在芝加哥MCA看了馆藏的两部肯特里奇的短片，觉得实在太好，尤其是《Felix in Exile》这一部，顺手翻两段博物馆提供的相关介绍。

2001年，在动画，视觉艺术，戏剧和歌剧领域均获赞誉的肯特里奇在芝加哥现代艺术博物馆（MCA）举办了自己在美国的首次个展。展览过后，MCA获准保存了他的十余幅画作和两部著名的影片：《Felix in Exile》和《History of the Main Complaint》。在他的炭笔画作上，肯特里奇利用擦除和修改创作了令人难忘的动画片段，描绘了作为自己化身的主角和他们在约翰内斯堡的种族隔离时代末期及其结束之后所经历的痛苦挣扎：Felix Teitlebaum是一位浪漫的艺术家，在影片中总是以裸身示人，Soho Eckstein则是一个以自我为中心的富有矿场主和土地开发商，永远都穿一套细条纹西装。

尽管肯特里奇最广为人知的成就是他的动画短片，但他本人依然将绘画视为自己工作的重心。他曾说：“我相信在作画时的不确定性，和图像落于笔下时的偶然性中，存在着某种对于我们自身生活的模拟。绘画创作的过程是一种试图去理解我们是谁，以及我们如何在世界中生存的手段。就在这一过程本身的陌生性之中，我们得以察觉到判断，伦理和道义。”

《Felix in Exile》是肯特里奇自1989年开始创作的《Drawing for Projection》系列短片中的第五部。正如系列名所体现的，所有作品都是肯特里奇用炭笔和粉彩绘制的。艺术家在一副画作上不断改动——绘画，擦除，涂抹，重绘，并用相机记录下其中的每个步骤。而动画电影，则是肯特里奇对千万张照片进行组合与剪辑，赋予其连续感和运动性的最终作品。本片主角是肯特里奇为此系列创作的固定角色之一：忧郁的Felix Teitlebaum，一个南非白人，常常可被看作肯特里奇自己的化身。Teitlebaum在影片中始终被描绘成裸身的形象，孤独而脆弱，被眼前挥之不去的南非黑人在种族隔离时代遭受暴行的幻像所折磨。影片的另一个主要角色——南非黑人女性，Nandi——从事地形与夜空的观测，搜寻来自过去的信息，探究历史漫长的行进。大地同样充当着影片的主角之一，生长愈合，新陈代谢，不断抹去人类及其时常残暴的历史在她身体表面留下的可见伤痕。与此类似，历史同样由定义其轮廓的事件所形成和塑造，而与历史学家一样，艺术家的绘画，擦除和重绘也是一次探究真相之某种要义的尝试。

William Kentridgewas born in Johannesburg, South Africa, in 1955. He attended the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg (1973–76), Johannesburg Art Foundation (1976–78), and studied mime and theater at L’École Internationale de Théâtre Jacques Lecoq, Paris (1981–82). Having witnessed first-hand one of the twentieth century’s most contentious struggles—the dissolution of apartheid—Kentridge brings the ambiguity and subtlety of personal experience to public subjects that are most often framed in narrowly defined terms. [1]

[1]//art21.org/artist/william-kentridge/

Artist, William Kentridge: My name is William Kentridge. I'm an artist, and I live and work in Johannesburg, on the Southern edge of Africa.

The films that I make come out of the brutalized society that Apartheid has left in its wake. This film uses a lot of images, which are really forensic photographs of people who died months before South Africa's first Democratic election in 1994. There's a huge amount of violence just in the run-up to the election.

The film title "Felix in Exile" really came from the wordplay that exile and Felix are almost anagrams of each other.

The films start as drawing. Drawing is the heart of all the work. I start with an image that I feel I know, or want to work with. And hope that in the process of making that drawing, other ideas and other images will suggest themselves.

The woman in "Felix in Exile" started off as a very minor part in the film. And as I drew it, her role and importance grew and grew until she in fact became the heart of the narrative of the film. She uses a sextant and a theodolite. The sextant's really for fixing your position and the other is for actually mapping the terrain that you're standing on, and they're about fixing and drawing the landscape. Making a record of here we are now, in this place. The machine that turns and then that clicks is really an old-fashioned seismograph that is monitoring the rumbling and turning of the earth. And insofar as all the people who die in the film get absorbed into the earth, it's part of the history digesting its people, I suppose. And that has to stand in for kind of history in general in the film.

There's a question of people disappearing, of memory disappearing, and how do we hang on to things that we should feel so strongly, but which get weaker and weaker with time? I think that what artists say about the work, one has to take with a big pinch of salt, cause it's always kind of justification after the event. So, my advice to you listening would be to switch off me talking, and rather, watch the film. [2]

[2]//www.moma.org/audio/playlist/1/248

Through his animated films, theatrical productions, and graphic work, William Kentridge addresses the personal and social traumas that are the vestiges of South African apartheid. His ongoing series of short animated films Drawings for Projection (begun in 1989) feature two principal characters, who function as the artist’s alter egos: Soho Eckstein, an avaricious South African mining magnate in a pinstriped suit and tie, and Felix Teitlebaum, shown naked and vulnerable to apartheid’s devastating acts.

In Felix in Exile, the fifth film of the series made between September 1993 and February 1994, Kentridge depicts the barren East Rand landscape as witness to the exploitation of and violence against both natural and human resources. Isolated in a hotel room, Felix peruses the survey charts of Nandi, a young black woman who maps the history of the terrain. Figures and structures are subsumed into the landscape or night sky, allegories for how the land can bear the scars of crimes against humanity.

Kentridge created the sixth film History of the Main Complaint in 1996 during the initial hearings of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, at which apartheid’s crimes were first publicly admitted while the perpetrators were granted indemnity in the hope of healing profound social and historical wounds in this post-apartheid society. In the film Soho lies comatose in a hospital ward, suffering from the weight of his past acts as well as those for which he is implicated due to his race and class. MRIs and CAT scans reveal his affliction, as memories of violence committed against black South Africans float across the screen. The relationship between individual and collective guilt is played out when Soho regains consciousness only through acknowledging his own responsibility.

Kentridge’s films reveal traces of their making, just as the narratives invoke memories of an historic time. For each scene, Kentridge films a large charcoal and pastel drawing (measuring approximately 76.2 x 114.3 cm), which he partially erases and redraws, recording each sheet up to 500 times. The cumulative effect of his thought process is retained, leaving residue of the act of production to reflect the tensions between past and present. [3]

[3]//www.guggenheim.org/artwork/9422

I first saw this short animation by William Kentridge at MOMA 7 years ago and was totally blown away. I got to revisit it on YouTube, although the video quality is not good.

William Kentridge's works are at once poetic, political and personal. He has a unique technique of making animation: he simply films a charcoal drawing as a key frame, then makes erasures and changes on the same drawing as the next frame. It's a process of constantly rewriting each existing moment, just like the evolution of history and memory in our unconsciousness.

Compared to Marker's La jetée which is composed of frozen moments, Kentridge's work presents a different time and space that are shivering and elusive, evoking the fading memory in an hypnotically poetic way. Another artist using paintings to make experimental animation is Jeff Scher, whose work is playful and apolitical. My favorite is You Won’t Remember This: http://scher.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/08/23/you-wont-remember-this/

«Felix in Exile» is the fifth of eight films that complete the «Drawings for Projection» series, on which William Kentridge worked from 1989 to 1999. All the films consist of 30 to 40 charcoal drawings, and they transport poetic and political stories.

In the process, Kentridge not only engages editing, dissolving, erasing, and overdrawing techniques, as customarily done in most animated films; he consciously uses these techniques as artistic means of expression. While Kentridge develops his filmed stories during the act of drawing, the overworking is repeatedly photographed with a 35mm camera.

The charcoal drawing technique allows for a seamless transition from one stage to the next. This developmental and conceptual process, applied in «Felix in Exile,» is ‹documented› in the film’s consecutively ordered 35mm shots. «Felix in Exile» was created in 1994, amidst ongoing public debates on the relationship between the country’s division of ownership and the formation of identity which accompanied the first open elections in South Africa.

The film tells the stories of Felix, a man living in exile in Paris, and of Nandi, a woman working as a land surveyor. The woman is Felix’s alter ego. She stands for the longing for one’s homeland, and how for his sake someone bears witness to the incidents in the new, democratic South Africa. No differently than with the fears and memories that flood over him in his room, the world ultimately overpowers Nandi as well—she is shot.

Her many gazes are found in the mirror. The drawings Felix produce flood his sparse room like water, like memory and longing. On the other hand, Nandi is embedded in a cosmic distance that dissipates in the misery of black South Africa. In the topography of the landscape, Nandi’s surveying instruments search for traces of history, for a standard of existence, for a direction.

The drawings and images of Felix and Nandi pile up one atop the other, functioning in both cases as seismographic documents of an emotional shock. The victims of the story are discovered on discarded daily newspapers and written as such into the landscape. Nandi too, finds death. Felix, on the other hand, finds himself once again in the deserted landscape of his homeland, but now with a suitcase full of drawings.