Category: 3_Animation and Non-Fiction
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William Kentridge
William Kentridge (born 28 April 1955) is a South African artist best known for his prints, drawings, and animated films. These are constructed by filming a drawing, making erasures and changes, and filming it again. He continues this process meticulously, giving each change to the drawing a quarter of a second to two seconds’ screen time. A single drawing will be altered and filmed this way until the end of a scene. These palimpsest-like drawings are later displayed along with the films as finished pieces of art.
See more information on Tate Gallery websiteAnimator William Kentridge animates with charcoal on paper, leaving traces of each drawing behind as the movement progresses. These traces lend a depth to the image as well as the time of the animation. They also serve a narrative purpose. Kentridge’s early animations were copied from early Soviet films, placed in the Apartheid, South African context. Apartheid was a system predicated on the exploitation of black South African labour in the interests of white South African society. Kentridge uses his animation to express his feelings of guilt for being a white male with inherited wealth and status as well as his personal fantasies of acceptance and forgiveness. The layered shadows of previous drawings that haunt his animations are ghostly reminders of the time that each drawing took to make. Animation here serves as a kind of penance.
Working process
Examples of charcoal animation
Evocative charcoal drawings of Johannesburg. Has detailed historical overview, but the images could speak for themselves. -
Maya Deren
Meshes of the afternoon is a short experimental film directed by wife-and-husband team Maya Deren and Alexander Hammid. The film’s narrative is circular and repeats several motifs, including a flower on a long driveway, a key falling, a door unlocked, a knife in a loaf of bread, a mysterious Grim Reaper–like cloaked figure with a mirror for a face, a phone off the hook and an ocean. Through creative editing, distinct camera angles, and slow motion, the surrealist film depicts a world in which it is more and more difficult to catch reality.
With the original soundtrack – no music.
Maya Deren , Marcel Duchamp – 1943 Ritual in Transfigured Time (1946) is a short, silent experimental film directed by Maya Deren. Like Deren’s previous work, A Study in Choreography for Camera (1945), she explores the use of dance on film through the lens of commentary of societal norms, metamorphosis, and anthropomorphism. The film is notable for its disjointed storytelling and use of slow motion, freeze framing, and unique blend of stage dance and film.