Drawings to Remember

Abstract

South African Artist William Kentridge’s Drawings for Projection films animate his charcoal drawings. This chapter analyses Kendridge’s animated film Felix in Exile (1994), for which forty charcoal drawings were amended and filmed during each step of the work’s stop-motion animation process. Felix in Exile addresses the traumatic history of South Africa during apartheid and provides a good meta-level insight into the process of drawing. This chapter explores how Kentridge’s drawing mechanisms and the representation of history, time and memory are interrelated. Questions examined include: How are mechanisms of drawing and animation related to history? How does Felix in Exile mediate time and memory? What is it exactly that causes this film’s affect? This chapter reflects on these questions by using Walter Benjamin’s philosophical texts, On the Concept of History (1942) and On the Mimetic Faculty (1933) in conjunction with theoretical literature on drawing in order to analyse Kentridge’s work.