Charcoal Matter with Memory: Images of Movement, Time and Duration in the animated films of William Kentridge

David H. Fleming
2013 Film-Philosophy  
In his temporal philosophy based on the writing of Henri Bergson, Gilles Deleuze describes duration (durée) as a becoming that endures in time. Reifications of this complex philosophical concept become artistically expressed, I argue, through the form and content of South African artist William Kentridge's charcoal 'drawings for projection ' (Moins 1998 , Lai 2008 . Indeed, Kentridge's animated works open up attenuated spaces that enfold and unfold different signifiers and images of time and
more » ... passage, unleashing different 'layers' of duration internal to the images and films. These exhibited art works thus provide illuminating 'philosophical' examples of animated audio-visual media that expressively plicate distinct images of movement and indicies of time. 2 Adopting a Deleuzian approach to the animation allows us to maintain a philosophical reference to film as a mode of thought, and explore how Kentridge's form and content synergise to express and embody non-human forms of artistic thinking. These become actualised in the machinic assemblage of viewer, film and screening context, and invite viewers to think about the interplay of perception, memory, time and matter. I uphold that Deleuze's Bergsonian-inflected cinematic models provide the perfect fit for Kentridge's work, appearing well-suited for structuring an investigation into three separate, yet interrelated, strata of time embedded within the films. These I relate to a concept of temporal thickness emerging via artistic images of 'contraction', a movement-image form that exposes geologically compressed time-lines 'insisting' between projected frames, and a series of diegetic scenes that bring the actual and virtual into relation so that 'crystal-images' of time in its pure state are dislodged. Although these three strata are artificially separated out for my analytic purposes, it should be understood that during screening they synthesise to communicate aesthetically a complex multifaceted image of time as duration.
doi:10.3366/film.2013.0023 fatcat:3bd6evdnorfxzmseszghg2jzse