Without having seen either Felix in Exile (1994) or History of the Main Complaint (1996), I’m going to hazard an encounter with these films based on the secondary sources I have been able to collect and what the artist, William Kentridge, has said about his work. That’s not to say that holding tightly onto his every word will make these films any more clear. After reading the quote above I think that the opposite is true. What I should say is that I’m going to avoid writing a summary. Instead, let me offer a place to begin: somewhere to start thinking about what his work does, what it is doing, and what it continues to do.
Kentridge’s films are deceptively simple. Each begins with a charcoal drawing on paper. He shoots a single still-frame with a 16mm movie camera. Then he goes back to the same image, erasing sections to imply movement – for example, to show a car driving down a street or water flowing from a faucet. This very repetitive and labor-intensive (most of his films take take 4-5 months to complete) process also records the frames as they go through successive layers of erasure. Instead of working with a new page for each frame, the drawings, showing traces of previous images, can be used over and over. The shots are then collected and the narrative takes shape during the film editing process. Kentridge makes his artistic practice transparent and we can read how the films were assembled. The visual effect is something like a “three-dimensional ‘drawing’” that is drawn and erased over time.
Keeping Kentridge’s process close by, I want to push it a bit further because I think that what he is doing is inextricably tied to what his films eventually do. By using erasure to imply movement and time, Kentridge avoids a clean page and accepts the traces of previous frames. As a film, what we see is a sequence of palimpsests where the past and present overlap. In doing so, I think, Kentridge makes a very pointed comment on the passing of time and the writing of history. In focusing on the events, injustices, and crimes of the past his films don’t simply chart a tidy narrative of ‘what has happened,’ but, more importantly, they ask us to look for and read what has been erased. And in doing so, we find a past that interrupts the present that, like the ghost, frightens us with its uncanny proximity.
As a South African, Kentridge is very conscious of his country’s history and its colonial past. Continuing to emerge out of apartheid, South Africa has spent many years looking backwards in order to punish the criminals of the past. But it has also used this backward glance in order to move forward and into the future. With various sources reporting on government documents and witness testimony, the details of South Africa’s apartheid history are becoming more clear, but at the same time, more opaque.
That’s not to say that Kentridge, as an artist, is avoiding the specifics of South Africa’s dark past or refusing to take a stand against the system(s) of apartheid. His work is still doing something. As Dan Cameron has said, “Rather than pick a side in the argument, it might be better to ponder what such a quandary reveals about the limits of critical language within the new global environment, where it becomes both necessary and redundant to consider the aesthetic and critical merits of an artist’s work in tandem with cultural identity.”
So what do these films do? Working within the opposing claims of truth/fiction, right/wrong, victim/victimizer as they relate to South African apartheid, they avoid falling into and defending a polemical stance. And, more importantly, they do not polarize the audience onto either side of ‘the argument’; there are no sides to be chosen. These films conjure the complex issues of race, nationality, and trauma as they continue to swirl together and haunt the present.
