Notes

Stereoscope: 35mm animated film, transferred to video and laser disc, 8mins., 22secs., colour.

In 1989 Kentridge made Johannesburg, 2nd Greatest City After Paris, the first in a series of short animated films featuring Soho Eckstein, property developer extraordinaire and his alter ego, Felix Teitlebaum, the artist. A decade later, Kentridge had produced seven films in the series, including Monument; Mine; Sobriety, Obesity and Growing Old; Felix in Exile; History of the Main Complaint; WEIGHING… and WANTING. Stereoscope, the eighth film in the series, was produced between 1998 and 1999.

Here Soho Eckstein is bent over what appears to be a ledger, examining columns of numbers that have been struck through. However, these are not just an accountant’s figures but evoke ciphers in some great cost-counting exercise. Throughout the film the screen is often divided to present two versions of the same event or person. According to Kentridge:

Yes, Stereoscope is about trying to bring these disparate parts of oneself together. … [It asks] how to maintain a sense of both contradictory and complementary parallel parts of oneself. Since James Joyce there has always been in modernist writing the notion of a stream of consciousness – floating connections rather than a programmed, clear progression. What I’m interested in is a kind of multi-layered highway of consciousness, where one lane has one thought but driving up behind and overtaking it is a completely different thought. ¹

Kentridge has employed his signature medium of drawing and erasure that deliberately leaves traces of itself behind like a shadowy memory of what was. Filming each mark with stop-frame animation techniques allows the images to emerge and disappear before our eyes like magic. The red text on this drawing forms part of the working notes that Kentridge made in filming and animating the drawing. '450' is a frame reference number (as in start at frame 450), and the other notes refer to the length of time to hold certain moments in the filming. 

¹ ‘Interview: Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev in conversation with William Kentridge’ in Dan Cameron, Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev and J M Coetzee. 1999. William Kentridge. Phaidon, pages 6–35.

Literature

cf. Exhibition Catalogue, William Kentridge, Museum of Contemporary Art: Chicago; Museum of Contemporary Art: New York, 2001-2002, page 51.