Kentridge has commented: ' Felix in Exile was made at the time just before the first general election in South Africa, and questioned the way in which the people who had died on the journey to this new dispensation would be remembered' ( William Kentridge 1998, p.90). A flood of blue water in the hotel room, brought about by the process of painful remembering, symbolises tears of grief and loss and the Biblical flood which promises new life. They are connected to one another, through the mirror, by a double-ended telescope and embrace, but Nandi is later shot and absorbed back into the ground like the bodies she was observing earlier. Felix looks at himself in the mirror while shaving and Nandi appears to him. Felix Teitelbaum, who features in Kentridge's first and fourth films as the humane and loving alter-ego to the ruthless capitalist white South African psyche, appears here semi-naked and alone in a foreign hotel room, brooding over Nandi's drawings of the damaged African landscape, which cover his suitcase and walls. She is recording the evidence of violence and massacre that is part of South Africa's recent history. She observes the land with surveyor's instruments, watching African bodies, with bleeding wounds, which melt into the landscape. It introduces a new character to the series: Nandi, an African woman, who appears at the beginning of the film making drawings of the landscape.

It was made from forty drawings and is accompanied by music by Phillip Miller and Motsumi Makhene. Kentridge's repeated erasure and redrawing, which leave marks without completely transforming the image, together with the jerky movement of the animation, operate in parallel with his depiction of human processes, both physical and political, enacted on the landscape.įelix in Exile is Kentridge's fifth film.

The films in this series, titled Drawings for Projection (see Tate T07482-5 and T07480-81), are set in the devastated landscape south of Johannesburg where derelict mines and factories, mine dumps and slime dams have created a terrain of nostalgia and loss. Remnants of successive stages remain on the paper, and provide a metaphor for the layering of memory which is one of Kentridge's principal themes. Each drawing, which contains a single scene, is successively altered through erasing and redrawing and photographed in 16 or 35mm film at each stage of its evolution. Kentridge makes short animation films from large-scale drawings in charcoal and pastel on paper.

Large cartoon telescope drawing