Artist's Note • by William Kentridge • 6 March, 2004

These films started 14 years ago. The project began, not as a coherent project, but as an attempt to play with animation; to play with drawing. They started because I had spent some years working on writing film scripts in the hope of making a feature film. I realisesd at that stage that it was going to be many years of jumping through hoops, in order for me to be able to practice the craft of film making. At a certain point that seemed impossible. So, the corollary of that is to say that the only way to make films is to find a condition of making films in which I could do them on my own.

The films are very simply made with a sheet of paper on the wall. There's a camera half way across the studio; a drawing is done on the paper and filmed for a couple of frames. I walk back to the drawings and then erase and alter the drawings slightly and shoot it again. And so the film evolves as this ongoing walk between the paper and the camera, in the hope that somewhere in the middle of that walk some idea will emerge to suggest what the next drawing or the next sequence should be. Once a few sequences are done, I look at them to try and see what they suggest.

So all the films were made without a script or a storyboard, so there are large parts of inconsistency and incoherence and parts where it requires enormous generosity on behalf of the viewer, to make narrative sense and retroactively create a script or a storyboard for the films.

This project was initiated by Ross Douglas from Gatehouse productions, who suggested: "Why don't we actually see your films in a proper condition?" Usually the films are seen on video and are many generations degraded from the initial film on which they are shot.

So that was the start of the project. The second important part was that in showing the films we would try to do some of them where possible with live music. And this meant Philip Miller, who is the composer I have worked with for years and years on many different projects, became essentially involved. To change the films from the form in which they had been done, with a lot of different sound effects into a form where they could work with live music, meant that most of the music had to be re-scored and had to be adapted. The task turned out to be much larger than I think either Philip or myself had anticipated in the beginning.

source: William Kentridge's Noiraille CHAPTERS