INTRODUCTION

This essay focuses on one animation film by the South African artist William Kentridge, Felix in Exile (1994). Kentridge's perhaps best-known artworks are his Drawings for Projection, a series of stop-motion animation films made out of charcoal drawings; Felix in Exile forms one entry in that series. Felix in Exile is a nine-minute stop-motion animation consisting of some thirty to forty charcoal drawings. Each drawing is modified little by little by redrawing and erasing lines. Because it captures each change in the drawings a few frames at a time with a 35 mm camera, watching the film is like watching drawings being created. Viewers can see the drawings literally transform before their eyes: the whole process of smudging, adding, erasing and marking is made visible (Christov-Bakargiev 1998: 61–4). The subject matter, as in many of Kentridge's works, is the traumatic history of his native South Africa. In a poetical and highly autobiographical manner, Kentridge addresses sensitive political issues regarding apartheid and tries to preserve the memory of this controversial colonial past. His Drawings for Projection was created from 1989 onwards, the period when apartheid was dismantled and more and more of its crimes discovered.

Felix in Exile represents a very effective artistic attempt to present both a specific local history and human memories of it. It is worth asking which elements of this animation make its inscription and/or documentation of history so effective. Are Kentridge's handmade drawings responsible for this, for instance? Can the ephemeral character of drawing more generally afford the viewer a kind of access to the past and an enhanced ability to preserve the past in memory? Drawing, after all, performs a double role within Felix in Exile, functioning simultaneously as both Kentridge's technical medium and primary mode of communication. Using Kentridge as a case study, this essay looks into certain notions about drawing and drawing mechanisms in order to see how these might relate to concepts and experiences of time, history and memory. Felix in Exile's representation of history is explored, for example, with reference to Walter Benjamin's concepts of history and his ideas on mimesis.