Provenance

Linda Givon Collection.

Notes

Stereoscope is the eighth animated film in William Kentridge’s multi-decade Drawings for Projection series of stop-animation films. It was made a full decade after the first film, Johannesburg, 2nd Greatest City After Paris (1989), which introduced the fictional characters of Soho Eckstein, a businessman who always wears a pinstripe suit, and Felix Teitlebaum, an artist and alter ego of Kentridge. The film is notable for Kentridge’s strong pivot to the character of Eckstein, intricate draughtsmanship, particularly of architectural buildings rendered from 1950s archival documents, and frequent use of doubling as a device to explore a divided consciousness. The film was made during the passage of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and explores themes of memory, desire, loss and forgiveness.

The eight-minute film comprises a total of 65 drawings. This drawing features early on. Eckstein is shown seated at an office desk viewing financial reports. A black cat and rotary telephone fill out his desk. When Eckstein leans back into his chair, the film explores the interior of the building, which operates as an analogue telephone exchange. Ghostly figures crowd a large PBX plug board. The film cuts to a male switchboard operator resembling Eckstein. This initiates a series of rapid edits featuring, in sequence, the plug board’s interior, an apartment block, an empty room, a naked man reading at a desk, this drawing of a naked woman slumped on a bed talking on a telephone, followed immediately by a room filled with scientific instruments, a naked man and woman standing opposite each other speaking on separate telephones, an office building and, finally, the interior of the plug board again.

A cobalt blue line connects the action. As the film evolves, this dynamic line connects places and people – except for Eckstein, who, alone with his melancholy, is literally flooded by blue. Stereoscope was widely reviewed when it was shown at New York’s Museum of Modern Art in 1999. ‘Stereoscope is in many ways nothing but action – physical, artistic, political, emotional,’ offered critic Roberta Smith, who likened the pulsing blue lines throughout the film to emotions and subversive thought.¹ The film encompasses stories of carnal love and political agitation, but is also in the words of another critic ‘anti-sequential’ and ‘diaristic,’ its ‘staccato rhythm’ shattering ‘normative temporal logic.’² It is for instance unclear if the naked woman in the film is Eckstein’s wife, who was romantically involved with Teitlebaum in an earlier film. Kentridge was awarded the 1999 Carnegie Prize for Stereoscope.

¹ Roberta Smith (1999) Art in Review: William Kentridge, New York Times, 23 April, Section E. Page 35.
² Lauri Firstenberg (2000) Review: William Kentridge’s Stereoscope, in Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art, Duke University Press. No. 11/12. Page 119.