence and inspiration across the time frames in history and creation of news forms of art or literary pieces. Some find their way into films in small frames while some create a total history on their own. They can be seen revolving around each other to teach the world about liberal arts and humanity. While researching about the topic, one comes across several examples of artists, writers and playwrights that help accentuate each other’s work for better understanding of the audience as well as the readers. They work together, consciously or unconsciously lifting and inspiring people to create more, consume more and question more.  The interplay of the play and the animated film analysed here is just a small part in understanding the vast influence of art and literature together as an entity and it would be interesting to see what more people can come up with while citing influence from previous works and adopting it according to the current scenarios.

Notes 

1.     Please note that any direct quotes from the nineteenth century texts are written in their original form, which may contain grammar mistakes according to twenty-first century grammar rules. 

2.     The works cited in this paper are from online articles and journals, who may have the original citations of works used in the journal.  

3.     The original animated film ‘Ubu Tells The Truth can be watched on YouTube from the following URL. https://youtu.be/cVWh_kYD2GY

Works Cited 

 

·      Wikipedia (n.d.). <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Paintings>. 

·       Wikipedia (n.d.). <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postmodern_philosophy>. 

·      Wikipedia (n.d.). "Alfred Jarry." <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Jarry>.

·      Ando, Erica. "William Kentridge: Five Themes (review)." n.d. 

·      Armitage, Helen. "10 Artworks By Goya You Should Know." Culture Trip (2016).  <https://theculturetrip.com/europe/spain/articles/10-artworks-by-goya-you-should know/>. 

·      Beaumont, Keith. Jarry: Ubu Roi. n.d. 

·       Bookrags. (n.d.). <http://www.bookrags.com/studyguide uburoi/criticaloverview.html#gsc.tab=0>. 

·       Corser, Elizabeth Benjamin and Sophie. "Literature and Art: Conversations and  Collaborations." n.d. Pdf. <http://www.mhra.org.uk/pdf/wph-9-1.pdf>. 

·      Harrison, Allan. "14 Famous Film Scenes Directly Influenced By Paintings." Taste of Cinema (2018). <http://www.tasteofcinema.com/2018/14-famous-film-scenes-directly influenced-by-paintings/>. 

·      Hurwitz, Dr. Nathan. "Ubu Roi: Summary, Themes & Significance." study.com (n.d.).  <https://study.com/academy/lesson/ubu-roi-summary-themes significance.html#:~:text=Ubu%20Roi%20is%20a%20satirical,mock%20a%20teacher%20he%20hated.>. 

·       Kentridge, William. (2007): 9.

·       Molesworth, Charles. "Ethnography, Art, and Justice: The Example of William Kentridge."  2006. 

·      Nordstrom, Ingrid. "The Tragic Employment of an Archetype: Catharsis in William Kentridge's Animation." 2013.  

·      <https://www.academia.edu/5882179/The_Tragic_Employment_of_an_Archetype_Catharsis_in_William_Kentridge_s_Animation_Ubu_Tells_the_Truth>. 

·       Rainey, Brian E. "Wascana Review." n.d. 

·       Shattuck, Roger. The Banquet Years. n.d. 

·       Wafer, Jeremy. "William Kentridge." (n.d.).  

·       <https://africa.si.edu/exhibits/insights/kentridge-ubusuite.html>. 

·      Wikipedia. "Truth and Reconciliation Commission South Africa." (n.d.).  <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truth_and_Reconciliation_Commission_(South_Afric a)>. 

·       —. Ubu and the Truth Commission. n.d.  <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubu_and_the_Truth_Commission#Plot>.