Visitors to "William Kentridge: Five Themes" can enjoy it fully without worrying much about his works' intended meanings. No one seems numb to the inherently entertaining quality of his cinematic work, enhanced as it often is by his musical collaborator Philip Miller.
SFMOMA has achieved something remarkable in its exhibition design: presenting six separate walk-in theaters of Kentridge's film works with almost no sound bleed.
The individually projected "7 Fragments for Georges Méliès" play simultaneously around the walls of a large room, and when you first enter, they seem unwatchably busy. But a solo piano score by Miller provides a sonic thread to connect the otherwise silent spectacles and they grow more comprehensible with time.
"7 Fragments" strikes me as the keystone in the arc of "William Kentridge: Five Themes." The comical quality of some of its episodes at first appears remote from the concerns declared openly in earlier work by the Johannesburg native: ethnic violence, the burden of history, the pressure of conscience, the corrupting temptations of power and salvation of the individual's humanity. And Kentridge acknowledges that "7 Fragments" represents a turn toward reflection on the more private sources of his art.
Yet, from his comic homage to Méliès' 1902 "Le Voyage dans la lune," Kentridge wrings serious skepticism about the grandiosity of all sorts of human projects, from space travel to the transports contrived by artists.
Several other "Fragments" show actions happening in reverse. In one, he pieces together torn shards to arrive at a life-size charcoal self-portrait. In another, he walks about the studio thinking and seemingly summoning source material like a magician, as books and paper sheets drift up into his hands.
Although he trained as an actor - a failed one, to hear him tell it - Kentridge said in a 2006 lecture at SFMOMA that it took him considerable work to give a natural look to gestures he knew would run in reverse in the projected films.
More than a performance gimmick, more than a trick fundamental to film, the reverse passages in the "7 Fragments" continue Kentridge's artful meditation on the consequences of human actions.
Can we anticipate consequences, or do the limits of self-knowledge or moral awareness make that impossible? Is progress an illusion, or ought we still hope for it?
Kentridge inhabits these dilemmas with an ingenuity and heart found almost nowhere else in contemporary art.