William Kentridge

NK

I’m curious where the animating impulse began for you. When did you realize that you could make these drawings move?

WK

The first of my charcoal animations happened in 1989, about 35 years ago. It started with a friend leaving a 16 millimeter camera in my studio and then showing me how to use the cable release to shoot at one frame at a time. And so I shot whatever came into the studio: people, visitors, children, with a duration so it was like they’d jump across the floor. And there was one small section where I’d drawn and altered a drawing as I shot. When the full spool was developed, I showed it to a friend who was an editor, and he said, “Yeah, it’s all fine, but in fact the most interesting part is when this charcoal moves. And I said, “No, no, that’s impossible. You know how slow that is? If somebody walks across the studio, you could capture movement within seconds. But with charcoal it took like two days, which only occupied four seconds in the film.” And he said, “Yeah, I know. But really, that’s the only interesting part.” I said, “Are you serious? I’m going to spend months doing this!” Anyway, I’d absolutely not considered it, but I soon discovered that you could both follow the process of making a drawing, shooting it frame by frame, and that when the drawing was finished, it could still continue. And that was a moment of art.

So that was the beginning of my revelation. But then subsequently I kept finding earlier pieces of animation—films that had been made ten years earlier, of drawing frame by frame on a piece of blank 35mm film. Drawing I’d done on successive pages of typing paper so you could page through them, where each page is a different frame of the film. I was about 15 years old when I first did that, which must have been the first one. Then an old friend found an 8mm home movie from when I was about 12, where I’d done a piece of two-fold animation, both of drawing and with moving objects going frame by frame.

So, in fact, the earliest animations go back to when I was about 12, and I think that even one stage earlier there were the games you played at school of drawing dots in a corner of school textbooks. Like if you were very bored with Latin you would draw a ball bouncing in the corner. So the games of how you transform static images into the periods of movement go back a long way. But the charcoal animation, that was much later. It wasn’t because I thought, “Let me do an animation.” I said, “Let me see if I can follow what the process of making a drawing is.” The charcoal was a given, I was already making the charcoal drawings and that found its form.

NK

You made Johannesburg, Second Greatest City After Paris in 1989. Which makes it your first animated film project, right?

WK

Correct. The origin story of that film predates my foray into animation, when I wanted to be a conventional filmmaker. I had written a number of scripts, and one of them was about people living at the edges of Johannesburg. There was a wealthy family in the house and a group of people living in the wastelands outside. I worked on it for several months with a friend and sent treatments to people, and it went across to Hollywood where, of course, people said, “Put the champagne in the freezer. Don’t open it yet, but put it in the freezer. We’re talking to Brad Pitt, we’re talking to so-and-so person…”And at a certain point I thought, “No, this is ridiculous. I’ll spend my life waiting to jump through other people’s hoops. I’ll be dependent on other people’s enthusiasm to practice my métier. I need to find a way of making films that are not dependent on anyone else, without writing a proposal or having it worked out in advance. I’m not spending my energy making other people enthusiastic about the things I want to make.”

So the first film, Johannesburg, Second Greatest City After Paris, was done in response to abandoning the feature and saying, “I’ll make the feature as an animation.” And one day, I got a roll of 16 millimeter film, I got the camera and I put the camera upon the sheet of paper. And so on day one of the project film was going through the shutter, and I decided that I will work out what the film is as we go. That principle—of not having a script or a storyboard, never having to try to explain it to someone else before it begins, never having to wait on other people’s say-so for a project to get going—was the breakthrough for me. In the same way that, for an artist, you shouldn’t first have to get permission from 45 executives in a country 8,000 kilometers away to be able to make your first mark of charcoal. You shouldn’t have to first write the essay of what your charcoal mark will mean. You begin, and you hope that at the end some people you know will see it. That became my basis for working with the charcoal films, and it became the basis for this series. It too began without a script or a storyboard. Thankfully, we were able to gather very supportive producers along the way, who were prepared to come along and understood how the film would work. And at a certain point, I had to show proposals to people, but it was not in order for the project to begin.

NK

What was the process that jump-started this series?

WK

This series began as an invitation from a Broadway producer to direct a big Broadway production. He’d seen another piece of my theatrical work, and the piece of theater that was suggested for me, when I read it, was so out of the question. It was about a part of the world that was completely outside my terrain. But I thought, “Okay, if I’ve got the attention of this producer, let’s meet in New York.” I thought of playing like I was committed. What would I want him to produce if he’s not going to produce that work of mine? So I dreamed up this idea of a series, a bit like a series of lectures that I had given some years before, and I described them to him over breakfast. He was certainly polite, but completely disinterested in it. Which was not too calamitous, since a year or so later he was completely disemboweled by #MeToo. I don’t know, he may still be producing things, but certainly it was a lucky escape. But, by then—this was a couple of years before COVID-19—I had these notes for fifteen possible episodes of themes.

And then, in COVID, when we thought we were going to be locked down for who knows how long, and travel was being restricted, I realized I’d have a few months. So I began—the first filming began about the second day of lockdown. Initially, it was just me and one studio assistant who was staying in our cottage, within our bubble. We were all part of the same group and our children were with us. But it meant I had a crew of one. He did the sound and the lighting. And he’s usually a maker of sculpture.

NK

Wow.

WK

And it was very good, the first eight weeks were just the two of us. And then as the lockdown lifted, more people could come back into the studio, and I started to make a crew. But the crew was never bigger than three—two usually. Even when you had the whole band in, it was a cameraman and the sound man and that was it.

NK

That’s amazing.

WK

Well, it was possible because it’s made over four years. Normally, when you shoot something you have six weeks. But here, it was: “Let’s shoot on Monday and Tuesday this week and I’ll do the conversation, but then I need five days to do the drawing. And then let’s see on Monday when we’ll work next week.” It was great to have a cameraman who had that flexibility. And sound was done in-house, in the studio, so I could go get some actors on this day or that. But it was spread out over a couple of years between first filming and last filming. Which is a kind of luxury, but also necessary because it wasn’t scripted. If you’re shooting for six weeks, you’ve got to know what people are going to do in advance.

NK

One of the things that is immediately apparent watching the series is that it’s during lockdown. There’s the sense of being a little cooped up. I experienced the pandemic as being a time where you suddenly have all this time on your hands, but you can’t do anything. I’m surprised to hear that it was something you were planning to make regardless.

WK

Well, it was only a vague thought. It was just a few pages. I’d go back through my notebooks and say, “Oh, in February 2019 I’d written down some topics.” But COVID made it so that we knew we could start straight away. There was a moment, where we knew, from next Thursday, we’re all going to be locked down. It was a time when you had to get all your whiskey in place. [Laughs.] In South Africa, there was a ban on alcohol and cigarette sales during COVID.We were saying, “Have you got some whiskey? Have you got some wine? Can we trade you an aubergine for a bottle of whiskey?”

NK

It’s true, there was a moment in time when the whole world knew that it was about to be hunkered down for who knows how long?That kind of time on your hands seems so essential to the final form. I mean, there’s so much animation in the series, and the series itself is quite long.

WK

Twelve-and-a-half hours.

NK

And edited down, I’m sure.

WK

We edited each episode to 50 minutes, and people watched it and said, “No, no, we’ve seen this drawing being made.” Or, “Now, one minute is lovely, four minutes is ‘You’ve lost us.’” So the film did get shaped by what people’s capacities were. There’s almost a hidden series, which is three times as long, for masochists who actually want to watch paint dry.

NK

As it is now, every act feels very well-utilized. I think it’s the perfect length.

WK

The editing was interesting because we had three, sometimes four, in-house editors. There’s a room above the studio which we turned into an edit suite, and each was given different episodes to manage. But with great good fortune, I’d asked Walter Murch if he would edit the whole series, because I’d met him before COVID and we’d got on well. He said he was busy writing a book for the next six months, so he couldn’t do it, but he said he would be a consulting editor. He was living in London and we were in Johannesburg, so it turned into a weekly phone call with him, sometimes sending in material, sometimes chatting with him talking about the book as he was busy writing it. I thought this series would take six months and he thought his book would take six months. And four years down the track our series is finished and his book is nearly finished. It’s getting published very soon.

It was fantastic to have this ongoing lesson. He was like a mentor to all of the editors, to all of us. Occasionally, I would travel to London when the lockdown ended, and we’d have time to look over the episodes. His advice would vary from being very broad, saying “I think this whole sequence here doesn’t make sense,” to “I think you need to tail out four frames later, bring up this volume here and ADR there.” Having the editors right in the room, made it easier for us to film immediately. If a line didn’t make sense we would stop and make the adjustment.

NK

Right, there’s so much play with layering of frames and optical effects in the series. It reads as having been reviewed frame by frame.

WK

Well working with frame-by-frame drawing is almost easier. That part is just me and the camera. The conversations are where it became complicated to remember what I had said in the first part while filming the second part. And that became most of the work by the editors.

NK

I love the amount of time you spend talking to yourself on-screen. You’re often in multiple places at once.

WK

It’s funny—sometimes I hear my father in one of the voices, sometimes my brother. The one who is somewhat skeptical of the whole procedure, that’s very much my father. And the one obsessed with memory, it’s like being in conversation with my brother.

NK

It’s a very old-fashioned film technique to overlap frames like that.

WK

Yes, I suppose it used to be like a complicated optical process with the actual frame, and now that it’s digital it’s so much easier to manipulate. I mean, one sees it in the great films from Méliès, where he multiplies himself many times over. Scenes in which he’d lose one head then another head appears. I’m just kind of in awe at how that was done optically.

NK

Yeah, back when it was all physical within the cels.

WK

Absolutely. It had to be masked and reprinted and rewound, then run through the camera again.

NK

One of the things that I love so much about your charcoal animations is that they show their traces. I sense an impulse in you to do that more generally, everywhere in life. It’s almost like a philosophy with you.

WK

The thing about the traces is, when I started the first animation, I hated them. I tried as hard as I could to get rid of it. I tried different sheets of paper, different erasers, drawing on plastic. And for the first couple of films, I apologized to everybody for the traces, saying, “I know it’s got this ugly gray swoosh behind it, let me see if we can do something about it.” It took other people to say, “Stop complaining, we're interested in the traces.” And then I said, “Oh okay. Maybe the trace is interesting. Alright, let’s recalibrate.” I didn't think, “Oh how clever am I to have worked out how to show the passage of time.” [Laughs.] More like, “How stupid was I not to see what I was doing?” But yes, it has become an essential part, and it’s still kind of the bedrock of all of the work that I do. Even 30 years down the track.

NK

Even with the coffee pot, and the many other objects that you surround yourself with, there’s this sense that these objects show their work. Their function is somewhat inherent in their design. And that’s so different from the digital world that we are increasingly living in.

WK

Well, I mean, for things like the coffee pot or, for instance, if you look at the black telephone there on the nightstand. There’s something about the range and richness of black that are charcoal-ready, that are meeting the idea of drawing halfway. They’ve brought that darkness with them. The coffee pot has it with all the different tones of gray, the aluminum metallic surfaces. The way it catches the light. But does it not also have the form of a woman’s skirt, with a cinched waist?

NK

Yeah.

WK

So part of me is interested, if it’s a self-portrait as a coffee pot: What is the feminine in me which that refers to? Which, I don’t push that for any distance, but I’m happy to say of the domestic objects, that is the one that feels closest.

NK

[Laughs.] Yeah, I love that. It’s funny, it appears so much in this series and it’s something that I began to recognize as more and more anthropomorphic as time went on.

WK

Initially, the series was going to be called Studio Life, and it was like, “Studio Life? That’ll put us to sleep before we even switch it on.” So the title of one of the episodes was “Self-Portrait as a Coffee Pot,” and that became the title of the show. As it happens, it’s more autobiographical than I anticipated at the beginning.

NK

Inevitably, I expect. I think it tells a nice story that’s so mixed into my sense of the pandemic now. The sense of gradually coming out of one’s own mind and meeting the world.

WK

That’s true, I mean, if I look at my notebooks, every week I had written down a list of graphs of where we were going. I became kind of an obsessed statistician looking at figures on my phone every morning. I remember there used to be an app that showed the spread, and I always took screenshots. And in the first one, there were like 80 cases in China. So right from that stage, before it had come to Europe, to be able to say, “It’s coming this way.” And then, “Oh, terrible. There have now been 14 cases in Italy.”

NK

Oh, so you were monitoring it from very early on.

WK

Yes, and because I did these screengrabs instantly, if I look at my phone over that period there are like 80 photos of different stages of the numbers.

NK

You can make your own stop-motion.

WK

There are a few drawings I made which refer to those graphs. But now it’s kind of—it’s not hard to remember that there was COVID, but it’s quite hard to remember just how closely we were all following it. “Where’s it shifting, where’s it going?” Like armies maneuvering in the night.

NK

I want to talk a bit about performance and the kind of character you make of yourself into, in the series. It’s interesting that you said that the series was inspired by lectures you’ve given. Were these the Norton Lectures at Harvard?

WK

The Norton Lectures and then, earlier this year, the Slade Lectures at Oxford, which were a similar kind of event. I think the condition of being an artist in the contemporary world, as of the last 20 years,there’s this expectation that artists have to talk—that you have to give to an artist talk or walk about an exhibition, or have conversations like this. You know, Matisse’s advice to painters was to be silent. Just to paint. But at a certain point I’d been asked to do several lectures on different things. The only way not to see them as a burden is to let them become part of my practice, an artwork in its own right. Then I was happier to spend more time working on them, to say, “That’s my project for the year.” In that sense of thinking, a lecture is a mixture of text and images, and how do we put them together?

The films in that sense weren’t breaking completely. I’d also made short films of me in conversation with myself called Drawing Lessons, which are on different topics or subjects. Often, if I can’t get to an exhibition, they’ll ask me to send an artist’s greeting to Taipei or wherever the exhibition is, and I’d do it in the form of the two of us doing this greeting. One admonishing the other for not being there, that sort of thing. This film is obviously the longest form of that, in different variations.

I suppose it's a way of showing that one often holds contradictory opinions, or one has to try to keep contradictions in one’s head in the most simple way. One self says, “I like the solitary act of drawing.” And the other says, “I prefer the companionship of collaborators.” And both are true. You know, I’m the person doing the drawing at the front, and when I step back there’s that other self, saying, “No, it’s no good, go back and do it over.” Which is familiar to anybody who’s written anything, I’m sure, and has reread it. Part of the time you think, “God he knew what he was doing. That’s much better than I could do.” And sometimes, you think “God, what shit is this? Not me. I’m not responsible for this. If I’d written this, it would be much better.”

NK

Yeah, I know the feeling.

WK

So in the studio, it’s possible to play with that, and you make it very palpable when you have two physical entities, like twins.

NK

It’s something I’m surprised we don’t see more of, when you put it that way. It sounds so natural, this kind of dialectical practice.

WK

If you’ve got actors doing it, it’s slightly harder for them to play the same figure—you’d have to get prosthetic noses. With this film it was great because I could just stop the camera, get up, go over to the other side. I tried to make one of them slightly neater than the other, sleeves rolled up. But then I’d forget which was which. [Laughs.] We were busy putting together a book about the series and I no longer know which was William One and which was William Two when they’re talking.

NK

And sometimes you have three or four.

WK

Yes, but primarily it's the two: One slightly skeptical and the other who accepts the chaos of the studio.

NK

As you point out, being an artist today requires being out in the world a lot. Perhaps this doubling of yourself is a chance to express that ambivalence?

WK

I think so. Yes, of course. And of course, once this series finished I think, okay, now we must do it again. Round two. Should have thought a little bit harder about some of those conversations. But the truth is, I’m not a writer. And if I’d spent much longer I still wouldn’t have—you know, you need good comic writers to write a good comic dialogue. Instead, I had to take my chances just with what was there.

NK

It works because it’s so clearly mapping your own thought process. In that sense, do you see William One and William Two as a division in being in the studio versus being out in the world?

WK

Yeah, I mean—say there’s a party, I’m like, “God, I should be back in the studio, making work.” Part of me thinks, “Okay, I know exactly what drawing it is I need to do when I get home,” which is fine. I used to sense it very strongly, that split of the self when I was younger. I’d come back from the events, I was in New York and I’d be here for an exhibition and at half past ten I’d come back to the hotel. I could absolutely feel part of me saying, “Oh, thank God. It’s been enough talking. Here’s the bed. Let’s just go to sleep, it’s fantastic.” And even as I’m doing that, the other side is saying, “Now come on, let’s get the hell out of here. The night is young! There’s bars, there’s clubs. There’s life in New York. You think you’re an artist and you’re going to bed at half past ten in New York? Forget it! You pussy.” And the other says, “You know, you can insult me all you like, but I’m going to bed. You go off, you go off.” And, of course, the one at the door then turns around, or sometimes the one in the bed would get up and go. But these days, I guess, it’s more often the one at the door that turns around.

NK

To get back to bed? [Laughs.]

WK

Not entirely, I’m pleased to say. Not entirely.

NK

I know, from your Catalogue Raisonné of drawings, the early works were often fliers and posters for events. You’ve spoken before about how nice it is to have a reason to make your work. Were you always friendly with performers or involved in theater yourself?

WK

Most of the theater posters were productions I was involved with, not entirely, but ninety percent. But at a certain point I couldn’t bear the work “on behalf of”—the condition of thinking for some other person, doing what somebody else needs. I found I can’t predict what other people do or don’t understand. You have to work on the basis that it’s interesting for you and the people you’re working with. So at that point, the focus of the work shifted very much from “what is needed out there,” to say, “I’m going to look at what’s needed in the studio.” Not to say that it’s disconnected from what’s happening out there. But I’m not trying to instrumentally decide what should be out there.

NK

Right, you certainly still work on operas and theatrical productions, but it sounds like, from your story about Broadway, not unless you feel it is the right fit for you?

WK

There will always be big theater projects. And the ones in the opera houses are obviously also at a big scale and are certainly works that require producers to make. I work on a much smaller stage too, at The Center For the Less Good Idea in Johannesburg, which is a small arts center I co-founded.

NK

That’s a great name.

WK

It’s from an African proverb, which is “If the good doctor can’t cure you, find the less good doctor.” So, when the grand ideas of the world have failed, let’s find more local, particular answers. But also: When you’re working on a project, you have a first idea, but it’s important  to  be open to what arises as you make it.

NK

It begins on the page.

WK

It begins on page, or with opera, it begins with listening to the music and looking at different film fragments and saying, “How does this music sound, and which kind of images have a connection to the music?” and then starting the drawing.

NK

Did Oh To Believe in Another World come from music?

WK

No, Oh To Believe in Another World has its own origin. This was a film to accompany the Shostakovich 10th symphony, which comes to New York this December at Lincoln Center. In fact, that project was started under COVID. I began a sort of WhatsApp collaboration with a costume designer who was locked down in Belgium where we made these small puppets out of old tools, thinking about a Mayakovsky play. And then, when the invitation came from the Lucerne Symphony Orchestra in Switzerland to think about making a film for a symphony, I said yes. At first, I remembered these Mayakovsky puppets. I said “Let’s do the Shostakovich 10th symphony, which was finished just after Stalin died.” So it’s a way of looking back at all of that. It wasn’t just saying, here’s music, let’s invent from scratch. And it wasn’t like I had the whole thing planned in my head and looked for the music. But a language already existed with which to think about it.

NK

Have you ever trained as an actor?

WK

Yes. When I was at university I worked with both student theater groups and I was going to art lessons—not at the university, it was at a different art school. And all my friends said to me, “You’ve got to choose. You’re buggering around doing a bit of drawing, a bit of acting. Choose.” And so at a certain point, I said, “Okay, I don’t have the right to be an artist, I don’t know where to go, I don’t know what I’d say.” So I tried to be an actor. I went to theater school in Paris for a year, to a school called L’Ecole Jacque Lecoq—still remembered, but back then a very famous theater school. I was there for a year, where I learned in three weeks I should not be an actor. I was terrible at acting, whatever I did was the same. But I learned so much about artmaking from this theater school. What it did was, it gave me the confidence of working with performers, whether in opera or on stage. To not feel like I’m winging it—though everybody’s winging it, obviously. But not in a way where you either have to show off or be terrorized by it.

NK

Yeah, the moment in the series when performers show up and begin rehearsing in the studio, it feels completely natural. There’s no sense that the work you’re doing has suddenly transitioned from one phase to the next.

WK

Because, since 1995, that's always been part of the métier. I mean, I do one opera every five years. Someone like a professional opera director is doing three or four every year. I’m just still floundering at the edges of that. But the other thing to be learned from acting is that you cannot allow your fear of making a fool of yourself to stop you from doing something.

NK

Are you interested in opera as the total work of art?

WK

I think you can think of it in two ways. You can think, “Okay, I’m invited to direct an opera and I’m the hired hand. I’m the person who’s come to work for six weeks or eight weeks, however long, to direct the opera as part of a whole team that the opera houses employ.” Or you can think of it, which I prefer, as, “You’ve been invited by the opera, and they’re giving you a piece of paper which is seventeen meters wide, ten meters high. And you’ve got three hours to make a drawing on that. And not only that, they’ll throw in 80 of the best musicians to play for you and 15 of the top singers.” So your invitation is to make a drawing in four dimensions over three hours. Here’s the libretto, here’s the music, that gives you a constraint and a shape. And both ways of thinking about it are true.

NK

One of the things that I was really struck by in your dialectics with yourself is your constant awareness of the multi-temporality of the object. There’s a theme of looking at a chair as a former tree.

WK

And a future fire.

NK

Yeah, I find you often return to ashes as the way of describing the final form. I’m curious if that shapes your interest in charcoal.

WK

The idea of it being a burnt tree and ash.

NK

Yeah. And then using to draw a tree.

WK

To draw a tree with the remnants of the tree. Yes. And the paper’s desire to be the tree. There’s a line in a very short Beckett play called Catastrophe, which I directed many years ago. It features a statue on a plinth, played by a live person, and there's a director and an assistant who's busy arranging folds of the dressing gown and the color of the head. The assistant keeps asking the director, “What color?” And he always just says, “Ash.” Ash as a color. It's an awfully nice, strange three-letter Anglo-Saxon word. That's Beckett at his most brilliant. Which is just a word.

There is also a line from, I think that it’s Herodotus, talking about heroes, saying, “Where are they now? Smoke. Ashes. Fable. Perhaps that they’re no longer even fables.”

NK

Right. “To dust…”

WK

Yeah. But it's interesting that it's not dust, it's ash. Rather, it’s the stage before it turns to dust, with the last remnant of its being still in the burnt flake.

NK

The ability to leave a trace.