The massive William Kentridge Five Themes at SFMOMA is a generous, almost overwhelming, gift to the Bay Area arts community; as was noted to me by a friend, it is difficult to think of another contemporary artist whose ambition is as wide-ranging as Kentridge's. The works on view, mostly made since 1990, incorporate history, politics, ecology, philosophy, and the aesthetics of visual, performing, and media arts. The themes referred to in the title are an indication of this wide spectrum of thought: Ubu Roi, the 19th century play about despotism; Soho and Felix, two characters from Kentridge's earlier work in the 1980s who embody the conflict and contradictions of capitalist South Africa; the Magic Flute, Mozart's opera that Kentridge has restaged; The Nose, Kentridge's upcoming opera staging based on 20th century history and 19th century literature from Russia; and generalized meditations on the nature of artistic production in the studio.

The exhibition is dominated by media art. It can be said to have a pair of cinematic bookends: the magical, century-old films of Georges Méliès to the recent Disney animation wall-e, whose establishing shots of a despoiled earth and a lonely tragic figure evoke Kentridge. Five Themes literally begins with Kentridge's homage to the early French film pioneer Méliès, and ends with Kentridge's drawing animations that elevated the artist into the international canon in the mid-90s. The hundred-year period marks out most of the subject matter of the exhibition, essentially a meditation on the depredations of the twentieth century's wars, genocides and environmental disasters. It is a dark vision of European bleakness, based on the facts of two World Wars, the Holocaust, Soviet imperialism, predatory capitalism, and of course, Kentridge's experience of South African apartheid. The ethos of this viewpoint is existentialism, its poet laureate Beckett, its scribe, Kafka. As Marc Rosenthal says in his introductory wall text, we are all "perpetrators, bystanders or victims."

The Méliès room, in MOMA's media art gallery, has a nine-projector installation. In the multi-screen homage to Méliès, objects fly around the room and time flips back and forth. Kentridge appears as an artist drawing self-portraits and struggling in a world where time and space don't behave. A nude, middle-aged woman gently embraces him, then disappears; a coffee pot lifts off and flies into the moon, à la Méliès' famous image of a spaceship crashing into the man in the moon. Busy ants in a negative-image film form clusters of constantly changing constellations. Books become ground for animation.

William Kentridge. Act III, Scene 9, from the portfolio of eight etchings Ubu Tells the Truth, 1996; Hardground, softground, aquatint, drypoint, and engraving, ed. 44/50; each 10 x 12 in. (25 x 30.5 cm); Collection of the artist, courtesy Marian Goodman Gallery, New York, and Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg; © 2008 William Kentridge; photo: John Hodgkiss, courtesy the artist; Printed by Caversham Press, Natal, South Africa.

The visitor then comes to the Ubu Roi work, based upon a 19th century play by Alfred Jarry about the fate of a corrupt monarch. In this iteration, black silhouettes, shadows, and occasional actors are depicted largely as refugees moving across the projection screen in weary, familiar fashion. These are remindful of Kara Walker's work, of course, but with defeat and abjection substituting for her travesties of the psychosexual nuances of racial politics.

William Kentridge. Portage (detail), 2000; Collage on book pages, eighteen panels, each: 10 4/5 x 9 1/4 in. (27.5 x 23.5 cm); 10 4/5 x 168 1/8 in. (27.5 x 427 cm) overall; Collection of the artist, courtesy Marian Goodman Gallery, New York, and Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg; © 2008 William Kentridge; photo: John Hodgkiss, courtesy the artist.

The next stop on this tour of Kentridge's modernist wonderland is an eight-projector video and text immersion into the Soviet experiment. Titled Learning from the Absurd: The Nose, it traces a path from wonderful early Constructivist breakthroughs to the disastrous devolution into Stalinist hell. This works are sketches toward the set for an upcoming staging at the Met in NY next year of Shostakovich's 1930 opera, based on Gogol's 1836 novel. We see dancing lines of text on torn paper in the Constructivist style, altered and parodied found film of early Soviet rallies and military parades, live action, and animated acting. The transcription of a 1937 trial of Bukharin is better than most dramaturgy, as the accused and Stalin debate who has a worse fate, the condemned or those condemned to keep on living.

William Kentridge. Black Box/Chambre Noire, 2006; Model theater with drawings (charcoal, pastel, collage, and colored pencil on paper), mechanical puppets, and 35mm animated film transferred to video, 22 min., 141 3/4 x 78 3/4 x 55 in. (360 x 200 x 139.7 cm); Commissioned by Deutsche Bank AG in consultation with the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation for Deutsche Guggenheim, Berlin; © 2008 William Kentridge; photo: John Hodgkiss, courtesy the artist.

For many, the highlight of the exhibition comes in the next room with the presentation, on three mini-stages over the course of about a half-hour, of aspects of Kentridge's 2005 staging of the Mozart opera, The Magic Flute. The opera is a fairy-tale setting for a debate about Enlightenment ideas of good government, through a Masonic point of view. The inarguably exquisite soundscore is supported by more of Kentridge's animated noodling, found footage, and animated figures in Monty Python fashion. A three-dimensional illusion is created with stagecraft scrims, producing an emotionally sweeping cosmological transcendence at its most effective. A recurring motif through the black and white images is a rhinoceros, symbolizing human rapaciousness. First seen shot on safari in early found footage, it is then recreated as a kind of shadow puppet later on. The theme of artist-as-magician shows up as Kentridge's form performs with birds. Domestic interiors appear and dissolve. Antique footage of German colonial militarism in SW Africa continue that theme.

In the final two rooms of the show, we see a large suite of drawings related to Kentridge's earlier 80s animated works about the characters Soho and Felix, as well as Nine Drawings for Projection, his iconic animations of suffering, misery and oppression. The exhausted visitor is offered a reading room in which to decompress.

Questions abound. In the end, is Kentridge a media artist whose drawings, bronzes and other works do not stand on their own at the same level as the video? Is he a popularizer of techniques initiated by other artists? Is his bleak vision of the world one that younger audiences can access? Certainly his seriousness of purpose, his intellectual rigor, and his grounding in historical reality are remarkable and admirable. Time will tell the extent to which his wide-ranging riffs on political and military oppression of the past hundred years cohere into more than mourning.

William Kentridge Five Themes is on view at SFMOMA through May 31, 2009.