Audio transcription

For more interviews and talks, visit the Harvard Film Archive Visiting Artists Collection page.

Haden Guest  0:00  

Good evening ladies and gentlemen. My name is Haden Guest. I'm Director of the Harvard Film Archive. And it's a really great honor to be here tonight to welcome you all and to welcome an artist who casts a long and deep shadow across contemporary art. Shadows are in fact a central concern and leitmotif of William Kentridge whose vast and truly multi-media, multidimensional and ultimately unclassifiable oeuvre finds a center of sorts, I would argue, in a series of short, largely black and white films which he began to make in the late 1980s just as his extraordinary talent began to be recognized internationally.

William Kentridge is here tonight, not only as a world-renowned artist but also as the 2012 Charles Eliot Norton Lecturer. I want to commend the Norton committee for inviting Mr. Kentridge, who has proven to be a truly spellbinding and extraordinary lecturer. In each of his mesmerizing talks, he's transformed Sanders Theatre into his studio and has given us unique and amazing access to his creative process. He's given equal weight and meaning to image as to word. He's not only an incredible lecturer, but he's also a captivating performer—as I think those of you who have been lucky enough to attend the lectures know—demonstrated brilliantly in his opening lecture, where he playfully deconstructed the gestural language of public speaking in a way in which so many speakers are revealed to be frustrated conductors. [LAUGHTER]

So I want to thank the Mahindra Humanities Center for their enlightened stewardship at the Norton lecture series and tell them really how thrilled we are to be collaborating with them on tonight's event. I want to thank Homi Bhabha, Steve Biel and Balrak Gil especially.

Tonight we're going to see a series of nine films that cut a diverse cross section through Mr. Kentridge’s work in cinema, including his very first film from 1989 as well as one of his most recent works from 2011. We can say that Mr. Kentridge’s films are motion pictures in the most literal and perhaps poetic sense, for they are in fact charcoal and paper drawings that are transformed through a process that Kentridge himself has called “Stone Age animation,” a laborious process in which he erases and reworks each drawing, and in this sense, they're animated by the swirl and smoke of charcoal dust. They're animated by the impossibility of a clean eraser, a process through which trace becomes as alive and vital as line and shadow, as expressive as the figure.

We can say that William Kentridge is not just a one man band, he's a one man symphony. And you'll realize this when again these are intensely handcrafted works. It is an exploration of drawing as nothing less than a mode of thought, as a way of channeling his polymath imagination, extraordinary range of references, which reaches across from Goya and Hogarth to German Expressionism to a range of cinematic references, which I hope that we being here at the Harvard Film Archive can discuss after this program, for Mr. Kentridge has very generously agreed to speak with us after after the screening, which runs for just over an hour in total, so Mr. Kentridge will join us to discuss his animated films and to take some questions from the audience. I want to ask you to please turn off any cell phones, any electronic devices that you have on you. Please resist the temptation to use them. And now please join me in welcoming Mr. William Kentridge.

[APPLAUSE]

William Kentridge  4:10  

There's a big relief in thinking that I'm going to speak for five minutes and not an hour. I will give you a couple of pointers towards the films but then essentially will show the films and I'll come back to face the firing squad afterwards. In the mid 1980s, having failed as an artist and failed as a theatre person, I thought I would become a filmmaker. And I spent a year or so writing a feature film script. And we sent it to various people and in the familiar words of Hollywood, they said, “Put the champagne in the fridge, don't open it yet, but put it in the fridge! We’re that close. Kevin Costner is very interested!” [LAUGHTER] And with those words, I understood I’d be involved in a fifteen-year process of jumping through other peoples’ hoops. And if I really wanted to make the film, the only way of doing it was to make it on my own, and not be dependent on the whim and the desire of other people, and not make my project that of trying to convince other people of the project that they should do so I could practice what I wanted to do.

So the animated film, the first one, started very directly as a way of trying to draw the film that I had written as a conventional feature script. With a condition that one, it had to be something I could do on my own in the studio, single person. And that meant two things, it meant firstly, that I wasn't dependent on the enthusiasm of anyone else for the film to start being exposed. Secondly, it meant I could have uncertainty in not knowing what I was doing as a way of working rather than as something to overcome before the work could begin. And thirdly, it meant that the day I decided I wanted to make a film, the film could start going through the gate of the camera, and would expose some seconds or minutes of film. So I would not have to wait for a script to be ready, I wouldn't have to wait for a synopsis to be ready. As soon as there was an impulse to make a film and I knew an image, I could start with that and let the film gradually expand. So none of the films made here started with a script or a storyboard. They all started with some scenes somewhere in the middle of the film, and the films expanded slowly. And the process of making the film—the months, or the weeks, depending on the film—was the process of discovering what the film was, what its story was, what its themes were, what it was trying to say, rather than knowing that in advance, carrying it out. I mean conventionally films start with distribution, from distribution backwards,. You start with a single line of the hook. You say to a producer, “I've got this great film: he wanted her, she wanted at all. That's the film we're going to—[LAUGHTER] That's the film we're going to make,” or somesuch, or “This is going to be Annie Hall meets Texas Chainsaw Massacre. [LAUGHTER] And so the principal was finding a way of working that worked against that structure of knowing in advance. It also means the films can't be made with assistance, because if you have an assistant, three things happen. Firstly, you have to pretend you know what you're doing. Secondly, when I tried working with an assistant, I'd work really fast, much too fast, to try to stop the assistant from being bored. And I found I was performing. I had to perform the act of being an artist making an animated film, for the sake of the person waiting for me to be ready to shoot the next frames. So there's uncertainty which can be built in. Not knowing what you're doing, allowing the film to take its own course or tempo or rhythm being given by yourself rather than the needs of the shooting schedule and the production manager and the producer. And time is money being behind it. I mean, essentially all this needed was a Bolex windup camera, 16 millimeter camera and a roll of film. A piece of paper and charcoal and the films could begin.

And most of the films here—I think seven of the nine—are films in a series which all use the same technique of charcoal drawings on paper, successively erased and filmed and erased and filmed and erased and filmed. So if there are sixty scenes in a film, sixty different images, there are sixty different drawings. Each scene is one drawing constantly altered. So they're not the thousands of drawings and things of cel animation, but a limited number of drawings.

The first films that I made, I had no idea they would be shown in galleries. I thought they would be part of the public body of work that gets seen. They were kind of idiosyncratic films made for myself. I didn't have to justify the characters, the names, the stories, what happened in them. They worked kind of like a diary, where any event could come into them. So it could be personal events. It could be events in the newspaper, events in the street outside the studio. But they were not dependent in any way on an overarching idea or script, and gradually, they would find the theme, make it up. And they've been made over the last twenty years. And so willy nilly you know, in spite of themselves, they are a kind of trajectory of South African politics. The first one was begun in the year before the ending of apartheid, 1989. They went through the period of transformation in 1994. And the most recent one was made last year, 2011.

There are also two other films. One used the technique of working with an actor in a painted set, something I did many years ago and have come back to more recently, rather in the style of Méliès making a film in a set that he himself had painted. So it’s partly an actor, partly it's a drawing, partly it’s a drawing in three dimensions. It's a sculptural drawing which is inhabited by an actor and that is filmed so it becomes flat again on the screen. That's the first film called Memo. And the fourth film called Ubu Tells the Truth is the detritus, the leaves, the leftover of a theatre production, which is a production called Ubu and the Truth Commission made in the mid 1990s, that referred very specifically to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa, which was the commission formed to investigate human rights abuses under apartheid. From that documentary material and working with Jarry's character, Ubu, we made a theatre production, which had in it many projected elements in the film that results, called Ubu Tells the Truth, is made up of the fragments of the film used for the theatre. And of course, the theatre production had its life and is finished and what remains is the film. And so in many ways, I think of the theatre production as an incredibly complicated, convoluted way of making a film, which is what we have here.

Then there is a film Journey to the Moon, the fifth film being shown, which is a film that goes back to Memo, the first film, of actors in the studio and the studio as a painted set. So it's both studio but it's also a decorated set for the remaking of the film Journey to the Moon. And I don't know how many of you saw the film Hugo, in which there were many references to the great film by Georges Méliès, Journey to the Moon. In the Georges Méliès’ film, the journey to the moon is very much a 19th century colonial journey. It goes to the moon as if he's going to Africa and there are savage moon dwellers with spears, and they chase the good colonialists off the edge of the moon and they return home and get a civic welcome. So this was trying to discover the moon in Johannesburg as being pretty much the same as Johannesburg itself.

The other films are all films in a series which involve two characters that developed when I first made the animated films. The characters arrived in a dream. Their names came from dreams. One was characterized in the dream as sort of a property developer extraordinaire. The other is described as a man whose anxiety flooded half of Central Park. That was the phrase in the dream. And I've been stuck with it for twenty-one years in terms of these characters continuing to inhabit all the films.

Most of the animated films are between six and nine minutes and six and nine minutes takes about a year to make: ten months to a year of animation, which is slow for making ten minutes of film. But the films also result in an exhibition of drawings. So if you think of a year to make an exhibition of drawings, that's fine. In terms of animation, this is really sloppy, messy animation. In fact, there are many animators who have come to me and said, “I don't understand why you don't even know how to make someone walk properly. And they’re showing your films in these places. Why don't they show real animators who know what they’re doing?”  So I'm very aware of them being unschooled. In fact, when I talk at animation schools, I’m mainly interested to look over the shoulders of students to try to get tips [LAUGHTER] on how to do the walking cycle properly and better. The first film you see Memo was made in a day, so it was a day of preparation and a day of filming. So that was about speed of improvisation, and the others are about a slow accretion of images. The total program will run for approximately an hour and I look forward to returning to your questions at the end. Thank you.

[APPLAUSE]

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Haden Guest  14:23  

Please join me in welcoming back William Kentridge!

[APPLAUSE]

Thank you so much for this incredible program. I thought I would start with a few questions before opening the floor to questions and comments from the audience. And I wanted to start by discussing– I mean, I'm a huge admirer of the Nine Drawings for Projection series that stars these characters that you told us in your opening remarks came to you in a dream and I'd like to know a little bit more about these characters. And in particular, Soho Eckstein, who undergoes something of a transformation across the series and I was wondering: was that transformation? You know, where he seems to become almost the conscience of the nation, these series of haunting flashbacks that he has. Was his transformation equally dreamlike and how did that take place?

William Kentridge 15:21  

No, the character started off, as you saw in the first film, very different to each other. And then somebody stupidly said to me, “You understand, of course, they're both you. They're both different aspects of yourself.” And as soon as I understood that, it became kind of impossible to draw them both in the same film. And so they got consolidated into the figure of Soho. But each film made, it’s so many years, you know, several years, it's three or four years, sometimes five years since the previous one—that it is unusual to see them as you've seen them this evening, after each other as like chapters of a story. So while I'm making them, I'm not so aware of these transitions. When you look at them retrospectively, yes, he's changed a lot from the beginning. I think also, one has to remember that the first one was made twenty-three, twenty-four years ago. So my shape then was much closer to Felix's shape, and in twenty-five years, I’ve grown to look more like Soho. [LAUGHTER] So that's also affected how the drawings and how the films are made. And when I started this film and the faces, I was certain there's going to be a role for Felix again. We haven't seen him for so long, he must come back in. But by the end of the film, somehow he hadn't yet appeared on a sheet of paper. I mean, there was a clear plan for him to be in some sequences. So I'm not sure about how much they– There's not a conscious shifting or thinking that Soho is changing from A to B. Each film is the result of working over the period in which the film is made. And in some way or other, they're addressing problems or questions that I was thinking about at the time. But it's more likely kind of the faithful old commedia dell'arte characters in this theatre company that won't die, and they keep on being hauled out to perform yet another role that's being given to them to do and in a way, they function as the visual vocabulary for looking at the ideas in the film, rather than the films being about them.

Haden Guest  17:39  

Much has been written and discussed about erasure and the trace in your films. I'm equally interested, though, in the line and, you know, thinking about the line as a certain quintessence of drawing, and I myself really thinking about these vectors that shoot across the screen, at times, resembling, as you've described them, surveillance lines. Other times seeming to sort of mark the scene of a crime, other times in stereoscope, they become these electric wires, seem to be tracing threads across the screen. And unlike the erasure, which seems to be about the removal and the trace, these lines often seem to be suggesting a certain potential, a certain vector, a certain enigmatic future that remains just a trace. I was wondering if you could talk a bit about these dynamic lines.

William Kentridge  18:46  

Yes, I think it's… not important to understand, but the films are simpler when you understand that in many ways, they're looking at what is possible with that technique. Now, if you say, “Well, I want someone to walk across the landscape, that they have the energy of walking across the landscape. With this technique, it means every frame, you not only have to erase the figure and redraw the entire figure, and then draw the landscape that you've rubbed out before to continue behind them. Whereas if you've got an actor walking across the screen, they simply walk across and the landscape appears behind them and they stay coherent as they're being filmed. So to do that with the drawings is very, not just laborious, but counter to the strength of the medium. Whereas a line that goes across a scene both conveys an energy and you can have an energy and it takes you an hour to draw, but not a week to draw five seconds. And there are animators who will spend six years making a four-minute film. And I absolutely don't have that kind of patience. So if you think well a blue line that goes across it has the energy of someone running across the screen, but you simply do a bit of blue and then you film it and you draw a bit more and a bit more and a bit more and in ten minutes, you've drawn your action across the screen. I mean, crowds that gather, which are gatherings of charcoal marks, are very efficient ways for the animation to work. If you're actually doing that with real footage, then you've got to get half the Indian army to be the crowd for the film Gandhi. And it's a massive logistical question, whereas a crowd gathered with charcoal marks is very easy. To get someone to speak in lipsync is very easy if you've got an actor. They simply talk. Or with computer animation, you can have fifty modules of mouths, which you choose and you put on. But if you're erasing and redrawing, something like that would be really inefficiently done, badly done, and with great difficulty. The face would continuously be twisting as you try to erase the whole face and redraw it. So a lot of the films in the end are also about the meanings of the film which come out of what the medium suggests what it's possible to do, what is not possible to do with the kind of ways of drawing so transformations are possible. Psychological changes are kind of impossible. So you have to find that in the other images.

Haden Guest  21:12  

I think so much of your of your films are so intensely cinematic, and I'm thinking of not only just the sort of silence slapstick quality of Memo, but also the sort of Soviet-style compositions in Mine. I was wondering if you could talk a bit about the importance of the cinema to your formation, to your imagination. And of course the Méliès film too.

William Kentridge  21:38  

I think black and white photography, particularly South African black and white photography—David Goldblatt, Struan Robertson, a whole range of... Peter Magubane, great photographers—were certainly very much– Particularly working with black and white drawing with charcoal, the natural vocabulary is that of photography or black and white cinematography, the tonal range given by a photograph. And because a lot of the references are photographic for the figures, for the people in the landscape, for the city scenes, there's a reference back to that and more to photography than to cinema. In terms of the structure of the film, there are fantastic, great Soviet films but particularly films like Man with a Movie Camera, in Ubu Tells the Truth, is a key reference in my head and it still is. It's a film I'll go back and look at again and fragments of it when thinking about making films.

I mean, one of the things about general cinematography, about making films is that from I don't know when it's 1915 Birth of a Nation or something, the camera starts moving and you get movement in cinema by the actual movement of the camera. The principle of these has to be that the camera stays static and whenever you have a panning across, the camera is fixed and I'm simply dragging the piece of paper in front—either with tiny increments if it's going to be a smooth pan or literally sliding the paper very quickly when it's one of those out-of-focus blow whip pans that you that you get and that's because it's not a complicated proper calibrated... You can get animation cameras on tracks which you can move half a millimeter and you can pan and move the camera as you would an ordinary film camera but then your filming becomes about mathematics about working exactly 2.8 millimeters rotation of each one to get a smoothness and mine are very much just moving it—not intuitively—but very quick marks across the sheet to know these are twenty-five gradations. We'll move that in one second. So it is always about turning time into distance into number which you can either do it as mental arithmetic or as serious calculus.

Haden Guest  23:59  

I was wondering if you could just talk a little bit more about about charcoal and how you discovered the potentials of charcoal for creating moving images.

William Kentridge  24:09  

Well, what is prior was the charcoal, making charcoal drawings before they became films. And the first films were made of experiments filming a drawing coming into being, seeing at which moment was the drawing complete, when did it die, when was it overworked. And then I discovered in fact that the drawing could continue. One could continue the alterations and the changing, so it wasn't as if I thought, “I want to make an animated film. Should I use ink? Should I use oil paint? Should I use sand? Should I use pixelation?” and decided on charcoal. It was rather I was working with charcoal and that showed a series of possibilities with movement. It's easy to erase. You can work with it really quickly. You can brush it on to get a big gray tone. You can work forwards and backwards with an eraser to make it light, with charcoal to make it dark, but it largely has to do with the speed and flexibility and the fact that it has this very rich tonal range, which is not the same as a photographic tonal range, but alludes to it.

Haden Guest  25:11  

Let's take a few questions from the audience. We can start with Ken Field right here, this gentleman with the glasses. There is a microphone coming to you.

Audience 1  25:21  

Thank you. The power of your films is so wonderfully amplified by the music and sound. And I was wondering if you would care to speak a little bit about not only the music itself, but also your process in working with your composer or composers.

William Kentridge  25:42  

I think, five of the films that we saw tonight, the music was written by Philip Miller, a Johannesburg composer who I've worked with since Felix in Exile, which was in 1994, I think. He was originally a lawyer, and when he started to work with me, he was about to make the transition from being a lawyer to being a composer. And someone had recommended him and I'd cut the whole film to a string quartet of Dvorak. So I said, Well, it's fine. He could write music to the film, but he was up against Dvorak. [LAUGHTER] Which he doesn't thank me for now, in retrospect. But the process is important that because the films don't have a script or storyboard, at the beginning, there's not much to tell Phillip. But after about three weeks or a month, there's maybe a minute of film that's been done, maybe two minutes of material. And then we'll start looking at the fragments of film footage, listening to a very wide range of music—both music that he's written and Hindemith, whatever, Handel, a whole range of different different kinds of music—to try to see what it does to the image or how it affects what you see, how you read the images that are drawn. And the music proceeds from that. So the drawing continues, and there are fragments of ideas and we will sit in his studio with him playing either literally on the piano or playing fragments on the computer of different ideas, until we find something that starts to change or affect how one sees the images on the screen. Sometimes it does it very literally; an image is very jerky, and if you have the right music, it actually smooths out what you’re seeing or it makes you comfortable with the jerkiness of the image. In the last film, Other Faces, there's a strange bird sounds and small sounds of the– That was originally done for a project that's going to be in a documentary and we were looking at how to make sounds of distant radio communications and Morse code and different things being sent across. And that was all music he prepared for this complete other project. And then while we were looking at possible sounds, he said, “Well, I have got this new stuff I'm thinking about for the other project, not for this for the other project.” And we put it on and in fact, it ended up with this film Other Faces and not with the other. So the fact of working very closely with the composer means there's a lot of space for discovering what kinds of sounds and music go with it. And then it's a backwards and forward process, so the film will get closer to completion and the composer will get closer to having sections of the music done. Ending at the last stage when the music will be written and recorded. And then the final tweaking of the editing maybe in terms of the music, so it's backwards and forwards, so they get closer together. And then in some cases, like in this case, in fact, when we've done a first mix, we both disliked some elements of the end of the film and came back and redid a fragment of the music at the end.

Audience 2 28:56  

Thank you. I'm wondering who were the Free Filmmakers? And also, I'm wondering the extent to which you or members of your family may have been more directly involved politically in the anti-apartheid struggle as I imagine you must have been and how.

William Kentridge  29:15  

Free Filmmakers was a filmmaking cooperative which a group of friends and filmmakers started in the late 80s, early 90s—many making documentary films—and I was part of the cooperative and so their name was put on the film. But it was really the fact that the editor and myself are both part of it. They made some very wonderful documentaries. They didn't have any success doing feature films which I'd hoped at some point would take off.

Iterms of work in anti-apartheid. I mean, I was a South African citizen during that time and I was not part of the underground, I was not part of the military underground. I would say that at a certain point, I was very involved with cultural politics, with artistic movements connected to politics. And at a certain point, I discovered that every argument I was in, every discussion and program of action, I had lost every single debate. And I realized there were people who were prepared to go to one more meeting than I would ever go. And every decision made would be reopened. So at a certain point, I retreated into the studio understanding that I was supremely inefficient as a committee, political animal, and whatever I had to say would, in fact, be said in an indirect way, but nonetheless, there in the studio.

In general, what I would say, as a perspective of white South Africans involved and concerned with the struggle against apartheid, there are maybe a handful—maybe twenty, thirty people, maybe a hundred people who are very deeply involved in trade union movements, in the underground. But for all the rest, I would say there are very few South Africans that can honestly say that they could not have done more. And I will put myself in the same category as that. I was involved with a number of people and we were concerned and busy and supportive of the anti-apartheid movement. But in terms of actually doing things, it was Black people in the townships. It was people whose lives were up against the police forces that are the real people who did the enormous transformations, with support by many different organizations, Black and white. But I have no illusions as to my part in the struggle.

Haden Guest  31:50  

Other questions? Yes, right here in the front?

Audience 3  31:59  

Thank you for being here. I wonder if you could talk a little bit about your use of numbers and lists and ledgers because you project them in many different instances, perhaps not in all the films but in several, and I have some associations, but I'm wondering whether you have a specific intention, and if you do, whether you want to talk about it.

William Kentridge 32:33  

I'm trying to think if I have intentions. [LAUGHTER] I mean, you're right that there are a lot of numbers. There's something fantastic about covering a surface, almost like embroidery, covering the surface with these marks. And it could be abstract marks. But in this case, they're mainly numbers. At some point, there's a kind of an idea of a moral bookkeeping of debits and credits, which goes through some of the films, of the balances. Some of the films are drawn on old cash books, like in Other Faces, and so that comes in, but I'm sure that you would have more interesting ideas than I do about what they–

Audience 3  33:12  

I’ll just quickly tell you two. [LAUGHTER] I mean, I thought on the one hand, perhaps, you were referring to Eckstein's ledger keeping but on the other hand, I also thought about the numbers that were put on the arms in the concentration camps.

William Kentridge  33:35  

I haven't thought of that. But let it be said in the film Mine, there's a scene in the showers and there are the tall chimneys of it. You cannot see an image of a row of showers without one of the associations being showers not just for washing yourself. And those tall chimneys also have all the other associations. Someone suggested to me that Soho’s pinstripe suit is concentration camp pajamas. That I've not thought. Those are based on, like the pinstripe suit my grandfather wore on the beach [LAUGHTER] when he went to the beach, but the numbers... I wonder. You may be right. I've not thought of it in certain, but I'm completely aware of these subliminal images and the way they sit inside us and come out and that images are never random. Even if they are randomly generated they bring a whole history with them. So both of those suggestions make sense to me.

Haden Guest  34:37  

Yes, right here. Will you pass the microphone, please?

Audience 4  34:46  

Thank you. To build on that previous question, I'm fascinated with the imagery that you have. With the exception of History of the Main Complaint, all the instrumentation, the telephones, the mechanical relays, are ancient, they're mechanical, you know, they hark back to another age. And I wonder if you could elaborate on that.

William Kentridge  35:07  

I can. There are two elements to it. The first is that there's something about the blackness of a Bakelite telephone that meets charcoal halfway. [LAUGHTER] That's kind of a negotiation; I'll bring the blackness, you bring the charcoal, and we'll make a party on the paper together. So there's something about the technology, about the material in which they're made and what calls to be drawn and what doesn't call to be drawn. But the second is that even though they're old technologies, as you say, they are mechanical technologies. That is to say they make visible processes, which often refer to contemporary phenomenon which are now invisible. So the telephone switchboard in stereoscope on the one hand is a 1920 stereoscope. But if you think of the crazy lines of connection, we have nonstop now between our telephones or computers, the email, we're far more connected by these lines which happen to be now be invisible in the way they used to be completely visible. You would take a line from one person and you plug it into a plug somewhere else on a switchboard and it was, on the one hand, a physical piece of copper on the other, it's a graphic line connecting two people. So a lot of the old technologies are connected to contemporary phenomenon, but in a way to try to make them visible.

Haden Guest  36:28  

Like a couple more questions in the very back. If you just wait for the microphone, please.

Audience 5

What about the image of the cat?

William Kentridge

The image of the cat?

Audience 5

Yeah.

William Kentridge 36:41  

The cat is another thing like the telephone; it meets the drawing halfway. The point about a cat with charcoal is you just make any smush and if you give it two pointed ears and a bit of a tail and whiskers, we believe it's a cat. I mean, we were once recording music with Philip and we were doing it in the sitting room of this woman who had owned the cello of the string quartet that was recording the music for stereoscope. And the film was playing on the television set and the quartet was playing and the cellist’s dog was in the room. And every time the cat appeared on the screen, the dog would focus. [LAUGHTER] And then every time the cat turned into a telephone, the dog would relax. [LAUGHTER] It turned from bomb to cat, it would be alive again. So there was something extraordinarily crude in the drawing, which nonetheless, we pick up so—and not just us—it’s picked up so quickly. So on the one hand, the cat calls itself as a possibility of drawing. I think I'd read The Master and Margarita maybe, when I started, which has an important cat as your attribute. I was thinking of Renaissance attributes, where you would have some animal as an attribute at your side, and the cat was the attribute of Soho, walking around him turning into the megaphone, doing different things. It's always a mixture of items, films which are in the news, so with Sobriety, Obesity and Growing Old, that was a film that was obviously made at the time of the first—was it the first Gulf War? It was at any stage, a stage where on the news every day saw reporters in Tel Aviv with gas masks in their hands about to put them on. And so that became the cat that turned into a gas mask—that had been on the news that day. In stereoscope that pictures people being thrown off a bridge and people being beaten, that was people thrown off a bridge in Kinshasa, and riots outside the banks in Moscow when the ruble was collapsing. So there are a lot of immediate short term references which are in the air and in the news and references cut out in each film. Sorry, that stops answering the question of the cat.

Haden Guest  39:00  

Let's take one more question right here in the very front. Amanda, thank you.

Audience 6  39:11  

We're curious about the process. So I'm wondering if you can explain a little bit more, because for example, I'm curious when you make– Because it's animation from your drawings, so I would imagine that you probably photograph yourself. They are mostly still photographs, except some parts that are video or you know, continuous. And so then what is the role between you and the editor? Do you take, for example, a fixed frame in a second, and then during the editing based on what energy and the speed you want, decide to film [UNKNOWN], because there's some parts which are faster?

William Kentridge  40:01  

There are two different ways. I mean, essentially the basic rule of thumb is two frames per alteration. So a straight film would be twenty-four different images in a second. With this, it would be twelve different variations with two frames of each image to make the movement. When that is done in the edit, sometimes it's slightly speeded up or it can be slowed down. But most of that happens in the film. I know I want something to happen quicker, so it will either every frame or the jumps between them will be larger. But particularly in the films which get finished digitally, there is a possibility of stretching and shifting, so that is something that happens in the edit with me and the editor. But the basic decisions about rhythm and speed are in the drawing as they are being filmed.

Haden Guest 40:56  

Well, I think that concludes tonight. And I want to thank you so much Mr. Kentridge for being with us.

[APPLAUSE]

©Harvard Film Archive