METAMORPHOSIS AS A NARRATIVE STRATEGY IN SELECTED  
SOUTH AFRICAN ANIMATED FILMS 
 
 
 
Richard Penn 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
A dissertation submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the  
Degree of Master of Arts in Fine Art in the School of Arts  
University of the Witwatersrand Johannesburg 
2009  
 
 
 
 
DECLARATION 
 
I declare that this is my own unaided work.  It is submitted in partial fulfilment for the degree of 
Master of Arts in Fine Arts at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg.  It has not been 
submitted for any degree or examination at any other university. 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Signed: ________________ 
 
 
Date:    ________________ 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Acknowledgements 
 
The financial assistance provided by AFDA (The South African School for Motion Picture Media 
and Live Performance) is gratefully acknowledged. 
 
I would like to thank my supervisor Walter Oltmann and my wife and family. 
 
 
 i 
Abstract 
 
This study examines the notion as well as the use of metamorphosis in the animated 
films of selected South African artists. The analysis demonstrates how metamorphosis, 
as a narrative strategy, is wholly appropriate to South African animation artists whose 
works engage with issues which tend to surface in a country in constant flux and in 
which the word ?transformation? is part of its everyday vocabulary and collective 
consciousness.  
 
I bring together ideas around metamorphosis from various animation writers and link 
these to an eclectic selection of writers in other fields. I examine W.J.T. Mitchell?s 
writing on the multistable image as well as the work of neuroscientist, V.S. 
Ramachandran in order to suggest a possible explanation for the hold that 
metamorphosis has over its audience. I also included an alternative history of 
animation via the transformative, Vaudeville performances of chapeaugraphy, 
shadowgraphy and Quick-Change. In addition I differentiate between the digital morph 
as exemplified in the music video to Michael Jackson?s Black or White (1991) and the 
type of hand-drawn metamorphosis in the work of William Kentridge. The issue at stake 
here is the ability of the morph to transgress arbitrary   boundaries of categorisation 
versus its tendency to obliterate otherness and inculcate sameness.  
 
For my case studies I examine William Kentridge?s use of metamorphosis in his 
Drawings for Projection and how metamorphosis is apparent not only in the 
transformation of one object into another, but at the level of the medium itself. Here I 
look at how his work is infused with metaphor through the palimpsetic traces left behind 
by the incomplete erasures of his technique. As a loose framework around the 
discussion of metaphor I look at the theories of Paul Ricoeur and the more poetic 
writing of Cynthia Ozick. 
 
In the on-going time lapse collaboration project Minutes by Mocke Lodewyk Jansen 
van Veuren and Theresa Collins I examine how both the city and our experience of 
time and space is transformed through time lapse animation and how this 
transformation enables an analysis of spatial practice that can be utilized in future 
urban renewal programmes.   
 
In my own work, I am interested in exploring the theme of origins. I look at genetics and 
cosmology as well as Deleuze?s theory of individuation and how they all seem to 
 ii 
incorporate a kind of ?metastable state? of infinite potential that is similar to Eisenstein?s 
?plasmaticness?. As a visual idiom I use static ?snow? or ?noise? in animation, video work 
and drawings; conceptually harnessing the idea that static contains residual radiation 
left over from the birth of the universe. Static noise is the medium through which I 
create portraits of my father and encounter my own ?genetic? self-portrait. I also analyse 
some of the work on physical actions by theatre theorist and director Jerzy Grotowski. 
From Grotowski, I have begun to understand certain performative aspects around 
gesture and the simultaneous portrait/self-portrait see-saw of my work.  
       
 
 
 iii 
Contents 
 
Declaration 
 
Acknowledgements 
 
Abstract            i 
 
Contents            iii 
 
Introduction            1 
 
Chapter 1  Metamorphosis         6 
 
Chapter 2  William Kentridge?s Drawings for Projection     24 
    Fortuna and associative Relations      28 
    Memory, metaphor and the morph      33 
 
Chapter 3  Lara Foot Newton and Gerard Marx: And There in the Dust (2004)   52 
Mocke Lodewyk Jansen van Veuren and Theresa Collins: Minutes (2005 - ) 59 
 
 
Chapter 4  Richard Penn: Mirrors and Origins       65 
 
 
Conclusion            78 
 
Bibliography            80 
 
Illustrations 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 1 
Introduction 
 
 
         ?Dick, don?t go from A to B. 
Go from A to X to B, 
Go from A to G to B. 
Go somewhere else in the middle!? 
      Williams, R (2001: 218) 
 
 
Before I move into the main body of this dissertation, I would like to spend some time 
explaining some basic concepts of animation technique in order to facilitate an easier 
understanding of technical terms. It is one of my objectives that the academic work of 
this dissertation should be pertinent to animation practice as well as to animation 
theory.  
 
Persistence of vision is the perceptual phenomenon that accounts for the perception of 
the illusion of movement that underlies all film processes. It is what allows the audience 
to ?see? movement on screen when there is, in fact, no movement at all. A live action 
camera will expose 24 still ?frames? or photographs every second. At this speed, the 
incremental changes between each individual frame are extremely small, so small, in 
fact, that when they are projected onto a screen at the same rate, our brains interpret 
them as a moving sequence. We fill in the gaps between the frames and the illusion of 
movement is complete. 
 
The technical difference between live action and animation lies at this juncture. 
Whereas the live action film camera will record at an optimum speed of 24 frames per 
second and project that recording at the same rate, the animation camera is capable of 
taking one still frame at a time1. This means that the animator needs to create 24 
slightly different images to make up one second of screen time. The animator makes 
interventions into the constructed reality in front of the camera between successive 
frames in a roll of film. When run consecutively through a projector at an optimum 
speed (usually 24 frames per second), the incremental changes that have been made 
by the animator give the illusion of movement and life owing to the perceptual 
phenomenon of persistence of vision. 
                                                
1 Using the physicality of film as a frame of reference to explain this difference is, for me, the easiest way 
to do it. It is still relevant to other forms of digital and computer animation. 
 2 
 
There are three basic ways to animate: ?Straight ahead? animation is the most intuitive 
process whereby the animator simply starts animating from the first frame and 
animates ?straight ahead? to the last frame.  This process demands a very skilled 
animator as without clear planning, action can start to wander and timing can become 
very hard to keep track of. ?Pose to pose? animation is a far more planned and 
controlled animation process whereby each sequence and then each individual 
movement is broken down to the most important, storytelling or ?key? frames. Then the 
next most important frames or ?extremes? are identified so that very clear markers are 
set for each movement. Transitional sequences or ?in-betweens? can then be chosen to 
link those markers. With this kind of planning comes increased control and so the 
problems faced by the straight ahead animator can be dealt with before the animation 
even begins. Control also brings about one of the major disadvantages of pose to pose 
animation in that the flow can sometimes be lost, the intuitive magic that is sometimes 
responsible for exciting discoveries. So, many animators opt for a third process - a 
combination of pose to pose and straight ahead, thus benefiting from the advantages of 
both2. 
 
The quote that opens this chapter is from Richard William?s book The Animator?s 
Survival Kit (2001) which is one of the most widely used practical animation ?how to? 
manuals. The quote is by Emery Hawkins, a master animator, and Williams uses it to 
emphasize the importance of the ?breakdown? or ?passing? position in animation 
technique. The passing position is situated between two extremes and Williams 
describes it as ?a traveler ? a transitional position?. He also calls it the ?secret of 
animation? (Williams, 2001: 218). He does a simple exercise to make his point. He 
identifies two extremes, a smiley face and a sad face and then draws a number of 
possible passing positions between them which define possible transitions from ?happy? 
to ?sad?. The variations are infinite and the exercise demonstrates Hawkins?s insistence 
that a good animation sequence needs to ?go somewhere else in the middle? and not 
simply take the most obvious route.  
 
From this simple exercise of outlining some basic animation techniques I have 
identified the most important concepts that I will be dealing with in this dissertation. 
Firstly, what becomes clear is that metamorphosis can be seen as the fundamental, 
underlying process at work in animation of any kind. Metamorphosis is defined by 
                                                
2 For a more detailed discussion of these processes and their implications for animation practice, see 
Williams, R (2001: 61) 
 3 
Suzanne Buchan as ?an effect in which a cinematic image, whether 2- or 3-
 dimensional, appears to effect a transition in form over time.? (Buchan,1998: 21). 
Whether animating on computer, in clay or through successive drawings, the animator 
needs to facilitate a metamorphosis of form by manipulating reality between the 
recordings of successive frames. Secondly, what this implies is the absolute control 
that the animator possesses over his/her filmed reality ? that the animator is able to 
construct every aspect of reality to their specifications. Due to the animator?s ability to 
adjust reality up to 24 times every second between frames, the animator has total 
control over space, time and matter in its metastable state. This is something that other 
visual media struggle to achieve unless they enlist the help of animation, often in the 
form of special effects. Thirdly, that this control is made possible by the strange, liminal 
positioning of the animator ?between frames? and finally, the incredible creative 
potential that this ability and positioning enables ? that the animator is not only able to 
go ?somewhere? else in the middle as both Hawkins and Williams stress, but that 
he/she has the capacity to go anywhere else in the middle. As Lisa Trahair says of the 
?in-between? position: ??the gap, that place of non-meaning, that inaugurates all 
meaning? (Cholodenko, 1991: 189).  
 
Bob Trubshaw describes the liminal as a ?non-time, a moment, not a transition?. 
(Trubshaw, 1995: www.indigogroup.co.uk/edge/liminal.htm visited October 2005)  He 
elucidates further by pointing to the five dimensions ? ?north, south, east west plus 
centre, the place where one is? (ibid, 1995) Centre, where one is, according to 
Trubshaw, is the most difficult place to describe. It is simultaneously the present and 
the past; it is the ?Dreamtime? of the Australian Aborigines which is always and never. It 
is the mythical ?Once upon a time? of fairytales or the Arabic equivalent ?It was and was 
not so? (ibid, 1995). The metamorphosis implicit in time-lapse photography and various 
animation techniques allows us to inhabit this ?centre?, this time in-between time and to 
experience the world from within a fleeting, liminal moment.  
 
The shape-shifting capacity of metamorphosis which enables it to transgress traditional 
boundaries and categories such as race and gender is at once its most prized asset 
and at the same time it?s most criticised characteristic.  In her introduction to Meta 
Morphing: Visual Transformation and the Culture of Quick Change (2000) as well as in 
her essay for the same volume, At the Still Point of the Turning World: Meta-Morphing 
and Meta-Stasis, Vivian Sobchack criticizes the digital morph for its easy assimilation 
of difference and its tendency to elide history: ?Thus it could be argued that as a 
paradoxically bounded and fixed figure of transformation, the morph operates to 
 4 
superficially simulate change as, on a deeper level, it assimilates not merely 
?difference? but also ?otherness?? (Sobchack, 2000: 138). 
 
I will explore this argument as it is leveled against the digital morph in Meta-Morphing 
and then argue how William Kentridge is able to foreground metamorphosis as a 
primary narrative strategy in order to comment on the similar problem of the 
assimilation of history and memory into the South African landscape during- and post-
 Apartheid. His particular articulation of metamorphosis can be described in animation 
terms as a variation on the ?modified base? technique whereby the animator begins with 
a malleable base substance (sand, oil paint on glass etc) that can be modified or 
manipulated by erasing and then adding to the base material. Each modification is then 
photographed to become one frame in the animated sequence and a usual tendency 
with the modified base technique is that there is no record of the previous frame except 
in the photograph that was taken of it. It is here that Kentridge?s articulation of the 
medium finds it?s most unique expressive device. He begins with a charcoal drawing 
and uses the charcoal as his base substance which he either erases or adds to. 
However, his erasures are only partial and traces of the previous frames remain as the 
sequence progresses. Through this self-reflexive use of the medium, ?history? becomes 
infused within his transformations; a history of the making of the film which is visible to 
the viewer in the finished work and which foregrounds the constructed nature of time, 
history and memory in his metamorphic transformations. I will argue that it is with this 
self-reflexive technique of incomplete erasures that Kentridge ?invites? the viewer 
between frames to witness the potentially deceptive nature of visual metamorphosis as 
argued by Sobchack. In doing so, he is able to maintain the porousness between 
categories that is one of the richest assets of visual metamorphosis without the easy 
assimilation of difference and the elision of history that often goes with it. 
 
As a second case study, I will look at the unique role that animated metamorphosis 
plays in the visual expression of metaphor in Gerard Marx and Lara Foot Newton?s stop 
frame animation project And There in the Dust (2005). I will demonstrate how, in the 
transfer and creation of meaning in metaphor, metamorphosis facilitates a visible, 
temporal trajectory that the animator can control and manipulate between frames. This 
enables the accrual of new layers of meaning to the metaphor as the transformation 
may be guided through many forms ?on its way? to its target destination. In this case, 
the animators? unique, incremental control over time is used to ?draw out? the moment 
of transformation of meaning in metaphor in order to successfully depict extremely 
 5 
sensitive subject matter (the rape of a 9 month old baby) in a way that amplifies its 
visual and emotional impact.  
 
Finally, I will discuss how Mocke Lodewyk Jansen Van Vuren and Theresa Collins? 
articulation of metamorphosis in their  time lapse animation project Minutes (2005) 
effects a ?drawing out? of the liminal moments between the passing of time in order to 
translate, for human perception, those natural processes that are outside our own 
temporal rhythms. By this I am referring to the passing of time that is either too fast or 
too slow for human perception to comprehend in ?real time?. Time lapse speeds up the 
passing of time during the movement from morning to night or night to morning and so 
makes these rhythms observable. I will argue that this new perception of time has the 
capacity to change our reality by offering the audience a new way of seeing and a new 
way of experiencing those rhythms that are so much a part of our every day lives and 
yet so elusive to grasp. I will also show how their use of metamorphosis facilitates new 
insights into the use of space in central Johannesburg and how these insights are 
being picked up by city planners and the social sciences.  
 
Through an analysis of these South African artists I hope to show how South African 
filmmakers are using metamorphosis as a narrative strategy for their films and how 
metamorphosis is a wholly appropriate idiom with which to tackle South African 
narratives. 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 6 
Chapter 1 
Metamorphosis 
 
 
 
The work of this master is the greatest contribution of the 
American people to art 
 
I am sometimes frightened when I watch his films. Frightened 
because of some absolute perfection in what he does. 
 
(Sergei Eisenstein on Walt Disney in Taylor, 2006: 85-86) 
 
It is interesting that Eisenstein, one of the great film theorists of our time, has such high 
regard for animation and yet, still, animation has not received much attention in the 
world of academic commentary. As a result, while work on metamorphosis in animation 
is not rare, it is fragmented with isolated essays in various publications but not much in-
 depth analysis of its potential. This makes my initial task of compiling selected work on 
metamorphosis and bringing some of my own connections and research material to 
bear on the subject, all the more important.   
 
If one examines accounts of the history of animation that appear at the beginning of 
most ?how to? books on animation, it becomes clear that most animators and animation 
writers prefer a historical account of the medium through the technological 
development of the cinematic apparatus of film camera and projector. These accounts 
usually begin with Egyptian and Greek sequential decoration on vases and tablets, 
then move on to optical toys like the Thaumatrope, Praxinoscope, Phenakistiscope, 
Zoetrope and Flip Book and all culminate in the serial photography of Edweard 
Muybridge and the first cartoons by James Stuart Blackton in 1896. In doing so, most 
historical accounts of animation choose to focus on the desire to create the illusion of 
movement as the driving force behind animation?s development and thereby ignore 
other, equally important aspects of the medium.  
 
Very little alternative history has been uncovered but in his essay Twenty-five heads 
under one Hat: Quick-Change in the 1890?s (in Sobchack, 2000) Matthew Solomon 
unearths a ?lost history? of cinema approached from the point of view of metamorphic 
performance: Shadowgraphy, chapeaugraphy and the spectacle of quick-change. In 
 7 
his article he provides a historical context for meta-morphic performances in film which 
he identifies as having been abandoned in early cinema history and having re-emerged 
in the digital transformations of the special effects morph. While Solomon does not 
specifically focus on the implications that these forms have on the history of animation, 
it can be deduced that the emerging pioneer animators of the time were intimately 
familiar with the vocabulary of quick-change as they drew heavily from the culture of 
the vaudeville entertainment acts where these modes of performance originated. His 
essay points to a practice of metamorphic and transformational performance that 
preceded the development of film and animation and represents, for me, an alternative 
history of animation approached via performance and transformation and for this 
reason it is essential in an explanation of the relationship between animation and 
metamorphosis.  
 
The transformative technique of quick-change involved the rapid, back stage, change 
of costume of a performer in order to facilitate an alteration of character. 
Shadowgraphers used mainly their hands to create human and animal shadow 
characters for an audience while chapeaugraphy involved the manipulation of a felt hat 
into different configurations on stage as the defining aspect of a new character. The 
difficult work of quick change transformations took place outside the view of the 
audience while the work of the chapeaugrapher placed the means of the transformation 
and the manner in which the transformations were accomplished within the field of view 
of the audience. The chapeaugrapher?s transformative object was a single accessory, a 
felt hat which he would skilfully manipulate and combine with performative changes in 
his physiognomy to complete the illusion of the magical ?creation? of new and familiar 
characters. The acknowledged master of chapeaugraphy was the French conjuror and 
shadowgraphist Felicien Trewey who called his act ?Tabarin, or Twenty-five heads 
under one hat? (Sobchack 2000: 9). 
 
Shadowgraphy involved mimicry as opposed to impersonation. The shadowgraphist sat 
or stood between a beam of light and a screen and using mainly his hands, dexterously 
created the silhouettes of animals and people highly praised for their life like 
appearances and movement. Many critics praised the skilled shadowgrapher?s ability to 
generate the real time metamorphosis of his characters and fingers into other 
characters. Solomon cites accounts of these transformation performances that 
describe how the artist would allow the audience to witness the metamorphosis of his 
fingers into the new character and how the audience much preferred to see this 
metamorphosis rather than the instantaneous appearance of perfect figures.  
 8 
 
The shadowgraphic performances of the Pilobolus Dance Company for the 2007 
Oscars Ceremony in Los Angeles provided widespread exposure for the art of 
metamorphic shadowgraphy. The performers  ?roll? on stage behind a huge backlit 
screen, individuals seemingly flow into one another as they transform into the figure of 
Oscar, the emblems for Snakes on a Plane (2006) and The Devil Wears Prada (2006), 
a James Bond gun and others. Their transformations are strangely organic and fluid 
and seem to deny the laws of physics and gravity as they melt into new forms. Once 
again, it is the path taken that holds our attention; our interest and pleasure is located 
in the metamorphic performance that takes us from ?A? to ?X? before arriving at ?B?.   
 
Several films made before 1900 were made to showcase the transformative skills of 
the quick change artist, chapeaugrapher and shadowgrapher as cinematic spectacle 
(Ibid: 15). In counter point, M?li?s?s Transformations ?clair substituted the spectacle of 
the performer with the film editing spectacle of the cut or splice. In this way, 
transformations across time and space could occur instantaneously while still 
happening ?in front of the audience?.  
 
During the first decade of film history, protean performances were gradually eliminated 
from the cinema as emphasis shifted towards the technology of cinema. What Solomon 
and others believed was lost in this shift towards technology and away from the 
performer, was the fluidity of transformation that was the trick of the shadowgraphist 
and chapeaugraphist as opposed to the comparatively jarring ?transformations? of 
montage in cinema.  
 
Solomon relates this fluidity with Sergei Eisenstein?s concept of ?plasmaticness? which 
he formulated in discussions about Disney?s early animated films. For Eisenstein, 
plasmaticness was the potential for a substance to assume any shape at will; a 
freedom from fixity and it centred on the myth of Proteus, the Greek god who 
possessed the ability to adopt any form. Eisenstein attributes the appeal of the Proteus 
myth to the omnipotence of plasma which contains in liquid form, all possibilities of 
future species and forms: 
 
An ability that I would call ?plasmaticness?, for here we have a being 
represented in drawing, a being of a definite form, a being which has 
attained a definite appearance, and which behaves like the primal 
protoplasm, not yet possessing a ?stable? form, but capable of assuming 
 9 
any form and which, skipping along the rungs of the evolutionary ladder, 
attaches itself to any and all forms of animal existence.  
(Taylor, 2006:101) 
 
Eisenstein also relates plasmaticness to the element of fire which is ??capable of most 
fully conveying the dream of a flowing diversity of forms? (Taylor, 2006:113). For 
Eisenstein fire is a symbol of control over nature as nothing is capable of resisting its 
power and also a symbol of freedom and life:  
 
Thus, fire is like an embodiment of the principle of eternal coming into 
being, the eternally life-producing womb and omnipotence. In this sense, it 
also resembles the potentiality of the primal plasma, from which everything 
can arise.  
(ibid:129) 
 
Antoine Girard Tabarin, the legendary early-seventeenth-century French clown and 
farce artist seems to point directly to Eisenstein?s plasmaticness when he called his 
chapeau ?true raw material, indifferent to all forms?(sic) having almost no essential 
form except formlessness?(sic) as this hat strikes by alterations, for there is no 
moment, no instant, when it does not receive a new figure? (Sobchack, 2000: 9) 
 
The transformative processes and plasmatic potential that was mastered by the artists 
of quick change, chapeaugraphy and shadowgraphy thus came to represent a course 
that emerging cinema would not follow but that, according to Solomon, was to re-
 emerge in the digital revolution of the 1990?s represented succinctly by the plasmatic 
omnipotence of the T-1000 from James Cameron?s Terminator 2: Judgement Day 
(1991). While Solomon does acknowledge that the tradition of performative 
transformation and metamorphosis did continue in ?certain animated films? (ibid: 17), 
his emphasis is centred on the emergence and history of live action film culminating in 
the development of digital technology and the alternative history of live action cinema 
that is represented by the above discussion.  
 
The relevance of this lost history to animation cannot be underestimated as many have 
argued that metamorphosis is the underlying principle of animation. Norman McClaren, 
an acknowledged master of the medium, provides a supportive definition of animation:  
 
 10 
Animation is not the art of drawings that move, but rather the art of 
movements that are drawn. What happens between each frame is more 
important than what happens on each frame.  
(Wells, 1998: 10) 
 
In other words, McClaren plays down the importance of the technology and techniques 
that facilitate ?drawings that move? in order to emphasize the performative aspects of 
the medium: ?the art of movements?. Two types of performance occur ?between each 
frame?; the ?performance? of the animator who imposes a new form on the animated; 
and ?performance? in the form of the transformation and metamorphosis of the 
animated which is manifest on each frame. The performance of the animator between 
frames is foregrounded by William Kentridge as an important aspect of his animation 
process which he calls ?Fortuna? as we shall see later. 
 
The chapeaugraphers, shadowgraphers and quick-change artists of the late Nineteenth 
century can thus be seen as the early precursors of the animators who would emerge 
in the first decade of film, supplying animation with a history in performance and 
metamorphosis that preceded the development of the medium itself. 
 
In his book, Understanding Animation (1998), Paul Wells identifies ten narrative 
strategies in animation: Metamorphosis, condensation, synecdoche, symbolism and 
metaphor, fabrication, associative relations, sound, acting and performance, 
choreography and penetration (Wells, 1998: 68 ? 126). Absolute control over all 
aspects of temporal and spatial ?reality? is the distinctive attribute of animation that 
allows for a unique engagement with these narrative strategies, however, they are not 
restricted to the animation medium. Visual metamorphosis is also an exemplary 
facilitator of many of Well?s narrative strategies. For this reason it is significant to look 
at those strategies for which metamorphosis is relevant, i.e.: condensation, symbolism 
and metaphor, fabrication, associative relations, penetration and metamorphosis itself. 
  
As a narrative strategy, metamorphosis can be used in place of editing to link images 
across time and space and to provide an immediate and fluid visual narrative 
progression that is unique to animation. In this way, animation does not necessarily 
need to rely on live action editing techniques to narrate a story and in so doing, can 
disrupt conventional notions of story-telling. Metamorphosis also adds a unique 
aesthetic quality to the visual design of a film in that it makes visible the transformation 
process by showing the essentially abstract stages of flux between the reality before 
 11 
and after the transition (Wells, 1998: 69).  Metamorphosis is a process that 
transgresses reality by resisting logic and by breaking down the illusion of physical 
space and destabilising the image. In so doing, it becomes a process that facilitates 
and legitimises the conflation of two apparently unrelated images or spaces and forges 
new and original relationships between images3.  
 
According to Wells? definition, condensation in animation ?prioritises the most direct 
movement between what may be called the narrative premise and the relevant 
outcome? (Wells, 1998: 76). Condensation points to animation?s narrative economy 
whereby a high degree of information can be compressed into a limited period of time. 
Again, it is a function of control (in that even the ?actors? in an animated film need to be 
designed, built, drawn, constructed etc) and the fluidity of the medium that allows for 
the visual elision of opposing ideas and the embodiment of a character?s emotional 
information within the form of the character itself. The natural laws of nature as we 
experience them and to which live action films are subject are not a given in the 
animated environment. Newtonian cause and effect are also not necessarily related as 
symbolic and metaphoric representation can be prioritised over the physical and the 
?real?. 4 
 
Metaphor is a narrative strategy that can, in Wells? words, smuggle meaning into an 
image or series of events and is often used in animation to evade censorship (Wells, 
1998: 84). The use of metaphor renders meaning necessarily open-ended as it invites 
interpretation of the symbolic over and above the self-evident. In this way it can be 
seen as emphasizing connotative values over denotative values. Metaphor, according 
to Wells, evolves out of symbolism and ?invites interpretation but insists upon 
openness? (Wells, 1998: 84). The metaphor, due to its emergence from a second order 
notion of representation, is thus necessarily flexible in its meaning and open to 
interpretation from different ideological and discursive perspectives. Wells distinguishes 
between metaphor and symbol in the following way: ?Whilst the symbol invests an 
object with a specific, if historically flexible, meaning, the metaphor offers the possibility 
of a number of discourses within its overarching framework? (1998: 84) and identifies 
the power of metaphor in its ability to free up the symbol from its historical and physical 
                                                
3 Wells discusses Caroline Leaf?s ink on glass animation The Street (1976) and Dave Fleischer?s Betty 
Boop?s Snow White (1933) as films using metamorphosis as their primary narrative strategy. 
4 Wells discusses Paul Driessen?s film Home on the Rails (1981) and Osamu Tezuka?s Jumping (1984) as 
films rich in condensation effects. 
 12 
meaning and encourage interpretation.5 Through the harnessing of the medium?s fluid, 
plasmatic and controllable qualities, metamorphosis is also a technique that lends itself 
to the visualisation of metaphor in a very immediate way (ibid: 69). I will examine 
metamorphosis and metaphor in detail later on. 
 
Fabrication is a term Wells uses to describe the need for animated worlds and 
characters to be constructed from scratch (ibid: 90). The animated environment is 
entirely fabricated and as such, according to Wells, concerns itself with the expression 
of materiality and can be seen as a construction of a kind of meta-reality which can 
have the same physical properties as the real world but read as an alternative version 
of it. Its total fabrication, as an alternative to lived reality, lends itself to the task of 
questioning material existence and makes itself open to metaphoric narrative 
interpretations. The constructed animated world is necessarily a second order 
representation and, by its very nature, inhabits a metaphorical narrative space.6   
Associative relations refers to something similar to Eisensteinian montage whereby 
previously unrelated images or sequences collide and new narrative impetus is created 
along logical and informed lines as opposed to surreal effect (ibid: 93). In the animated 
environment, Wells stresses that these collisions can take place at the level of 
representation itself so that a new visual dialogue, a narrative dialectic between two 
image forms, is created: ?Tensions emerge from design strategies, representational 
associations, and the redefinition of space, completely challenging the dominant 
orthodoxies of visual perception? (ibid: 93). Kentridge stresses this aspect as 
fundamentally intrinsic to his process of ?finding? the narrative of his films as opposed to 
the structured pre-production planning process involved in most animation productions. 
Wells attributes animation with the unique capacity to evoke an experience directly, to 
access invisible, internal spaces that cannot be as accurately described in any other 
                                                
5 Wells discusses Jiri Trnka?s film The Hand (1965) and Christoph and Wolfgang Lauenstein?s film, 
Balance (1989) as films rich in symbolism and metaphor. 
6 Wells deals with another aspect of fabrication in his analysis of Svankmajer?s Jabberwocky (1971). He 
focuses on Svankmajer?s re-animation of materiality for narrative purposes, how Svankmajer tries to 
project the inner life of an inanimate object and this expression becomes his narrative imperative:  
?Consequently, Svankmajer and the Quay Brothers essentially animate apparently still and enigmatic 
environments which are provoked into life by the revelation of the conditions of existence as they have 
been determined by their evolution and past use. This gives such environments a supernatural quality, 
where orthodox codes of narration are negated and emerge from the viewer?s personal reclamation of 
meaning.? (Wells, 1998: 91) According to Wells, most 3-D animation utilising specific objects is in some 
way involved with the uncanny. The doll that is animated to life is at once familiar yet alien, ?familiarity 
is a mark of associational security while alienation emerges from the displacement of use and context.? 
(Wells, 1998: 91) So the doll is associated with the life that its use in childhood bestowed upon it but is 
estranged in its contemporary context and seems threatening because it still seems to possess that life. 
 13 
way. He calls this narrative strategy ?Penetration?: ?Narration in this mode is very much 
determined by the intention to reflect the immediacy of sensual experience as it 
characterises the ability to conduct everyday lives taken for granted by others? (ibid: 
122). As case studies, Wells looks at Stephen Palmer?s Blindscape (1994) and Tim 
Webb?s A is for Autism (1987). These two films use animation as ?the most direct 
creative method? by which the conditions of blindness and autism may be expressed, 
?two conditions among many, which it may be impossible for others to know about? 
(ibid: 122). What it is about the animators that enable them to ?know? about these 
conditions that can only be known through experience is unclear since neither animator 
is blind or autistic although A is for Autism does make use of the drawings of autistic 
children. It is also, perhaps, a little too sweeping to say that no other form of artistic 
representation can harness the penetrative mode of narration as well as animation. 
However, these two films do demonstrate how the transformative attributes of the 
animation medium lends itself to the expression of abstract states of mind and visceral 
experiences.   
 
Metamorphosis as a technique is often seen as the foundation of animation. As the 
?real time? transformation of one object into another by evolution of line, shifts in 
formation of clay etc., Eisenstein?s ?plasmaticness? emerges as a primary means of 
expression that sets animation apart from live action filmmaking and demonstrates the 
extent of control that the animator has over their characters and environments.  
 
Norman M. Klein?s essay, Animation and Animorphs: A Brief Disappearing Act, focuses 
on a distinction between the kind of metamorphic gag structure made popular by 
Disney cartoons and the kind of articulation of metamorphosis by the Fleischer 
Brothers in the early 30?s; and its re-emergence in contemporary, independent 
animated films. His distinction rests on the neologism, the ani-morph, and it is a 
concept that is central to my own ideas about the creative, narrating function of 
metamorphosis in animation. He defines the ani-morph, firstly through a distinction 
between its use as a verb and as a noun. Ani-morphing is essentially the abbreviation 
of the term animated metamorphosis to ?ani-morph?, describing an animated cycle 
during which a metamorphosis or change in form occurs over time. He locates the ani-
 morph, however, between the metamorphic cycle. 
 
Let us imagine a midpoint inside this cycle, between the extremes ? a lapse 
or hesitation, what I call an ani-morph. The shift is suddenly not very stable. 
For a few frames, the object ? the body, in this case ? does not look like 
 14 
what it was, or what it will be. The ani-morph is literally between the rest of 
the cycle. 
(Sobchack, 2000:22) 
 
Ani-morphs are intrinsically self reflexive. Klein opens his essay with a description of 
Stuart Blackton?s and Windsor McCay?s lightning hand sketches in the first decade of 
the Twentieth Century. In these animated sketches, the animator?s hand would flash 
across the screen, erasing lines and making changes to a face drawn in charcoal. The 
effect is described by Klein as the transmutation of one substance into another, but 
more importantly, with this transformation, ?gravity itself, or time, transforms as well? 
(ibid:21), broadening metamorphosis?s realm from the mutating object to encompass 
the transformation of worlds and even realities.  
 
In this way, an entire animated film can be an ani-morph where not only bodies 
transform, but entire environments can change before our eyes. He terms Oskar 
Fischinger?s abstract films as ?essentially ani-morphs as sensory rhythm? and makes 
the important point that ani-morphs in animation ?can be extended almost indefinitely?, 
unlike those in live action films (ibid: 22).  
 
The ani-morph does not narrate by generating a dramatic structure, but rather the story 
is progressed through ?colliding atmospheres? (ibid: 22),  where not only the characters 
change and transform as ani-morphs but the air itself as well. The audience is 
transported across space and time through the transformation of the living environment 
in a similar way as the cut and other montage ?transitions? are used in live action film. 
Only, with the ani-morph, the audience is able to experience these changes visually in 
whatever form, pace, pattern that the animator desires. The animator can go from ?A to 
X to B? as a way of augmenting meaning within the cut, a technique that succeeds in 
achieving Eisenstein?s goal of montage as metaphor. 
 
Ani-morphs also narrate, according to Klein, through the ?instability? of the drawn line 
which implies movement and breathing; through the animation principles of 
exaggeration and squash and stretch and through the insertion of extremes or ani-
 morphic ?gaps?, ?hesitations? or ?glitches? within the cycle. The moment between the 
cycle when the object or environment becomes unstable and resembles neither what it 
was nor what it will be is an example of one of Klein?s ani-morphic ?gaps? (ibid: 22) and 
he likens a ?glitch? to zooming in on a Rembrandt until the cracks in the paint can be 
seen. In this way, ani-morphs are self-reflexive ?ruptures that fall into sequence? and 
 15 
when they are inserted to narrate, as is the case with William Kentridge?s Drawings for 
Projection, metamorphosis reveals what is hidden: ?entropy as molting, melting, 
melding, mutation.? (ibid: 25)  As an example of the Fleischer?s use of the ani-morph, 
Klein describes Betty Boop?s Snow White (1933) as Fleischer?s ?ani-morphic 
masterpiece? (ibid: 26). 
 
The Fleischer?s enthusiasm for the total transformation of reality was in stark contrast 
to the ethos of the Disney studio during the 1920s and later. Disney?s use of 
metamorphosis was a lot less overt and was never allowed to function as a narrative 
strategy in its own right. Metamorphosis in Disney films was restricted to exaggeration 
and squash and stretch, two of the studio?s ?12 basic principles? of animation (Thomas 
and Johnston, 1984: 47). Metamorphosis was never allowed to do the actual 
storytelling. A Disney character could never change into something else, it could 
distort, but it ?must always come back to the original shape? (ibid: 138).  
 
Disney?s pursuit of realism was seen as a necessary step on the way to achieving what 
had not yet been achieved in animation, a full length animated feature film. The studio 
had realised that a sequence of gags was good enough for a short cartoon but would 
not sustain an audience through 90 minutes (ibid: 90). They invested everything into 
achieving pathos and empathy within their audience at the expense, for some, like the 
historian William Moritz, of some of the most exciting and essential aspects of the 
animated medium7. As a result, Disney films could not be self -reflexive in the way that 
the visual transformations of the Fleischer cartoons could be. As explained by Thomas 
and Johnston, ?We cannot risk ruining a sequence or a good characterisation with a 
mechanical imperfection or jitter that reminds the audience that we are dealing with 
drawings rather than real human beings? (ibid:114).  
 
Klein describes the process of animating as a process where the animator assumes 
total control over their reality so he/she can make adjustments to drawings and 
movements at every juncture. The animation process is full of stages where form and 
movement may be checked, modified and improved upon. Eventually, however, the 
??events? that generated the drawing ?shrivel up? but leave an absence one can sense. 
And ?craftsmanship? is revealed from beneath? (Sobchack, 2000:24). Here, Klein 
                                                
7 ?No animation film that is not non-objective and/or non-linear can really qualify as true animation, since 
the conventional linear representational story film has long since been far better done in live action? 
(Moritz, 1988: 21) 
 16 
emphasizes a sense of absence of the animators hand due to the overtly self-reflexive 
nature of the ani-morph. He mentions this aspect on a number of occasions:  
 
The ani-morph is solid and absent at the same time. It is like a 
scar that narrates, a Braille of absences. The viewer can 
practically run a finger across the ani-morph?s ridge, a very 
haptic sensation. The drawings leave an elegant wound as they 
dissolve to make way for movement.  
(ibid) 
 
What is important for me is Klein?s reference to the narrating power of the absent 
animator and the location of the ani-morph between successive frames - the ani-morph 
as a destabilising ?lapse? or ?hesitation? between the transformation of one form into 
the next where the animator inserts him/herself, makes a change to reality and then 
exits before the next frame is recorded but not before her presence leaves behind an 
ani-morphic trace to be woven into the narrative?s trajectory.    
 
Suzanne Buchan, in her essay ?Graphic and literary Metamorphosis: Animation 
technique and James Joyce?s Ulysses? for the Fall 1998 edition of Animation Journal, 
makes the claim for animation as the medium best suited to the portrayal of visual 
metamorphosis to match Joyce?s literary ?portmanteau? transformations. Her essay 
provides a springboard for a discussion of those elements of the animation medium 
that I will be drawing from in my case study analyses later on. Her essay also provides 
a useful link with the themes of metaphor and the multistable image which I will also 
develop in relation to the films of William Kentridge. 
 
Buchan first attempts to define animation as metamorphosis: 
 
The animation film is a form which is ultimately defined by its use of 
metamorphosis, an effect in which a cinematic image, whether 2- or 3-
 dimensional, appears to effect a transition in form over time.  
(Buchan, 1998: 21) 
 
Metamorphosis is the basic principle and effect of animated technique in 
film, where static images, each slightly different than the previous one, are 
photographed on a roll of film. Upon projection, these phasal images gain 
 17 
the illusion of unity and movement; the metamorphosis of the static drawing 
to a coherent figure changing in time is fundamental to animation.  
(ibid: 23) 
 
The problem with the above definitions, as pointed out by Alan Cholodenko8, is that 
they apply just as readily to live action film as to animation; they point to the perceptual 
phenomenon of ?persistence of vision? which is the underlying facilitator of all illusory 
movement in film. I would take this definition further to argue that one of the defining 
aspects of animation is that persistence of vision can be harnessed and used to 
facilitate the creation of meaning. Nuances of line, tone, colour, form and other 
compositional devices when viewed consecutively at 24 frames per second acquire a 
quality and an association with each other that is only possible in animation. Animation 
is thus a site at which persistence of vision can change from a technical necessity of 
the cinematic medium to an active, practical and creative mode of expression. This 
capacity is facilitated by the liminal location of the animator between frames where 
his/her art of worldmaking is made possible through absolute control over time, the 
image and the action.  
 
In his discussion of the plasmatic quality of Disney?s animation, Eisenstein asks why 
this is so attractive and suggests that it possibly represents for the viewer, similar 
stages in human development as far back as the ?origin of the foetus or further back 
down the evolutionary scale? (Taylor, 2006: 103). He says: ?It is justifiable to suppose 
that this work has most or all the traits of pre-logical attractiveness? (ibid, 2006: 125). 
Lacan?s Mirror stage is a likely candidate for that ?memory? is one that is continually 
present: ?The mirror stage (stade du miroir) is not a mere epoch in the history of the 
individual but a stadium (stade) in which the battle of the human subject is permanently 
being waged? (Bowie, 1991: 21)9  
 
                                                
8 Email correspondence with the author 
9 The Mirror stage was Lacan?s first major contribution to the theory of psychoanalysis first published in 
the late 1940s. The mirror phase is very important to Lacan?s theory of the origin of subjectivity and is an 
essential stage in the development of self perception and a sense of selfhood. A child between the ages of 
6 ? 18 months, helpless, unable to speak and not in control of its actions, when confronted with a mirror 
image shows a kind of jubilation at the unity which it sees and appreciates and which it will one day 
achieve. It is the beginning of a dialectic in which recognition is simultaneously a misrecognition 
stemming from the essential illusion that the mirror image represents (the child is not the image of the 
child). The mirror phase is also associated with the frightening fantasy of the fragmented body which 
represents the threat that this unity may disintegrate or be torn apart. The child in this stage often displays 
?transitivity? which is the misrecognition of other small children as itself so that when a child falls and 
hurts itself, the other child that is watching, cries as well. (Macey, 2000: 255-256) 
 18 
Eisenstein also relates the attractiveness of plasmatic freedom of form to the 
comparative captivity of the standardization and mechanisation of American existence 
in the 1920s and ?30s. For Eisenstein, the early cartoons of Disney served as a 
temporary antidote to the loss of changeability brought about by Fordism and the ?grey 
wolf? of poverty and unemployment during the great depression. 
 
In the chapter ?The Artful Brain? from his book A Brief Tour of Human Consciousness 
(2004), Dr. V. S. Ramachandran speculates about the possibility of universal artistic 
principles founded on the universal principles of neuroscience. One of those principles 
he calls ?Grouping? and it involves perceptual problem solving. When faced with a 
visual puzzle (Ramachandran uses Richard Gregory?s Dalmatian dog which at first 
glance appears as a flat ground made up of random splotches and slowly evolves into 
the picture of a dog), vision from a neuroscientific point of view shows itself to be a very 
complex phenomenon.  
 
The human brain sends reward signals from the visual centers of the brain to the 
limbic-emotional centers when part of the dog is recognised. Ramachandran describes 
this reward as an ?A-ha? moment of partial recognition. This small bias is sent back to 
earlier stages where it helps to facilitate a further binding of the image at hand. This 
process of recognition and reward eventually results in a final big ?A-HA!? as the 
random splotches seem to morph into the picture of the dog. Ramachandran uses this 
example to describe how the pleasure we experience in the activity of solving a 
perceptual puzzle is actually the result of our accessing something very deep, 
something to do with the way the human brain evolved.  
 
In the highly camouflaged environments of our evolutionary past, vision evolved mainly 
to discover objects and to decipher the camouflage of our food and those animals that 
would see us as food (Ramachandran, 2003: 50). A leopard moving through the foliage 
is a fragmented puzzle of colour and shape that needed to be ?put together? by our 
brains into the whole leopard that was the sum of the fragments. Once achieved, we 
knew to take evasive action. According to Ramachandran, the system of partial 
recognition and emotional reward (?A-ha?) developed in order to facilitate the process 
of defeating camouflage and is designed to keep us interested throughout the entire 
problem solving process and not to become frustrated and to give up: 
 
 19 
In other words, the wiring of your visual centers to your emotional centers 
ensures that the very act of searching for the solution is pleasing, just as 
struggling with a jigsaw puzzle is pleasing long before the final ?A-ha?.  
(ibid: 51)  
 
So, according to one of the leading minds in neuroscience, we have been programmed 
through evolution to find pleasure in perceptual problem solving. Pleasure not only in 
solving the problem in full, but in the step by step, partial solving of the problem as it 
progresses toward the final ?A-ha?. In a discussion with William Kentridge, Angela 
Breidbach seems to point to a similar compulsion to embark on visual problem solving: 
 
There is a hunger in everyone?s eyes to understand the world and to look 
for any clues to create the space. One cannot resist reading what one sees 
as patterns, constructing the space, ordering it. The sense is of the brain 
trying out different connections all the time, predicting what the space will 
do; this is why the most minimal of visual hints are seized upon as clues for 
reading sense into space.   
(Breidbach, 2006: 7) 
 
Marina Warner also notes the pleasure inherent in metamorphic transformations and 
how it is often harnessed as a narrative strategy:  
 
Moreover, some kinds of metamorphosis play a crucial part in anagnorisis, 
or recognition, the reversal fundamental to narrative form, and so govern 
narrative satisfaction: when the beggar maid turns out to be the foundling 
princess?Stories of this kind promise us change, too. 
(Warner, 2002: 18/19) 
 
Ramachandran moves from here into a discussion of the speculative implications that 
this might have on the visual arts in general. I would like to be more specific in using 
this recognition-reward theory to enter into a discussion of the class of image known as 
the multistable image and its relationship to and implications for metamorphosis in 
animation.   
The ?multistable? image is a class of images whose primary function is to demonstrate 
the co-existence of two different or opposite readings in a single image. Joseph 
 20 
Jastrow?s duck-rabbit is probably the most emblematic of this type of image (JJ ?The 
Duck-Rabbit? from Fact and Fable in Psychology (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1900). 
W.J.T. Mitchell describes the effect of the multistable image:  
The ?fort-da? or ?peek-a-boo? effect of these images is sometimes 
associated with forms of ?savage thought?, rites of passage, and ?liminal? or 
threshold experiences in which time and space, figure and ground, subject 
and object play an endless game of ?see-saw?.  
(Mitchell, 1994: 46)  
As a mode of visual representation, the full potential of animated metamorphosis (at 
least in its ?essential? state of Klein?s ani-morph) seems to be located within this class of 
image. When at first one encounters the duck-rabbit, as long as the first time viewer is 
not aware that it is a multistable image, the viewer will more than likely pick up on one 
reading, either duck or rabbit. The moment of ?shift? when the second reading is picked 
up can also be described as a kind of metamorphosis having taken place in the mind of 
the viewer. In this way, Ramachandran?s description of the recognition-reward system 
as ?visual peek-a-boo? (Ramachandran, 2003: 50) is linked to Freud?s pleasure 
principle10 and ?fort-da?.11 
Mitchell speaks about the multistable image displaying the quality of ?nesting?, whereby 
one image is concealed inside another image, rendering ambiguous the boundary 
between first- and second-order representation: ?They employ a single gestalt to shift 
from one reference to another? (Mitchell, 1994: 48). This ambiguity creates a sense of 
fascination for the audience who returns to this mysterious object whose fluctuating 
identity seems so singular and specific. It might be said via Ramachandran, that it is 
camouflaged and its camouflage cannot be defeated. Its fragments cannot be united 
into a whole and it cannot be pinned down. Perhaps this may account for our 
fascination with this kind of image and for animated metamorphosis as well. 
 
                                                
10 The Pleasure Principle is one of the two major principles that govern mental activity, the other being 
the reality principle. According to Freud, all psychical activity is directed toward the procurement of 
pleasure and the avoidance of pain. The pleasure principle serves to return the psyche to a level of 
equilibrium and constancy which pain disrupts. (Macey, 2000: 300) 
11 This is the name of a game played by and 18 month old baby which Freud observed. The baby would 
throw a cotton reel out of its cot and then pull it in on the piece of string attached to it making the sound 
?Oo? and ?Aa? as it did so. Freud interpreted these sounds as ?fort? (gone) and ?da? (there) which allows 
the child mastery over a physical object and to achieve a symbolic mastery of the anxiety caused by the 
absence of the child?s mother. In this way it is linked to Freud?s Pleasure Principle. (Macey, 2000: 133)  
 
 21 
On the duck-rabbit, Ludwig Wittgenstein speaks about a new perception arising out of 
an unchanged perception (Wittgenstein in Kenny (ed.), 1994: 183) while in animated 
metamorphosis, the object itself undergoes a change in form over time. In noticing a 
?change of aspect?, he speaks about a change in perception ?quite as if the object had 
altered before my eyes? (ibid: 183). He seems to be describing a kind of mental 
metamorphosis; a metamorphosis of interpretation that takes place as part of the 
process of perception itself and one that is no less real or less powerful than a change 
of aspect that may occur before our eyes.  
 
Eisenstein cites Dr Georg Kerschensteiner?s book The Development of Drawing Skill 
(Munich, Carl Gerber; 1905) in his discussion of contour in Disney cartoons (in Taylor, 
2006:144). In one case a child was asked to draw a tree from memory and the result 
was a drawing that represented independently the general outline of the tree as well as 
the system of branches that to an older person are one and the same thing - the 
system of branches constitute the general shape of the tree. Eisenstein comments that 
the consciousness of the child was not yet capable of comprehending this unity of part 
and whole. In time, the child will be able to understand this unity. This is similar to the 
dawning of an aspect which I relate to the process of transformation in animation. In 
Eisenstein?s example, the child?s developing consciousness facilitates a kind of 
metamorphosis that enables a new understanding of reality.  
 
This same kind of mental transformation is apparent in the treatment of objects through 
metaphor in art and theatre. Using the example of Tsepang (Lara Foot Newton and 
Gerard Marx, 2003), a change in aspect is noticed in the object of the loaf of bread and 
the broomstick. By the time the audience experiences the brutal shoving of the 
broomstick shard into the loaf of bread, they are also (or perhaps exclusively) 
witnessing the rape of a nine month old baby. But when are the tables turned between 
the ascendancy of the denotative value of the object and its connotative or 
metaphorical significance? When does the audience stop seeing the broomstick as a 
broomstick and start to perceive it as a penis? This moment, I would argue, is the 
moment that Wittgenstein describes as the ?dawning of an aspect? with regard to the 
duck-rabbit and in animation this ?change? or ?dawning? of an aspect describes a 
moment during the visual phenomenon of metamorphosis which, due to the absolute 
control over time and matter available to the animator, can be drawn out and meaning 
can be accrued in this moment that is, as I have argued, a site of interest and 
?pleasure? for the audience.  
 
 22 
The change of aspect that Wittgenstein speaks about is a change that takes place 
during our interpretation of a visual image as part of the phenomenon of perception, 
and as such, it is a mental activity that cannot be measured or pinpointed in time. It is a 
liminal moment, an immediate thing; not the transition, but forever between the 
transition and it is thus forever elusive, and an ?essence? of animation that is supported 
alongside Alan Cholodenko?s use of the word animatic 12 which he describes as: 
 
The essence of animation, except animation can have for me no essence, 
therefore it is the nonessence of animation, the condition of possibility and 
at the same time impossibility of animation?the animatic bears direct 
relation to Eisenstein?s notion of Plasmaticness, that formless form that 
giving all form is itself ungiveable as such, that Protean form that is ever 
changing ?shape-shifting?, that is the very figure of metamorphosis. 13 
 
Animation can extend this metamorphic process, draw out and use the ?dawning of an 
aspect? to create as many ?a-ha? moments of recognition and reward on our way to or 
perhaps in avoidance of, a destination. The significance of this becomes clear when 
the following question is posed: When or at what point does an object become more 
like B than like A in its metamorphosis? Kevin Fisher Also describes this moment:  
 
Within any morph between two objects there is a midpoint at which the 
morph is minimally recognisable as either ?source? or ?target? image. It is at 
the moment of midpoint that, if only for just an instant, the morph lapses 
from the order of known things. Most important, this lapse (or lack) of 
formal definition is still figured in full 3-dimensional extrusion, and the 
paradoxical presence of being-without-thing-ness blinks at us like some 
denuded metasubstance stripped of the over determined trappings of 
symbolic designation and fixity.  
 (Sobchack, 2000:118)  
 
Ultimately, however, this is a question that cannot be empirically pinpointed in an 
animation sequence because the ani-morph is in continual flux. However, it does have 
certain implications for the possibilities inherent to the animation medium. Metamorphic 
sequences can take advantage of the multistable event and in so doing can draw our 
                                                
12 Cholodenko?s animatic is not to be confused with the filmed storyboard animatic that forms part of the 
animation production pipeline. 
13 Email correspondence with the author 
 23 
attention to the transgression of boundaries that questions the permeability of man-
 made borders and categories, ideologies and notions of nomenclature and ?truth?. I will 
focus on this aspect of metamorphosis when I turn my attention to Kentridge?s 
Drawings for Projection. 
 
In this first chapter I have attempted to bring various aspects of metamorphosis 
together in order to provide a foundation for looking at the use of metamorphosis in 
William Kentridge?s Drawings for Projection which will be the task of the next chapter. I 
have looked at an alternative history of animation via the metamorphic performances of 
the Quick Change artists, shadowgraphers and chapeaugraphers of the late nineteenth 
century in order to foreground the roots of animation in metamorphic performance and 
to provide a bridge to Wells?s narrative strategies in animation. Here, I intended to 
show that metamorphosis is central to the effective expression of a number of these 
strategies. I then spent time looking at Eisenstein?s use of the word ?plasmaticness? to 
enter into a discussion of an ?essence? of the medium itself and how Klein?s ?ani-morph? 
and Cholodenko?s ?animatic? point to the importance of the space ?between? frames in 
animated metamorphosis as a space where meaning can accrue. I also attempted to 
use Mitchell?s and Wittgenstein?s discussion of the multistable image and 
Ramachandran?s theory of visual problem solving to link animated metamorphosis to a 
model of perception. In the next two chapters I will look at some South African case 
studies where metamorphosis is foregrounded as the dominant narrative strategy in 
order to show how metamorphosis emerges as an appropriate mode of representation 
in a country of constant change and flux. 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 24 
Chapter 2 
William Kentridge?s Drawings for Projection 
 
In Ovid, metamorphosis often breaks out in moments of crisis, as 
expressions of intense passion, as Hughs points out; but, as a literary 
figure, it refuses to settle between the states of metaphorical evocation 
to actual description and embodies the condition of writing itself. Both 
forms of change however put up resistance to time and forgetting?  
(Warner, 2002: 16) 
 
Introduction 
As Marina Warner suggests, metamorphosis tends to emerge in literature during 
moments of crisis as well as in ?transitional places and at the confluence of traditions 
and civilizations? (ibid: 18). In 1997 South African critic, Clive Kellner, described the 
turbulent, young democracy as ?a completely heterogeneous cocktail of discord, 
assemblage, bricolage, metamorphosis and epistemological erasure? (Boris in Benezra 
et al, 2001:36). In a country of 11 official languages emerging from post-colonial, post-
 Apartheid trauma, it seems that South Africa?s stories are very well suited to the 
process of metamorphosis. 
 
I would suggest that metamorphosis in Kentridge?s work occurs in three, often 
overlapping levels. First are the most obvious surface level transformations where one 
object literally changes into another before our eyes, for example, we see smoke from 
Soho?s cigar transforming first into a bell and then into a tea cup in Mine (1991). 
Transformations of one object into another are the most noticeable in that they are the 
most easily observed, however, the complexity of their meanings especially when 
coupled with the more deeply embedded notions of metamorphosis is central to this 
dissertation. This will not be more keenly felt than when we discuss the appropriation of 
the dead bodies by the landscape in Felix in Exile (1994). Secondly, metamorphosis 
takes on a more structural role at the level of the piece?s narrative strategy in that it is 
used in place of established live action film transitions like the cut, dissolve and fade to 
transport the audience across time and space. In so doing, metamorphosis is literally 
used to ?tell the story?; it is the method of presenting events and of moving from one 
event to the next. Finally, Kentridge?s distinctive technique offers up a medium that is 
infused with metamorphosis through its harnessing of palimpsest.  
 
 25 
The bringing together of two disparate ideas to create a new idea is a simplistic 
definition of metaphor for the purpose of demonstrating its kinship with metamorphosis. 
Paul Ricoeur ends his essay Word, Polysemy, Metaphor: Creativity in Language (1973) 
with a definitive statement that makes it impossible not to look at metaphor when 
dealing with metamorphosis. ?With metaphor?, he says, ?we experience the 
metamorphosis of both language and reality? (Valdes, 1991:85). The scope of this 
essay precludes a full analysis of metaphor in relation to Kentridge?s work so I will 
focus on a specific aspect of metaphoric function. I will relate his application of 
metamorphosis to the use of the digital morph in contemporary visual effects in terms 
of the absence and presence of metaphor with the purpose of coming to a clearer 
understanding of the complexity of his medium in the context of other manifestations of 
metamorphosis.    
 
Finally, I will examine the ?range of agencies? that Kentridge calls ?fortuna? which he 
uses as a model for drawing and for the process of thought itself. It is fortuna that 
opens up the space for metamorphic plasmaticness in Kentridge?s narratives and as 
such it is central to an understanding of the all pervading use and effect of 
metamorphosis in William Kentridge?s Drawings for Projection.  
 
William Kentridge was born in 1955 to a family of prominent lawyers active during 
Apartheid and renowned for their defense of Apartheid victims. His father, Sydney, led 
the inquest into the death of Steve Biko in 1977. Kentridge?s upbringing in such a family 
with access to the kind of political and social information that was censored and 
withheld from the South African public afforded him early insight into the unjust and 
abnormal society in which he lived. 
 
Kentridge earned a B.A. in Politics and African Studies from the University of the 
Witwatersrand, Johannesburg in 1976. Thereafter he studied Fine Art at the 
Johannesburg Art Foundation until 1978, where he later taught printmaking. He also 
studied mime and theatre at the ?cole Jacques LeCoq in Paris from 1981 to 1982. He 
was a founding member of the Junction Avenue Theatre Company based in 
Johannesburg and Soweto from 1975 to 1991, and later of the Free Filmmakers 
Cooperative, established in Johannesburg in 1988. In 1985 he worked as a prop 
assistant on a television series and in the same year he made his first animated film, 
Vetkoek/Fete Galante. He has made 9 animated films in which the characters of Felix 
Teitelbaum and Soho Eckstein play the leading roles: Johannesburg:2nd Greatest City 
After Paris (1989); Monument (1990); Mine (1991); Sobriety, Obesity & growing old 
 26 
(1991); Felix in Exile (1994); History of the Main Complaint (1996); Weighing and 
Wanting (1998); Stereoscope (1999); Medicine Chest (2001) and Tide Table (2003-04). 
Kentridge was honoured with a film retrospective at Annecy International Film Festival 
in June 1995. 
 
He has maintained a thoroughly multimedia practice, producing and often combining 
drawings, films, and theater. His extremely successful collaboration with the 
Handspring Puppet Company began in 1992 with the production Woyzeck on the 
Highveld in which both puppets and their manipulators were presented on stage, 
accompanied by animated projections. He then conceived and directed Faustus in 
Africa! in 1995. By 1996, South Africa had had its first elections and was on the road to 
establishing a new democracy. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission was 
designed to allow victims of Apartheid to confront their perpetrators and to share the 
pain of their losses with the rest of South Africa. It was also designed to encourage the 
perpetrators to confess their actions and in so doing to hopefully allow some sort of 
closure to those who had lost family members without any explanation as to where they 
had gone or how they had disappeared. The TRC unearthed extensive atrocities that 
were committed during the decades of the struggle against apartheid and extended 
amnesty to applicants from all quarters of the political spectrum in return for their 
confessions. Kentridge and the Handspring Puppet Company?s Ubu and the Truth 
Commission (1996), written by Jane Taylor, addressed the ongoing TRC process 
drawing on themes from Alfred Jarry's dark play Ubu Roi (1869).  
 
In 1998 he interpreted Claudio Monteverdi?s Il Retorno di Ulisse (1998) also with the 
Handspring Puppet company and in 2005 he premiered his most recent theatrical 
production in which he combined live actors and animation - Mozart's Die Zauberfl?te 
(The Magic Flute) at Th??tre de La Monnaie in Brussels, with William Kentridge 
directing and Ren? Jacobs as conductor. 
 
Kentridge has exhibited widely since 1981. He has had solo exhibitions at the Museum 
of Modern Art in New York (Projects 68, 1999), Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture 
Garden in Washington, D.C. (2001), the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New 
York (2001), Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris (2002), and Castello di Rivoli in Rivoli, 
Italy (2004), among other venues. He has also participated in many group exhibitions, 
including the Venice Biennale (1993), Istanbul Biennial (1995), Biennale of Sydney 
(1996), Documenta (1997 and 2002), Bienal de S?o Paulo (1998), Carnegie 
International (1999), Shanghai Biennale (2000), and Auckland Triennial (2004). In 
 27 
addition, he has appeared in many international film festivals, among them the New 
Zealand Film Festival and the Internationales Trickfilm Festival Stuttgart (both 2000). 
He has received many awards for his work, including the Blue Ribbon Award at the 
American Film Festival in New York (1985), the Carnegie Prize at the Carnegie 
International (2000), the Sharjah Biennial Prize (2003), and the Kaiserring prize from 
the M?nchehaus-Museum f?r Moderne Kunst in Goslar, Germany (2003) in recognition 
of his contribution to contemporary art.  
 
In 1998 a survey exhibition of his work was hosted by the Palais des Beaux-Arts in 
Brussels, continuing to museums in Munich, Barcelona, London, Marseille and Graz 
and 2001 saw the launch of a substantial survey show of Kentridge?s work in 
Washington, traveling thereafter to New York, Chicago, Houston, Los Angeles and 
Cape Town. Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev curated a new retrospective exhibition of his 
work for the Castello di Rivoli in Turin in January 2004, touring thereafter to Dusseldorf, 
Sydney, Montreal, Johannesburg and Miami. The installation 7 Fragments for Georges 
M?li?s, Day for Night and Journey to the Moon was presented at the 2005 Venice 
Biennale and in October of the same year the Deutsche Bank Guggenheim in Berlin 
presented Black Box / Chambre Noire, a project commissioned by the Solomon R. 
Guggenheim Foundation. He lives and works in Johannesburg. 
 
The figure in the landscape is a central theme in Kentridge?s work and his oeuvre is 
especially noted for how it reveals certain aspects regarding the relationship between 
the body, identity, geography and memory. There is a strong tradition of landscape 
painting in South Africa most of which depicted, for Kentridge, a false ideal of South 
Africa that he could not relate to. Neal Benezra in his article William Kentridge: 
Drawings for Projection (2001) remarks that the paintings of two of South Africa?s most 
celebrated landscape artists, Jan Ernst Abraham Volschenk (1853 ? 1936) and Jacob 
Hendrik Pierneef (1886 ? 1957) depicted a seamless, idealised relationship between 
the land and its people, which even at a young age seemed very unlike the landscape 
that Kentridge saw all around him. The landscape of JHB is constructed by the mining 
operations that built the town in the late 19th Century. It is essentially flat with the only 
visible ?mountains? being the mine dumps which are essentially the waste material of 
mining operations. The mine dumps are built from ?discarded land? (Benezra et al, 
2001:22).  
 
Land is intrinsically connected in the South African context to identity and politics, 
occupied first by colonial explorers and later by settlers, it became the site of horrific 
 28 
crimes under the Apartheid regime. Felix in Exile was made just before the first SA 
democratic elections in 1994 when issues such as ownership, dispossession and 
redistribution were foregrounded in the political and social spheres. Discussions around 
colonial boundaries and cultural territories raised questions about where the 
dispossessed were going to live and how they would identify themselves in the ?New 
South Africa?. The land around JHB has been brutalized by the processes that built the 
town and it is on this land, in this context that Kentridge chose to play out much of the 
drama of his narratives.  
 
Kentridge is often attributed with ?developing? a kind of ?poor-man?s animation? in which 
he photographs charcoal drawings, erases certain elements and then redraws them 
and adjusts them for the next frame. This form of animation was one of the first 
recorded animation techniques that dates back to James Stuart Blackton and Thomas 
Edison?s work Humorous Phases of Funny Faces released in 1906. In this short film, 
Blackton used chalk on a blackboard and erased each drawing before redrawing 
certain elements for the camera to capture.  
 
Fortuna and Associative relations 
 
Now it seems to me metamorphosis embodies the shifting character of 
knowledge, of theories of self, and models of consciousness that postulate 
the brain as an endlessly generative producer of images and of thoughts, 
selected from and connected through fantasy, observation and memory. 
(Warner, 2001: 202) 
 
In a lecture entitled ?Fortuna?: Neither programme nor chance in the making of images 
(1993)14, Kentridge explains his neologism and the central position that ?fortuna? 
occupies in his filmmaking and drawing process. He uses a particularly potent 
sequence in Mine (1991) where Soho, lying in bed is preparing his coffee in a plunger 
cafeti?re. At that point in the filming process he was contemplating how to get from 
Soho in bed to the miners underground and the agent which presented itself was the 
coffee plunger. When it reached the bottom of the coffee pot, Kentridge maintained its 
trajectory downwards and it continued to sink through the bottom of the coffee pot and 
through Soho?s bed. The camera pans downward with the plunger which has now 
become the lift in the mineshaft and we are transported effortlessly into the stifling, 
                                                
14 In Cameron et al, 1999: 114 
 29 
crowded and dirty world of the subterranean miners. In describing how he came upon 
this idea of using the coffee plunger as the agent for this metamorphosis of space from 
bedroom to bedrock, he makes a point of distancing himself from conscious thought 
and choice in the matter. 
 
None of them came about through a plan, a programme, a storyboard, 
neither obviously did they come about through sheer chance. ?Fortuna? is 
the general term I use for this range of agencies ? something other than 
cold statistical chance, and something too outside the range of rational 
control. 
(Cameron et al, 1999: 118) 
 
In interviews with Kentridge and writing about his creative process, it becomes very 
clear that, for him, starting with a clear moral, ethical or political statement or even a 
clear idea of where and how the narrative should progress is a creative dead end. 
Drawing - the desire to put charcoal to paper and the activity of drawing itself creates 
the psychological space within which the imagery and ideas of his films find fertile 
purchase. In her essay ?The Rock?: William Kentridge?s Drawings for Projection (2000), 
Rosalind Krauss notes that the generosity with which he opens his process up to the 
viewer is in part, a way of diverting the viewer away from ?the rock? and its ideological 
imperatives. ?The rock? is how Kentridge describes the immovable presence of 
Apartheid and for him, the scale and weight of the rock is inimical to the task of 
representing and exploring it. As Krauss notes: ?a rock upon which art itself must 
always founder? (Krauss in Gehman and Reinke (eds.), 2005: 97) 
 
In an extract from his essay Felix in Exile: Geography and Memory (1994)15, Kentridge 
talks about some of the starting points for the film. One of the starting points was 
through word games or concrete poetry that brought about playful yet often deeply 
significant shifts in meaning such as exit/exist, historical/hysterical and of course, 
Felix/Exile. He does, however, downplay the significance that should be attached to 
what he describes as ?puns and alliteration as a substitute for ideas? (Cameron et al, 
1999: 122) but he used this kind of whimsical play as a way into the ?dumb? process of 
working which for him defines the space where his mind gets into gear and meaning 
begins to emerge.  
 
                                                
15 In Cameron et al, 1999: 122 
 30 
This is not to say that the starting point will transform itself from something 
ephemeral to something solid, but rather that it gives an entry point and that 
through the process of working, connections, inventions and images are 
generated which can both rescue the origin and find the heart of the 
material which might otherwise not have been evident. 
(Cameron et al; 1999:122) 
 
These word games find common ground with the multistable image and the kind of 
transformative activity that links them with Ramachandran?s recognition/reward process 
of visual problem solving that I introduced in the previous chapter. Kentridge 
emphasizes the process of discovery and recognition in his working process. It is 
through the making of the drawings that he recognises, remembers and incorporates 
into his narrative trajectory and places little value on the conscious planning and 
storyboarding process that is usually central to animation preproduction ? ?You know it 
by recognising it, rather than knowing it before.? (Breidbach, 2006: 64) Associative 
relations are central to his narrative strategy and he illustrates this by describing how 
he came across the iconography for Tide Table. He tells how he was thinking about 
AIDS and how, in parts of Africa, it is described as the thinning disease (ibid: 107). This 
led to an association with the biblical story of Pharaoh?s dream about the fat and the 
thin cows emerging from the ocean ? the fat cows representing periods of plenty and 
the thin cows representing periods of drought. The familiarity of this image arose from 
certain beaches in South Africa where cows regularly walk along the shore. A similar 
series of associations led to the characters of the child minder and the boy who 
emerged out of the choir after he ?recognised? his own child minder in the features of 
one of the choir members (Ibid:104). These two characters then emerged as central 
characters alongside that of Soho and the boy became the memory of Soho as a child 
and the sequences that of an encountering of one?s past self. The conception of 
drawing is, for Kentridge, a model for knowledge, a testing of ideas and not an 
achievable instant: 
 
What does it mean to say that something is a drawing ? as opposed to a 
fundamentally different form, such as a photograph? First of all, arriving at 
the image is a process, not a frozen instant. Drawing for me is about 
fluidity. There may be a vague sense of what you?re going to draw but 
things occur during the process that may modify, consolidate or shed 
doubts on what you know. So drawing is a testing of ideas; a slow motion 
version of thought. It does not arrive instantly like a photograph. The 
 31 
uncertain and imprecise way of constructing a drawing is sometimes a 
model of how to construct meaning. What ends in clarity does not begin 
that way. 
(Cameron et al, 1999: 8) 
 
Kentridge tells a story to illustrate the idea that the human brain is programmed to find 
order in chaos and to impose known patterns onto the unknown. When his daughter 
was three years old he told her how the cat had been chased by the dog but managed 
to escape through the cat flap. When she retold this story she said: ?The cat went 
outside, the cat was chased by the dog and then it flapped its wings and it escaped.? 
The idea of a cat flap was unknown to her but the association of the word ?flap? was, in 
her mind, inextricably linked with birds, wings and flight so that these associations 
affected her understanding of events and literally transformed her reality so that it could 
fit into an existing structure of knowledge (Breidbach, 2006: 61). With Kentridge, one 
must always be aware of his insistence that the associations we draw into the work are 
not his starting point. He does not start with the associations and their meaning and 
then work forward from there: ?The description of associative meaning is secondary 
and partly reimposed now, once the event has actually happened, trying to find the 
logic that must have been there, rather than starting from these logics directly.? (Krauss 
in Gehman and Reinke (eds.), 2005: 83).  
 
In her discussion of fortuna Krauss draws a formal comparison between Kentridge?s 
Monument and Beckett?s Catastrophe in order to illustrate the importance of 
Kentridge?s activity between successive frames in his films. ?The business? of Beckett?s 
play, she says, ?is made up of the continual movement of the director?s assistant to and 
from the motionless figure on stage; following her director?s instructions ? removing the 
figure?s hat, taking his hands out of his pockets and then returning to the director? (ibid, 
2005: 98). It is just this movement to the drawing on one side of the studio where small 
erasures and additions are made and back to the camera on the other side of the 
studio to record the changes that constitutes the operation of Kentridge?s own 
Drawings for Projection. This space that he traverses between frames, at once 
mechanical and meditational is the space which is open to fortuna ? the ?finding? of the 
individual images and their interconnectedness which becomes the narrative as 
opposed to the lengthy preproduction processes of most animation production ? 
scripting, storyboarding, animatics etc. Fortuna and what he describes as his ?stalking? 
of the drawing in the studio is an aspect of his working process closely related to 
associational automatism and improvisation. In the space between the camera and the 
 32 
drawing he is able to see the drawing and to allow free association to play a part in his 
next move.  In terms of a time based medium such as animation, this ?stalking? takes 
place between progressive frames. 
 
This movement between the drawing and the camera has, for Krauss, seemingly 
entered the cadence of Kentridge?s medium. It is as if his stalking of the drawing is 
somehow present in the rhythm of the films themselves. This recalls Norman 
McClaren?s highlighting of the performative aspects of animation when he defined 
animation in terms of ?the art of movements that are drawn? which I discussed in the 
first chapter (Wells, 1998: 10). 
. 
 
This is not just in the breathing that is thematised in so many of the works: 
the ?statue?s? laboured breath at the end of Monument; the rise and fall of 
the chests of the workers asleep in their terrible bunks in Mine; Soho?s 
troubled wheezing through the gasmask of Sobriety, Obesity and Growing 
Old; the open mouthed rasping of the comatose Soho in The History of the 
Main Complaint. It occurs at a deeper level of representation in which the 
hesitations in the continuity of the movement seem the registration within 
the film?s visual field of Kentridge?s body ?stalking the drawing,? of his own 
movement both tracking and slowing that of the image.  
(Krauss in Gehman and Reinke (eds.), 2005: 111)  
 
This ?absent presence? of Kentridge between the frames recalls the liminal location that 
Klein puts forward as the seat of the ani-morph?s transformational power. It is here that 
the animator?s presence leaves a trace that becomes woven into the narrative?s 
trajectory:  
 
Eventually, however, the ?events? that generated the drawing ?shrivel up? 
but leave an absence one can sense. And ?craftsmanship? is revealed from 
beneath. 
(Klein in Sobchack, 2000:24).  
 
Krauss also approaches fortuna through a discussion of the philosopher Stanley 
Cavell?s use of the word automatism as a preferred way of referring to medium. The 
automatisms of an artistic practice are those ?broad genres or forms around which an 
art organizes itself (the fugue, the dance forms, blues) and those local events or topoi 
 33 
around which a genre precipitates itself (e.g. modulations, inversions, cadences)? 
(Krauss in Gehman and Reinke (eds.), 2005: 103). In mastering one of these traditions, 
the artist masters a whole range of automatisms which function as a support of ready-
 made formula over which spontaneity and improvisation can be released to its fullest 
extent. According to Krauss, Kentridge?s automatism (his new medium) is his discovery 
of a new convention through improvisation (fortuna) and what is important is that 
primary meaning is generated through this automatism, this process of fortuna. In this 
vein, it can be said that Kentridge favours procedure before meaning and that meaning 
is, in fact, induced by this process of fortuna.  
 
The hope is that without directly plunging the surgeon?s knife, the arcane 
process of obsessively walking between the camera and the drawing board 
will pull to the surface, intimations of the interior.  
(ibid: 105) 
 
Memory, metaphor and the morph 
 
Thus, as a form (both of figuration and figure) that is ?carried beyond? itself 
and ?across? different realms of our present existence and culture, the 
morph is not only meta-morphic in its shape-shifting formlessness that 
greedily ?devours all forms?; it is also meta-phoric in its inherent tropological 
movement and its historically substitutive activity.  
(Sobchack; 2000: xiii) 
 
?Morphing, a computer-generated transformation of a photographically based image?? 
(Bukatman in Sobchack, 2000: 225) ? This aspect of Bukatman?s definition specifies a 
technological preference. In Kentridge and other more ?traditional? animation forms, 
metamorphosis is not necessarily computer-generated and its base is not necessarily 
photographic. While most of the essays in Meta-morphing deal with the digital morph, 
there are some exceptions which acknowledge the wider implications of the morph in 
terms of transformation and metamorphosis without the use of computer programmes. 
As discussed, Matthew Solomon?s essay looks at the performance based 
transformations of chapeaugraphy, shadowgraphy and quick-change and Norman 
Klein?s essay deals with the ani-morph and compares the use of ?analog? 
metamorphosis in the Disney Studio versus the Warner Brothers Studio. In the same 
volume Victoria Duckett explores the material morph through the artist Orlan and her 
?metamorphoses? of self through countless plastic surgery alterations. In this context of 
 34 
the digital morph and the broader field of metamorphosis and transformation, it seems 
pertinent that I attempt to locate Kentridge?s use of metamorphosis within this wider 
field. 
 
Roger Warren Beebe relates the morphing sequences of the T-1000 in Terminator 2: 
Judgment Day (1991) to Roland Barthes? notion of the punctum which Barthes 
articulated as a kind of ?rupture? in the photographic image (Sobchack, 2000: 161). 
Beebe suggests that the morphing sequences affect a temporal disruption of linear 
time and that the cinematic punctum offers the viewer a different kind of non- or anti-
 narrative pleasure. By this he means that the audience is momentarily distracted from 
the action taking place on screen in order to fully enjoy the spectacle of the special 
effects morph (Sobchack, 2000: 164). 
 
Here, Barthes? punctum shares certain attributes with Klein?s ani-morph which I have 
already linked to Kentridge?s metamorphosis. Both embody certain reflexive qualities 
and Klein describes the ani-morph in a similar language to that used by Beebe to talk 
about the cinematic punctum (the ani-morph as a glitch, a gap, an absence ? the 
punctum as a point or rupture). So the question arises if a similar ?spectacularisation? of 
the morph occurs in Kentridge? In Beebe?s discussion, the morph is treated as a 
sequence within a larger narrative context. It is treated like a technique or trope within 
the language of film and in the case of the punctum, the morph has the effect of 
disrupting the narrative that brackets it. However, Kentridge?s process of achieving 
movement by drawing, erasing and redrawing, sets up a privileged space for 
metamorphosis in his work. It can be said that Kentridge?s films are the morph at every 
moment. The morph cannot be isolated except in some cases where a specific 
sequence or morph within the morph is isolated and in this sense it does not ignite the 
same dialectic relationship with the ?non-morph? of the surrounding film as the digital 
morph does.  There is far less disruption because the entire universe is plasmatic and 
the viewer is made aware of this from the onset. From this perspective it can be said 
that metamorphosis is Kentridge?s dominant narrative strategy.  
 
So we are less ?arrested?, there is less of a ?rupture? or disengagement from the action 
because all action is expressed through the technique of continuous transformation. 
Also, the morph in T2 is pure spectacle as for the sake of pleasure. Beebe describes 
part of a chase sequence in T2 where the morphing T-1000 is on one side of a locked 
gate and the protagonists are on the other. For a moment they look at one another, the 
chase is halted while the viewer waits, not for what will happen next in the chase scene 
 35 
(that is temporarily forgotten) but for the morph itself. The technological spectacle, as 
punctum, becomes more important than the narrative itself. This never occurs in 
Kentridge?s work because metamorphosis and the narrative are linked metaphorically 
infusing the morphing process itself with its own powerful meaning. It can be said that 
in Kentridge, all action is delivered via the morph. The action is metamorphosis and 
there is no action without metamorphosis.  
 
Scott Bukatman?s essay Taking Shape: Morphing and the performance of self is a 
criticism of the morph?s easy assimilation of difference through an examination of 
Michael Jackson?s music video for Black or White (produced in 1991 by PDI) and the 
kind of transformations in the movie The Mask (1994). He also examines transvestitism 
and blackface performances of the 1920s and 1930s through the perspective of the 
appropriation of minority identities. His criticism of the morph is laid out in the following 
passage: 
 
Around virtual reality and morphing, images of reality, identity and history 
are put up for grabs by a mutability so apparently radical that these 
categories appear to be superseded, even obliterated. Like so many 
tantalising digital dreams, morphing holds out the promise of endless 
transformation and the opportunity to freely make, unmake and remake 
oneself. 
(Bukatman in Sobchack, 2000: 226) 
 
My focus, in this chapter, is the use and function of metamorphosis in the work of 
William Kentridge whose Drawings for Projection foregrounds precisely those themes 
that the morph is here criticized for obliterating - the themes of memory, history and 
forgetting.  
 
Suzanne Buchan, in her essay ?Graphic and literary Metamorphosis: Animation 
technique and James Joyce?s Ulysses? for the Fall 1998 edition of Animation Journal 
makes a comparison between visual metamorphosis in the form of animated 
transformations and literary metamorphosis in the portmanteau words created by 
James Joyce16. She also discusses how metamorphosis is intrinsic to the form of both 
                                                
16 Portmanteau: refers to the fusing of two or more words or lexemes to produce a new word with a 
different meaning. 
 
 36 
and in so dong shows how the technique of animation is inherently equipped to 
facilitate the expression of metaphor. It is in the discussion of metaphor that 
Kentridge?s form of metamorphosis finds its greatest departure from the digital morph. 
 
Initially she sets up the problem facing visual portmanteau by pointing out that what is 
needed is a visual language that is inseparable from what is being represented:  
 
It is in Ulysses that portmanteau words take on the status of characters, 
and the classical literary concept of metaphor is tried and dilated beyond its 
original definitions, where tenor and vehicle are morphologically fused in 
one word. But as long as the language is inseparable from what is being 
told?and no visual equivalent for this creative achievement of Joyce is 
developed, then words such as ?contrandsmagnificandjewbangtantiality? 
(3.51) ?pornosophical? (15.109) ?shis? and ?hrim? (15.3103) will never be 
expressed cinematically.  
(1998: 26) 
 
Buchan goes on to discuss animation as cinema?s ?visual equivalent? by defining the 
similarities between the control that the writer has over the smallest lexical unit (in 
language the morpheme and the seme) and the animator?s ability to do the same in 
terms of controlling and playing with each and every film frame: 
 
?the possibility to place every single frame in compositional opposition to 
those preceding and following it identifies it as a medium using techniques 
that can create visual palimpsest and metamorphosis. The protean qualities 
of animation can create equivalents of the characteristics of psychological 
time, of acceleration or ellipsis. As well, applied shifts in meaning and 
blundered euphemisms and figurative use of words can be visualized. 
Words employed with the wrong meaning can become visual puns. And 
visual metaphors can become concretized and visualized. 
(ibid: 28) 
 
One of the primary dichotomies surrounding the morph that are dealt with in Meta-
 morphing is its useful ability to transcend accepted borders, boundaries and categories 
while at the same time becoming problematised for its potential to disregard history and 
obliterate difference and otherness in its fiery consumption of all in its path. With its 
protean plasmaticness, the morph stretches across boundaries of categorization 
 37 
(including race and gender) to challenge dominant western philosophies that fix these 
and other aspects of identity and experience and in so doing suggest their artificiality. 
The morph shifts our metaphysical focus from the fixity of ?being? to the process of 
?becoming? which is echoed by Marina Warner in her book Fantastic Metamorphoses, 
Other Worlds: Ways of Telling the Self (2001). Warner looks at Maria Merian?s work on 
the metamorphosis of the butterfly (1699 ? 1701) and other insect species and her 
insights that reflect the shift in the notion of development from change as ?progression? 
to change as ?cumulative process?, each stage of metamorphosis as expressing 
something of its subject, not as a ?shucking? off of the past, but of a reincorporation of it 
in a new state (Warner, 2001:84). Taken to its opposite extreme, however, the morph 
can become a pathological leveler with an insatiable appetite to ?devour all forms? 
without the acknowledgement of consequences, histories or subjectivity (Sobchack, 
2000: xiii). As Scott Bukatman puts it:  
 
Morphing is an inadequate, overly literal gesture toward change without 
pain, without consequence, without meaning. There is something 
comforting, perhaps, about the stability of unstable identity, but morphing 
holds out empty arms. 
(ibid: 245) 
 
The example used to illustrate this uncritical, mindless consumption is Michael 
Jackson?s music video for Black or White (1991) whereby the morphing of one happy 
ethnic face into another makes the ignorant claim of an ill-conceived multiculturalism of 
similitude. The music video begins high in the clouds behind a moving camera that 
suddenly tilts downward and falls to Earth. Its fall is arrested before it hits the ground 
where it shoots through the streets towards its target: McCauly Culkin?s house. Here 
we are witness to a strange scene which results in Culkin strumming his electric guitar 
and blasting his father halfway across the world in his armchair. He lands in ?Africa? 
where Michael Jackson and a troupe of African tribesmen begin to dance. This is when 
the song actually begins and the sequence takes us through many cultures, landmarks 
and locations, the only constant is Jackson as backgrounds and environments collide 
and are replaced by one another. The final morphing sequence takes place against a 
white background where multiracial, beautiful people from the shoulders up morph 
seamlessly into one another while dancing, smiling and lip syncing to Jackson?s song. 
At the end of the song we cut to a camera that shows us the film set on which the 
morph shots were recorded and the video fades away.  
 
 38 
When one views Kentridge?s Drawings for Projection alongside morphing sequences 
from Jackson?s Black or White or the T-1000, one is immediately struck by the 
astounding technological chasm that separates them. Kentridge opts for the most 
obsolete use of the medium, referring us back to the early 20th Century and those first 
pioneers of animation ? James Stuart Blackton, Emile Kohl and Windsor McCay ? 
while the digital morph utilizes advanced computer technology. There is also, in 
Kentridge, a far more visible auteurial insistence that is not present in the digital morph. 
As a result, the digital morph has a tendency to eradicate glitches and imperfections so 
as to provide as smooth and ?perfect? a transformation as technology allows. In his 
book Animation and America (2002), Paul Wells discusses Henry Selick?s contention 
that the widespread availability of morphing programmes and the removal of the artist?s 
hand from the process in favour of the software has devalued the morph which was 
once the ?Holy Grail? of animation (ibid: 143). Wells makes the point that this return to 
an emphasis on the artist and the process is a necessary and important step towards 
reclaiming meaning in the morph: 
 
This return to a more individual and artisanal approach recognizes the 
aesthetic tendencies in animation as their intrinsic language of expression 
and meaning. In returning to the process of drawing attention to the 
auteurial investment in metamorphosis, Selick successfully reclaims the 
process by which the characters and their effects are specific and 
purposive.  
(ibid: 143) 
 
Chris Landreth?s film Ryan (2004) is interesting to approach from the perspective of 
transformation, metamorphosis and change. The film is a rare and excellent instance of 
3D digital transformation that retains a sense of history and memory. The film is a 
documentary about the transformation of Ryan Larkin from an Oscar winning animator 
with the Film Board of Canada to a sick, self-absorbed, alcoholic beggar on a self 
inflicted and inevitable trajectory towards death. In the film, Ryan is literally 
disintegrating, his flesh and bones are withering away, and he is not a solid mass 
anymore. His head is like a misshapen slab of Emmenthaler cheese and his flickering 
memories are seen projected onto his cranium?s surface.  
 
But in Ryan, we do not witness the morph taking place. Rather the audience is inserted 
into a moment within the morphing process over which the narrative is laid like a forced 
interlude. In its documentary-style structure of questions posed and answered, we get 
 39 
the distinct impression that we are unwelcome in Ryan?s slowly decaying world, that 
the forced, temporary halting of his metamorphosis in order for a nameless audience to 
gain some insight and perhaps to sympathise with the pathetic fall of a great artist, is 
no respite for the artist himself. In Ryan, the differences and opposition of the two poles 
between which the transformation takes place are not seamlessly obliterated by the 
morphing process. Difference is maintained by allowing the audience a general view of 
the transformation through past representations of Ryan in reminiscing scenes where 
his vitality as a creative force was still strong and contrasting this with his present, 
liminal state of being. In this way we are aware of his slow decay and transformation. 
Where Black or White glosses over the stages between the poles, Ryan?s narrative is 
located spatially and temporally at an in-between, liminal stage, somewhere along his 
metamorphic journey. 
 
WJT Mitchell accounts for Nelson Goodman?s use of the term ?dense? or ?replete? to 
distinguish between different notational systems within which certain kinds of pictures 
can be located. He talks about the ?dense? or ?replete? qualities of drawings versus the 
?differentiated? qualities of maps or the alphabet. A ?dense? picture is one in which every 
line, every mark, every modification of texture or colour is loaded with semantic 
potential. A picture can be seen as super-dense, or what Goodman calls a ?replete? 
symbol, in that relatively more properties of the symbol can be taken into account.  
 
The image is syntactically and semantically dense in that no mark can be 
isolated as a unique, distinctive character (like a letter of an alphabet), nor 
can it be assigned a unique reference or ?compliant?. Its meaning depends 
rather on its relations with all the other marks in a dense, continuous field. 
(1986: 67) 
 
This consequence of the replete, auteurial mark also characterises a further 
differentiation between the digital morph and Kentridge?s morph. In Kentridge, the 
morph, as process, is itself semantically dense in that every increment, every erasure 
and every addition has metaphoric meaning. I will spend more time on this aspect later 
on in a discussion of his process in terms of the palimpsest.  
 
In regard to specific sign types, the morph sequence from Black or White is indexical 
by virtue of its physical contact with its subject through the photographic recording 
process and this relationship, according to Joanna Bouldin, is a source of the 
photographic image?s power over the viewer: ?The indexicality?the physical contact 
 40 
with the original?is what gives the image its powers, not its verisimilitude? (Bouldin, 
2001:1). She goes further to set up an opposition between the indexicality of the 
photographic image and the iconic sign of the drawn animation image: ?There is no 
denying that the animated image lacks the privileged relationship to the ?real? attributed 
to more automatic processes like photography? (ibid:1). This becomes a relevant 
distinction when talking about the political implications in the morph?s propensity to 
gloss over history and difference because it can be argued that it is precisely the 
indexical link between the viewer and those who are being morphed that invites the 
ignorant claim of an easy globalised utopia and it is precisely this link that Kentridge?s 
animated image does not possess.  
 
Paul Ward, in his article Animated Realities: the animated film, documentary, realism 
(2008) sets out the privileged conditions under which non-naturalistic images have a 
greater capacity to comment on reality than those that are indexically linked to their 
subject. ?The difficulty,? he says, ?with naturalistic forms of representation?is precisely 
that they concentrate on the surface, rather than attempting to represent what might be 
going on beneath the surface.? (Ward, 2008: http://reconstruction.eserver.org/082/ward.shtml 
accessed January 2009) and he goes further to quote Brecht: ?Therefore, in order that 
a representation does tell us something about reality, something has actually to be 
constructed, something artificial, something set up (cited in Benjamin 1972, p.24).? 
(ibid: 2008). This is where Kentridge?s use of palimpsest, metaphor and metamorphosis 
finds a powerful access point into the theme of memory ? by inventing a morphing 
process that transcends its historical use around the elision of memory to comment on 
the importance of not forgetting. 
 
Cynthia Ozick suggests a very specific link between memory and metaphor. She 
proposes that memory or history is necessary for the creation of metaphor. She begins 
by contrasting the Oracle of Delphi with the parable of servitude in Egypt.   
 
When conscience flashed out of Greece, as it did again and again, it 
flashed out idiosyncratically, individually, without a base in a community 
model or a collective history?there was no will to create a universal, moral 
parable; there was no will to enter and harness metaphor for the sake of a 
universal conscience.  
(Ozick, 1991: 276) 
 
 41 
Ozick contrasts this with the case of the Jews who began their existence as slaves and 
carried the memory of four hundred years of torment and oppression and she claims 
that this memory gave rise to a sentence, a metaphor upon which ?every idea of moral 
civilisation? is built. Ozick cites Leviticus 19, verse 34: ?The stranger that sojourneth 
with you shall be unto you as the home-born among you, and you shall love him as 
yourself; because you were strangers in the land of Egypt? (ibid: 279)  
 
Ozick suggests that without the metaphor of memory and history we would be unable 
to imagine what it is to be Other. She calls metaphor the ?reciprocal? agent that makes 
it possible to ?envision the stranger?s heart? (ibid: 279). She defines memory as ?history 
as judgment? (ibid: 276) which is reminiscent of Soho?s affliction in History of the Main 
Complaint (1996). It seems that only after experiencing his own loss ? first of his wife to 
Felix and then the collapse of his entire empire, could Soho begin to ?envision the 
stranger?s heart?, to experience the suffering of others as his own suffering through 
metaphor. 
 
Philosopher Paul Ricoeur, in his essay Narrated Time (1985), suggests a very similar 
model:  
 
I would readily say of narrative fictions what I said regarding lyrical fictions: 
both teach us to see the world, and more precisely to act and suffer as we 
imagine things in our fictions. Seeing as?is the Spirit [?me] common to 
metaphor and narrative. Narrative fictions can be called metaphorical as 
long as we mean nothing more by this term than the work of seeing 
as?which is what narrative fiction achieves in the world [milieu] of acting 
and suffering.  
(Valdes;1991: 350) 
 
In The Function of Fiction in Shaping Reality (1979), Ricoeur also suggests a similar 
?memory? at play to what Ozick describes when he discusses the concept of ?semantic 
impertinence?:  
 
Every metaphor, in bringing together two previously distant semantic fields, 
strikes against a prior categorization, which it shatters. Yet the idea of 
semantic impertinence preserves this: an order, logically antecedent, 
resists, and is not completely abolished by the new pertinence?Therefore 
predicative assimilation contains a new sort of tension, one no longer solely 
 42 
between subject and predicate, but between incompatibility and the new 
compatibility. Remoteness persists in closeness. 
(ibid: 125)  
 
So, metaphor works through a shattering of prior categorisations (which is the morph 
par excellence) but without total assimilation. Semantic impertinence or resistance 
maintains difference in the face of the new similarity that has been achieved after the 
semantic clash. In his essay, Ricoeur argues against the contention that the arts are 
merely connotative and the sciences denotative; that the arts renounce truth claims 
and can only evoke feelings, emotions and passions devoid of ontological significance. 
He proposes a denial of the historical dichotomy between poetic imagination and 
epistemological imagination which limits the power of metaphor to a decorative device 
without the potential to create semantic meaning and suggests that the interpretation of 
metaphor as semantic innovation and as a potential model through which to approach 
this proposition (ibid: 135). 
 
Thus, if the metaphorical process is the key to the transfer of meaning 
proper to all displacement of concepts, the work of the model shows the 
way in which poetic fictions themselves effect the metamorphosis of reality.  
(ibid: 135) 
 
In this way it can be said there is no metaphor in Jackson?s Black or White morphing 
sequences. There is no semantic resistance, no ?history as judgment? and no memory 
of the previously distant semantic fields that have been brought together so violently by 
the morph. Without memory, without history as judgment one cannot learn to ?envision 
the stranger?s heart? and metaphor becomes inspiration. ?Inspiration,? says Ozick, ?is 
ad hoc and has no history. Metaphor relies on what has been experienced before; it 
transforms the strange into the familiar?Inspiration calls for possession and increases 
strangeness. Metaphor uses what we already possess and reduces strangeness? (ibid: 
281). From Ricoeur it could be said that the digital morph as epitomized in Black or 
White remains a ?decorative device? and does not possess the potential for ?semantic 
innovation?. Or, as Bukatman warns:  
 
 
 
 
 
 43 
Appropriation thus becomes an act of complete erasure [?] Morphing, a 
celebration of endlessly transmutable surface, becomes a sign only of itself, 
hardly even alluding to the complexities of history and ethnic culture behind 
its digital gloss. 
(Sobchack, 2000: 240) 
 
But as Bukatman notes, there were two versions of the music video ? the initial version 
had an additional scene. A black panther exits the studio and emerges into the night 
where it morphs into Jackson. What follows is a disturbing scene in which Jackson 
performs his signatory crotch-grabbing, shouting, tap-dance routine and then proceeds 
to violently smash the windows of a parked car with a crowbar. He then transforms 
back into the panther and with a backwards glare at the camera, he prowls off into the 
darkness of the city. 
 
This scene was censored due to complaints from concerned parents. Apparently, 
according to Bukatman, this was because of the crotch-grabbing in the context of 
growing suspicion and court cases involving Michael Jackson at the time. But 
Bukatman also suggests a less obvious reason that may have contributed to the scene 
being pulled. In this censored scene, culminating with that intense feline glare, the 
viewer is implicated. The contrast between this scene of dark violence and the Disney-
 fied cuteness of the morphing sequences previously witnessed forced doubt over the 
unified ?family of man?. In Bukatman?s words: ?By dramatizing what seems to be furious 
rejection of a benign, assigned role, by reclaiming a masculine, black urban identity, 
Jackson unexpectedly performs a frightening pas d?un of isolation, entrapment and 
refusal.? (Sobchack, 2000: 236). Bukatman goes further to suggest that it was, 
perhaps, this deep emotional ambivalence that was so disturbing and not so much 
Jackson grabbing himself that caused him to apologise and remove the scene.  
 
For me, and I recall that panther?s gaze, this scene demonstrates the power of 
metaphor to affect change in the world. Wendy Steiner argues in The Colors of 
Rhetoric (1982) that metaphors and other analogical models are essential for progress 
in the sciences, philosophy and literary criticism drawing on Charles S. Peirce?s 
assertion that, ?these iconic tools of thought are unique in their capacity to reveal 
?unexpected truth?...? (1982: 1). This initial version of the music video introduced 
?history as judgment? and Jackson?s violent refusal is a kind of ?semantic impertinence? 
? a resistance of this easy blending of races and nations so that strangeness is 
?reduced?, not ?possessed? ? and what could be more disturbing to an America that 
 44 
had just emerged from the first Gulf War? This final scene brings about the semantic 
clash and a consciousness of ?history as judgment? that reveals an unexpected truth 
about American society and implicates the consumer in Jackson?s own strange 
physical transformations and troubled identity.   
 
It is through palimpsest that Kentridge brings about a semantic clash without total 
assimilation and it is this aspect of his work that makes for a technique that is rich in 
metaphor and infused with ?history as judgment?. His ?stone-age filmmaking technique? 
(Cameron et al, 1999:114) of erasing, redrawing and then photographing consecutive 
increments in charcoal on the same piece of paper began as an attempt to record the 
history of a drawing. His initial concern being that he would often feel that a drawing 
became overworked once it was ?complete? and the filmed drawing would retain each 
moment (ibid: 114). He writes: 
 
Filming enables me to follow this process of vision and revision as it 
happens. This erasing of charcoal, an imperfect activity, always leaves a 
grey smudge on the paper. So filming not only records the changes in the 
drawing but reveals too the history of those changes, as each erasure 
leaves a snail-trail of what has been. 
(ibid: 114) 
 
The ?trace? of previous frames that are not completely erased (fig. 1) and which are 
therefore visible to the viewer is the crux of our departure from the all consuming 
morph as explored in Meta-morphing. It is to this facet of his technique to which I will 
now turn my attention.  
 
In Narrated Time (1985) Ricoeur provides a very succinct definition of the trace: 
 
What actually is a trace? It is, in a primitive sense, a vestige left by a 
human being or of an animal. A trace is left, a trace remains?The 
important point here about the trace is its double status which refers it to 
two heterogeneous temporal levels. On the first level, the physical, the 
trace as a substitute must be a mark left by something. As such, it is 
handed over to the contingencies of preservation or of destruction: this is 
why documents must not only be collected but conserved in archives. As a 
physical entity, the trace is something of the present. Traces of the past 
exist now: they are remnants to the extent that they are still there, while the 
 45 
past context of the trace ? people, institution, actions, passions ? no longer 
exists. It is there that the other face of the phenomenon enters the picture. 
On a second level, the noetic, there is a trace only for one who can deal 
with the mark as a present sign of an absent thing, or better, as the present 
vestige of a passage that exists no longer. A trace, then, is a present thing 
that stands for [vaut] an absent past. The whole enigma of the trace is here. 
What creates the enigma is the interconnection of a relation of causality 
with a relation of meaning. To follow a trace, to trace back a trace, is to 
effect practically, the fusion of two sides of the trace, to constitute it as 
effect-sign. 
(Valdes; 1991: 345)  
 
Early in his career, Kentridge strove to achieve perfect erasures, to hide the visible 
process of the drawing. Similarly, during initial rehearsals in his first collaboration with 
the Handspring Puppet Company, Woyzeck on the Highveld (1992), he also attempted 
to hide the puppeteers from the audience. This was an attempt to allow the audience 
an easy, non-reflexive and willing suspension of disbelief by concealing the artist?s 
hand and the manipulators that gave the puppets agency. It was only until they were 
well into rehearsals that they realized that the presence of the manipulators were an 
asset and formed an integral part of the meaning of the work. ?Instead of a two-
 dimensional charcoal drawing working through time in a film, it?s like a three-
 dimensional ?drawing? working through time in a play? (Cameron et al, 1999: 18).  
 
Kentridge links this relationship between audience and performance with Brechtian 
theatre where the puppeteers focus on the puppets but the audience?s attention is 
drawn in a circular trajectory from the puppets to their manipulators and then to 
themselves. The process breaks the traditional ?fourth wall? of the performance space 
by making the audience aware of the fabricated nature of the reality that is being 
represented. The audience becomes aware of their own participation in the 
performance transaction - weighing, wanting, watching from the comfort of their seats.  
 
Kentridge notes a similarity between the relationship of the puppets and their 
manipulators on stage and the erasures ? the traces left behind ?  brought about 
through his animation technique (Breidbach, 2006: 37). The ?trace? in Kentridge?s 
Drawings for Projection is brought about by his technique of incomplete erasures which 
leaves behind a ?memory? of a vestige that exists no longer. We are asked not to 
concentrate on the present alone, but to inhabit the politicised space between past and 
 46 
present. Both of these ?mistakes? can be described by the words of Klein?s animorphs. 
They are both ?gaps?, ?fissures?, ?scars?, ?a Braille of absences? (Klein in Sobchack, 
2000: 24)  that narrate and they are both central to the meaning and interest of 
Kentridge?s technique in that they bring to the surface those aspects of the work that 
would otherwise remain hidden. 
 
We see the original drawing as a traced memory. Traces like this can be 
very unstable, like white noise invading. Any animated film has dozens of 
traced images that become ani-morphs. However, they are not merely slip-
 ups. They are pocket fables unto themselves, brief and easy to insert. 
What?s more, when they dominate ? as ruptures that fall into sequence ? 
what results is a journey into an underworld. By underworld I mean a 
hidden place, an antiworld, where many atmospheres meet. 
Metamorphosis then, is the surfacing of the hidden: entropy as molting, 
melting, melding, mutation. 
(Klein in Sobchack, 2000: 25) 
 
In her book Hollywood Flatlands: animation, critical theory and the avant-garde (2002) 
Ester Leslie discusses some of Freud?s notions of the unconscious and conscious mind 
and how he used early optical toys that were the forerunners of film and animation as 
analogies. She pays special attention to Freud?s analogy with ?The Mystic Writing Pad?, 
which he wrote about in his 1925 essay ?A Note upon the ?Mystic Writing Pad??. He 
describes this psychic apparatus as part of the intricate model of the unconscious as 
having ?an unlimited receptive capacity for new perceptions and nevertheless lays 
down permanent ? even though not unalterable ? memory traces of them.? (2002: 61) 
He places this psychic, ?mnemic? system behind the system of perceptual 
consciousness which receives perceptions without retaining their trace, Leslie notes 
that Freud refines this model in Beyond the Pleasure Principle by locating 
consciousness in the perceptual system rather than in the permanent traces 
themselves.  
 
The ?Mystic Writing Pad? was a toy that had come onto the market and Freud used it?s 
mode of working to illustrate his notion of the unconscious. It was a writing tablet made 
from wax, celluloid and translucent paper upon which notes could be made by 
scratching with a sharp stylus which leaves darker marks on the paper. These marks 
could then be easily removed by lifting the paper and separating it from the wax layer, 
however, a permanent trace of these marks remained etched faintly into the wax. The 
 47 
mode of operation of this toy mirrors Freud?s notion of the unconscious which is also 
divided into the two functions of receipt and preservation. Leslie notes Freud?s 
extension of this analogy to include the process of ?negation? whereby our 
consciousness is constantly opening up to the world and receiving impressions only to 
recoil and withdraw in a similar way that the Mystic Writing Pad is unable to make use 
of the permanent traces once they have been inscribed.  
 
In terms of the perception of real objects, Freud asserts that this process can be an 
internal one that does not rely on checking that an object exists in reality, but rather by 
re-finding that object in memory to ensure that an event actually took place. Leslie ends 
her discussion of the ?Mystic Writing Pad? with the following summary: 
 
Freud?s model of consciousness as a whole, as evidenced in ?A Note upon 
?The Mystic Writing Pad?? and ?Negation?, is a dialectical model. Its 
elements, as in Hegel?s dialectic of Aufhebung, are receipt, preservation, 
negation and overcoming. 
(2002: 62)  
 
This description perfectly describes the form of the palimpsest as a series of layered 
marks where the traces of each layer are still apparent and as an explanation 
describes almost perfectly Kentridge?s process of incomplete erasures. It also links this 
palimpsetic process and form with memory and Freud?s early account of the process of 
remembering and forgetting.  
 
Leslie also spends time discussing Walter Benjamin and his work on memory as an 
analogy with the thumb cinema, a proto-cinematic device that provided a model by 
which the past and memory could be viewed. Here, memory is seen as an image or 
more specifically, a photograph, and history, according to Benjamin, decays into 
images, not stories. Memory and history in Kentridge?s animated films, while bound up 
in stories, eventually culminate in still images, drawings for projection become drawings 
for exhibition and are infused with the narrative that formed and transformed them in 
animation. The drawings that emerge from the animation process find their most 
significant analogy in Freud?s Mystic Writing Pad. Their history is present in the traces 
left behind by Kentridge?s technique of incomplete erasures; a history that is wholly 
responsible for its existence and the form it takes in the present, yet a history that 
cannot be fully accessed through an analysis of its present form. When we engage with 
Kentridge?s films, we are essentially experiencing the metamorphosis of a number of 
 48 
blank slates or white pages toward their frozen end state through their partially hidden 
histories. For this reason it becomes important to acknowledge Kentridge?s animated 
films as ?Drawings for Projection? which shifts the emphasis from the animation to the 
drawings themselves. Although he makes countless erasures and redrawings to 
achieve animated movement, his use of a single piece of paper as the ground for each 
sequence results in only twenty to forty finished drawings at the film?s completion and 
these drawings suffer too, the full burden of South Africa?s troubled history. Kentridge 
uses the palimpsetic form of his metamorphoses to question particular versions of 
?history? and their claim to ?truth?.   
 
In a lecture at North Western University, Illinois, November 1994 Kentridge remarks on 
how a word like ?Sharpeville? can conjure up an entire narrative of events and related 
images that facilitate the remembering of a specific, tragic moment in time but that if 
you actually visit the site of violence:  
 
There are no bloodstains. The ghosts of the people do not stalk the streets. 
Scenes of battle, great and small, disappear, are absorbed by the terrain, 
except in those few places where memorials are specifically erected, 
monuments established, as outposts, as defences against this process of 
disremembering and absorption.  
(Cameron et al, 1999:127) 
 
What Kentridge is describing here is how the landscape leaves no trace of the events 
that played out on it. In Felix in Exile (1994)17 the landscape is treated as the 
antagonist in the film as it voraciously devours the slain bodies that fall upon it and in 
so doing wipes out all evidence of their passing. As Boris notes: ?It seems to have no 
                                                
17 Felix in Exile has two main characters, Felix Teitelbaum who appears in most of Kentridge?s films 
alongside Soho Eckstein and a new character, Nandi. Felix spends his time naked (presumably in exile) in 
a room with a bed, a suitcase and a basin while Nandi is some kind of quantity surveyor. Her world is the 
veld of the East Rand in Johannesburg. She spends her time measuring, marking and inscribing the land. 
The two characters are connected as Felix?s suitcase is filled with Nandi?s drawings which float up and 
paste themselves on the walls. In one scene, Felix moves to his basin to shave and his mirror image is 
replaced by Nandi. In this way their worlds become linked through the mirror. This overarching character 
narrative is punctuated by images and sequences that contextualize their relationship. The film was made 
in 1994, during the run up to the country?s first democratic elections amid fears of reprisals after the fall 
of the Apartheid government and the atrocities committed under it. Newspapers blow across the battered 
landscape; blood seeps into the ground, newspapers float down to cover the corpses which then grow into 
the landscape itself. Coloured lines of measurement stab at the ground violently, injuries are circled and 
measured as the landscape is constantly being scratched, marked and recorded. Felix?s tap begins to 
overflow and to flood his room as, in the final moments, Nandi is killed and becomes one of the corpses 
she has been documenting. She sinks into the ground and becomes a water-filled ditch in the landscape. 
Felix, standing at his basin has witnessed this as the walls around him disappear and he is seamlessly 
transported into the water-filled cavity. 
 49 
conscience and acts as a continuous force of change indifferent to consequences? 
(Boris in Benezra et al, 2001: 31). For Kentridge, this erasure of history through the 
constantly evolving landscape is a central theme in Felix in Exile but the landscape?s 
appropriation cannot be complete. As a witness to the events played out upon it, it 
holds those events beneath the surface as a concealed repository of memory and 
history. As Kentridge states:  
 
I am really interested in the terrain?s hiding of its own history, and the 
correspondence this has?with the way memory works. The difficulty we 
have in holding on to passions, impressions, ways of seeing things, the way 
that things that seem so indelibly imprinted on our memories still fade and 
become elusive, is mirrored in the way in which the terrain itself cannot hold 
onto the events played out upon it. 
(Benezra et al, 2001: 31) 
 
In Felix in Exile Kentridge shows us with poignant force how the image moves toward 
disremembering through the transmutation of the slain corpses into the landscape (See 
fig. 2 ? 4). This metamorphosis creates a polysemantic text, a text that can be read in 
many ways. The polysemantic event in Kentridge?s work, as evidenced in the fusing of 
landscape with corpses in Felix in Exile creates a visual palimpsest rather than a 
concrete meaning which supports the political readings of his work without the work 
becoming didactic. He writes: 
 
I have never tried to make illustrations of apartheid, but the drawings and 
films are certainly spawned by and feed off the brutalized society left in its 
wake. I am interested in a political art, that is to say an art of ambiguity, 
contradiction, uncompleted gestures and uncertain endings. An art (and a 
politics) in which optimism is kept in check and nihilism at bay. 18 
(Moins, 1998:  
http://mag.awn.com/index.php?Itype=search&sval=William+Kentridge&article_no=393  
accessed January, 2007) 
 
The viewer must find relations between the original image and the transformed image 
through the palimpsetic traces generated by the visual conflation of both over time. 
Here, he uses metamorphosis as a ?disremembering? device to demonstrate how the 
                                                
18 Michael Godby, William Kentridge, Painter, Revue Noire No. 11, December 1993, January/February 
1994, pp. 20-23 
 50 
landscape seamlessly appropriates the murdered corpses and the horrific events in 
South Africa?s past while at the same time the palimpsetic traces of the metamorphosis 
represent history as judgment and prevent the audience from accepting their effortless 
absorption and appropriation. Paul Ricoeur describes how we interpret a trace: 
 
The temporal implication is considerable: to follow a trace is to effect the 
mediation between the no longer of the passage and the still of the mark. At 
this price we now no longer have to say that the past is something that is 
over and done with in any negative sense but can say that it is something 
that has been and, because of this, is now preserved in the present.  
 (Valdes, 1991: 345) 
            
In her essay The Rock: William Kentridge?s Drawings for Projection Rosalind Krauss 
points out that if transformation is built into the very nature of animation, as I have 
argued, the resistance toward effortless transformation can be seen as a resistance 
toward animation itself ? animation?s very illusion of movement (Gehman and Reinke 
(eds.), 2005: 110). She describes this resistance as ?a kind of rictus that brakes the 
forward motion, reinstating the stillness of a single drawing? (Gehman and Reinke 
(eds.), 2005: 110). Here, she draws on Deleuze?s distinction between two types of 
photography: time exposure ? the still image replete with meaning which is the domain 
of the photograph and of painting and the snapshot ? the ?any-instant-whatever? that is 
the domain of the movie camera. The capturing of any-instant-whatevers, at a rate of 
24 ?instants? every second, which are capable of ceding their place to their successor is 
what constitutes the moving subject in film. The flickerbook is the animator?s test of the 
fluidity of the movement, his guard against the pose. Krauss?s ??rictus? which is very 
similar to Klein?s ani-morph, Cholodenko?s animatic and Barthes? punctum reinstates 
the stillness of the single drawing within the movement between two ?nows? and in 
Kentridge, is situated in his palimpsetic technique of incomplete erasures which always 
retain a trace of what has come before and will become the trace of what occurs after 
?like a leaf stuck to one?s shoe? (ibid, 2005: 112).  
The palimpsest is the layered result of the accumulation of contours over one another 
so that the successive layers are still, in some sense, visible as a trace of past events. 
For this reason, Krauss views the palimpsest as ?the emblematic form of the temporal 
and as such it is the abstraction of narrative, of history, of biography.? (ibid, 2005: 114) 
This stands in distinct contrast to the digital morph?s easy assimilation of the past 
without consequences or acknowledgement of history. The distinction between the two 
 51 
lies in Kentridge?s use of the palimpsest which results in a warning against forgetting 
and being, in a sense, ?about? memory itself. Mikhail Yampolsky used the following 
words to describe Yuri Norstein?s animated film Tale of Tales (1979) but in light of the 
above discussion it seems to describe perfectly the workings of Kentridge?s films:  
What confronts us is not simply a film about memory, but a film built like 
memory itself, which imitates in its spatial composition the structural texture 
of our consciousness.  
(Yampolsky in Wells; 1998: 94) 
 
From the process of drawing where the very act opens up, for Kentridge, the 
psychological space for associational thought processes and fortuna to assume a 
leading role in the narrative flow to his palimpsetic use of metamorphosis to ?tell the 
story?, his Drawings for Projection become steeped in memory, history and metaphor. 
Kentridge?s ani-morphic transformations introduce a reflexivity that forces the audience 
to become aware of their own participation in the performance transaction - weighing, 
wanting, watching from the comfort of their seats. Like Soho in Stereoscope (1999) 
these techniques have the effect of splitting the audience. On the one hand we accept 
the transformations and appropriations but on the other we are skeptical of their origins 
and the ease with which identities are dissolved and reformed. In this sense Kentridge 
does not ask for a willing suspension of disbelief so that the audience?s filmic 
experience is continuous and uninterrupted, but for the ?unwilling? suspension of 
disbelief (Cameron et al, 1999: 19) that encourages ambiguity and the participation of 
conscience in the sifting of those ?unbidden? images that surface alongside those that 
we allow ourselves to see.  
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 52 
 
 
 
Chapter 3 
 
Lara Foot Newton and Gerard Marx: And There in the Dust (2004)  
Mocke Lodewyk Jansen van Veuren and Theresa Collins: Minutes (2005 - ) 
 
In this chapter I will examine two further case studies of South African animated films 
whose narrative strategies are underpinned by metamorphosis. First I will look at 
Gerard Marx and Lara Foot Newton?s And There in the Dust (2004) and then I will look 
at Mocke Jansen van Veuren and Theresa Collins? time lapse project minutes (2005 - ). 
The narrative structures of these films are quite diverse and metamorphosis functions 
in quite different ways to achieve their various goals. Marx and Newton?s film employs 
an accessible narrative structure especially with regard to the verbal telling of the story 
through voiceover. And There in the Dust is a film whose events and emotional triggers 
need to be fully grasped and experienced by the audience. In no way does this make 
the film simplistic or simple as the multifaceted visual design and challenging cinematic 
storytelling add layers of complexity and, in so doing, make this film rich in 
metaphorical nuance and meaning. The minutes project is abstract and experimental 
both in its visuals and its audio. As van Veuren states: 
 
In order to access the work, a viewer needs to shift into another, lesser-
 used gear. The meaning of the work is the sum total of an experience, and 
is not delivered in the declamatory timeline of an entertaining narrative. 
(van Veuren, 2008: 
http://www.uj.ac.za/multimedia/NewsandEvents/tabid/8176/ArticleType/ArticleView/articleId/
 241/Default.aspx  visited December 8, 2008) 
 
Minutes does not utilize metamorphosis in order to facilitate an emotional experience, 
rather, metamorphosis underpins the process of time lapse animation which is used, in 
this case, to analyse and comment on daily life in central Johannesburg. 
 
 
And There in the Dust (2004) 
 
On a gray, stained backdrop the background to the story appears in typewriter font: 
 
 53 
?In 2001 South Africa was devastated by the news of the brutal rape of a nine month 
old child by the name of baby Tshepang? 
 
?Once the story hit the headlines, the scab was torn off a festering wound and 
hundreds of similar stories followed? 
 
?Each was equally horrific? 
 
?A five month old baby? 
 
?A two year old little girl? 
 
?And so the list grew? 
 
A proliferation of type like an inky smudge begins to grow on the final word ?grew?. The 
smudge spreads across the entire screen, blackening and dirtying it. The title of the film 
?And there in the Dust? emerges from this ?metastable? substance as gaps within the 
ink. The type-font recalls the use of words in the newspapers that told these horrific 
stories and which by their very nature is required to be objective and unemotional. This 
provides a context for Marx and Newton?s telling which sets out to tackle the emotion of 
such events.  
 
The first sequence opens on a tracking shot across a dirty, hot, brown landscape with a 
village in the distance. The set is noticeably constructed, the village is clearly a model 
and this establishes the fabricated reality within which the story takes place. As 
discussed in the first chapter, the totally constructed reality is one that, according to 
Paul Wells, lends itself to the task of questioning material existence and makes itself 
open to metaphoric narrative interpretations (1998: 84). The constructed animated 
world is necessarily a second order representation and, by its very nature, inhabits a 
metaphorical narrative space. The camera then reveals a townsman sitting in the 
foreground eating a loaf of government, brown bread. This man is one of two human 
characters in the film. The effect of this meeting of two realities (one live action and one 
constructed) is similar to the semantic clash at the root of metaphorical expression and 
its effect is to open the mind of the audience to the possibilities of interpretation. It is 
this man?s voice that provides the narrated voice over that runs throughout the film. He 
begins: 
 
 54 
?Nothing ever happens here, nothing, niks. Maybe it?s the heat or maybe it?s the dust 
but nothing ever happens. Here the heat is different; it?s not like there in other places. 
Here the heat knows it is hot and it enjoys being hot. The sun is always looking at us, 
watching us. The Big Baas. Die Makulu Baas.? 
 
Throughout this sequence he is eating his bread, tearing it apart and chewing it as he 
sweats and looks up toward the sun. The sequence ends as he puts the half eaten loaf 
down at his feet. This simple movement is filmed as pixilation19 to provide a stylistic 
transition into the first animated sequence to follow.  
 
Here the loaf of bread is seen from a high angle shot on a black ground, lit from above. 
It begins to crumble and disintegrate, leaving a sea of crumbs which quiver and jerk as 
if alive. The crumbs are used as the base substance within which the characters are 
?drawn? frame by frame and is a kind of modified base technique similar to that of 
Kentridge and to the sand animation of Canadian, Caroline Leaf and Hungarian, 
Ferenc Cako. This particular sequence was achieved by first filming the action using 
real actors in ?real time? and then projecting the sequence frame by frame over the 
crumbs via a projector mounted above it. The positions of the characters were then 
?traced? from the projected images frame by frame. 
 
First one character enters frame and discovers something in the foreground, he calls to 
the other villagers and then the narrator arrives and pushes through to the front of the 
crowd to describe what has been found to the audience: 
 
?It all happened the day De Waal was untangling the fishing line in the veld opposite 
the old church. Suddenly he came upon a small crumpled figure. Anna and some 
workers at the church heard him and they came to see what was happening. I was 
walking down Church Street on the way to the tavern and heard all the commotion. I 
pushed through the small crowd to see?? 
 
The screen cuts to black and then opens on the live narrator sitting in the same place 
smoking a cigarette: 
 
??and there in the dust?? 
                                                
19 Pixilation is an animation technique used to animate human characters. The actor moves, is still for the 
camera to capture a frame then moves and is still again for the next photograph. Pixilation has nothing to 
do with the pixels that make up a digital image. 
 55 
 
Cut to black and while the narrator continues to describe what he sees, an image is 
created over the black. The image is constructed, it is an accumulation and its form is 
at first non-specific. A close up as a plaster (or band-aid) appears on the black, then 
another and another as the camera cuts to a longer shot. The plasters continue to 
mass until two appendages grow from the one side. They become tiny legs. Arms grow 
from the other side and finally the head of what is revealed to be a small baby. The 
narrator?s description over this sequence: 
 
??an arm, some fingers, hands. A small, little crumpled face, a tiny pot-belly, fat little 
thighs. And in between her thighs lay a mess like a cauliflower, red, bloody. Her tiny, 
tiny little vagina, split open. She had been raped, sodomized, disemboweled, they said. 
She was nine months old.? 
 
Cut back to the bread crumbs and the crowd watching. Slowly the crumbs gather 
together into a pile of crumbs. 
 
?Everybody stood dead still. Finally, old Anna, trembling like a chicken took her shawl 
and covered the baby. They stood in the hot sun, Makulu staring at us for over an 
hour.?  
 
Cut to extreme close-ups of new characters. These are the ?town-people?, their lower 
bodies human in dirty pants and dresses with torn takkies for shoes; their upper halves 
are dwellings; the houses in which the villagers live. One female character in a soiled, 
billowy dress is the church. These characters, like Chris Landreth?s portrayal of Ryan 
Larkin in Ryan (2004), seem to be caught mid-metamorphosis, either changing from 
village into villager or vice versa. They are still, the wind ruffling their loose clothing 
(See Fig. 5).  
 
?None of us could move. We were like Lot?s wife. We had been turned into salt. Then 
finally an ambulance arrived like a great white shark on the desert sand?  
 
The ambulance is a pair of neat, white doctors? shoes with a flashing, emergency light. 
It moves across the landscape, between the town-people. A man (the paramedic ? the 
second human character) dressed in white walks among the town-people. 
 
 56 
??Out jumped a very tall white man. Blonde hair and blue eyes and quite a few 
pimples. Afterwards, Anna said he looked like Goliathi from the bible.  
?Middag? None of us said a word.  
?Hoe lyk it?? We stood - bags of salt. 
 
The paramedic kneels next to the pile of crumbs, takes off his glasses and rubs his 
face in horror. Cut to the writhing pile of crumbs on black. The doors of the town-people 
slam shut as he looks in their direction. The metamorphic design of these characters 
implicates not only the individuals but the entire village and community as they remain 
silent and turn their backs on the responsibility they share.   
 
?No-one said a word, no-one moved. It was like we were in church. We stood at our 
altar.?  
 
The paramedic returns his glasses to the bridge of his nose and lays out a white 
handkerchief. He gently scoops up the crumbs and placed them in the cloth. He gets 
up and walks away. 
 
?Then he carefully picked up the baby and walked towards the ambulance. He opened 
the back doors and he climbed in. He put the baby on the metal bed but before the 
doors were shut, through the gap, I saw the big man, Goliathi, kneel down next to the 
baby. He put his forehead on her forehead and then he began to cry?? 
 
Cut to a shot of his glasses on a steel grey tray. Water appears and grows from under 
the eye pieces. The water rises until the glasses are covered and they float off screen. 
 
?A great big heave of sob like an earthquake, he cried.? 
 
The ?ambulance-shoes? drive away through the landscape. The town-people are alone 
and they slowly turn and walk away. We are left with the narrator in the foreground and 
a group of five town-people behind him.  
 
?And then nothing much happened for quite a while. But then nothing ever happens 
here, niks.? The film fades to black and the credits roll. 
 
The key to the powerful storytelling strategy lies in the transformation of objects and 
materials through metaphor. As Paul Wells notes, metaphor can smuggle meaning into 
 57 
a work by favoring the connotative, 2nd order of representation over the denotative 
meaning (1998: 84). While metaphor is central to many kinds of representation, 
animation?s plasmatic, fluid and controllable qualities allow for the concrete 
visualization of metaphor in a unique and immediate way. 
 
Bread is of central importance and it takes on a number of different forms and 
meanings in the narrative. Bread itself is a staple diet representing health, nourishment 
and sustenance. This reading is supported by its first appearance as the narrator sits in 
the hot, energy sapping sun and tears off chunks of bread to eat. He then places the 
half eaten loaf on the ground where it undergoes its first transformation. 
 
In a stop-motion animated sequence, the loaf disintegrates and crumbles until the 
screen is filled with a sea of undulating and spasming crumbs (See Fig. 6). This 
transformation demonstrates the plasmatic potential of animation as something with 
form, structure and meaning (the loaf of bread) is taken apart before our eyes, 
separated into its constituent parts (crumbs) that in themselves have no meaning or 
function other than the memory of the loaf that they were. It is this formlessness in 
addition to the memory of a previous form that provides the crumbs with the potential 
for metaphorical movement.  
 
Spaces appear between the crumbs as shapes that become human forms (See Fig. 7). 
The crumbs undergo a transformation into the support substance of a modified base 
animation sequence that is used to tell the events leading up to the discovery of baby 
Tsepang. In response to the discovery, the crumbs gather together into a pile, reverting 
back to the potential of the pure plasmatic state but now with the additional memory of 
the baby?s discovery. 
 
The final state of its transformation brings it back into the world of the narrative as 
opposed to the storytelling function of its previous incarnation. The paramedic scoops 
up the crumbs and places them on a white cloth which he carries carefully back to the 
ambulance. The crumbs have become the baby Tsepang and as the paramedic 
departs we are able to reflect upon the many layers of meaning that the bread picked 
up through its transformations, both physical and metaphorical from its initial depiction 
as simple sustenance, through the facilitation of the events of the baby?s discovery, and 
then finally as the baby Tsepang herself, broken and disintegrated (See Fig. 8).  
 
 58 
The only two characters that are depicted as human, played by real actors and with 
minimal design intervention are the narrator and the paramedic. As the title sequence 
suggests, the story of baby Tsepang was the first of many such stories which were 
suddenly revealed in the press (and which just as suddenly disappeared). The main 
characters - the townspeople, the environment and Tsepang herself are critically 
interpreted and completely fabricated so that the audience is never allowed to situate 
the events in one single place or time. In this way, And there in the Dust becomes 
about all those stories and speaks not of one South African village but of many; not of 
one baby Tsepang, but of many; not of one culpable community but of many.  
 
Tsepang is visually represented twice in the film, initially as an amalgamation of band 
aid plasters and lastly as the crumbs of bread taken away by the paramedic. When the 
first plaster appears on screen and even as more and more plasters are laid over it, the 
audience is given enough time to reflect on the material used. Plasters are used to 
cover wounds and they are usually administered by a caring hand. However, as they 
begin to pile up and amalgamate first into a formless heap and then, bit by bit into the 
shape of a baby, their slightly transparent fleshy colour coupled with their maniacal 
application offers a different interpretation.  
 
It is a tricky task to visually represent a disemboweled baby or, in this case, to put 
forward any kind of representation of a person whose story is so close to a 
community?s conscience. The people of South Africa had heard all the gory details 
about baby Tsepang?s rape on television and in the newspapers and the entire country 
was in the throws of trying to come to terms with the issues that this explosion of 
events brought to the fore. As an arts practitioner, one has an ethical responsibility 
toward the subject of a work of art while at the same time, one needs to find a visual 
idiom that will impact the audience emotionally and conceptually. William Kentridge 
was faced with a similar dilemma during his production of Ubu and the Truth 
Commission (1996). The Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa was set 
up as part of the negotiated settlement between the outgoing National Party and the 
incoming ANC. Its purpose was to create a space for victims of human rights abuses 
under the Apartheid government to tell their stories and for the perpetrators of these 
deeds to make a full confession and in return to receive amnesty for their crimes. For 
South Africans, this was one of the most harrowing moments of this transitional period 
as witness after witness came to tell their own stories or the stories of their dead or 
missing loved ones. These sessions were broadcast live on television and on radio and 
 59 
as Kentridge notes, the power of this ?live theatre? was far too great to compete with. 
He gives a different motivation for his theatre work: 
 
The origin of our work is very different, and even if in the end it links directly 
to the Commission, this is secondary rather than primary. Our theatre is a 
reflection on the debate rather than the debate itself. It is trying to make 
sense of the memory rather than be the memory [?] 
(Cameron et al, 1999: 133) 
 
Also, what is activated here is the embattled boundary between the symbol and the 
icon, the indexicality of the live TRC testimonies versus their iconic or symbolic 
representation on stage or in an animated film and it is Marx?s uncanny and 
metaphorical mode of representation which meets and overcomes the problem of 
representing visually, that which has been explained verbally through the voice over 
and which already lives vividly in the imagination of the viewer. The time allocated 
within the metamorphic sequence from one plaster into the baby allows the audience to 
listen to the description provided by the narrator and to speculate on which part of that 
description the form will become ?Is it a close up of her battered body? Is it a 
cauliflower? Is it her head, her face? This speculation prompted by the critical use of 
materials and metamorphosis stimulates powerful mental images in the mind of the 
viewer without having to resort to less effective gory details (See Fig. 9).  
 
Marx and Newton use metaphor to transform the objects and characters in And There 
in the Dust to present the audience with a multilayered visual palimpsest. This 
palimpsest is created through the metamorphosis of objects and characters from one 
state to the next in such a way that a memory of all these states remain. One does not 
have a mental image of a battered and torn baby at the end of the film but an emotional 
sense of what it would have been like to be there in the dust and in the sun. And There 
in the Dust transforms the audience into witnesses.  
 
 
The minutes Project (2005 ? present) 
 
The minutes project was initiated in 2005 by Mocke Jansen van Veuren and Theresa 
Collins, both Johannesburg based art practitioners. It consolidated a period of 
experimentation with time lapse animation and a shared desire to document their 
experiences of Johannesburg city life. What emerged is a unique vantage point from 
which the use of space in the city could be analysed, the worth of which was soon 
 60 
picked up outside the sphere of artistic practices by geographers and architects. The 
work was first shown as a three screen synchronized installation accompanied live by 
the Kwani Experience?s Crippled & Unrehearsed at the Horror caf? in Newtown, 
Johannesburg. Further films have been shown as single, 2, 3, 4 and 5 screen 
installations accompanied by experimental site audio in Johannesburg, Cape Town, 
Sao Paulo, Havanna, London, Delft and Berlin including the 7th Sao Paulo Architecture 
Biennial.20 The project consists of a large number of time lapse films that were 
achieved by placing a Bolex camera at strategic sites in and around Johannesburg. 
The camera was programmed to take one photograph on a roll of 16mm film at 
consistent intervals from between 20 seconds and about one minute. When projected, 
the effect is a greatly increased ratio of action to time and the compression of a full 
twenty four hour day into around three minutes or so of screen time. 
 
Minutes draws our attention to the liminality of every moment by speeding up and 
compressing time through the process of time lapse photography. This has the effect of 
transforming the city and allowing the audience to experience time and the city in a 
new way.  
 
The passing of time is an overarching theme in the work. Time is measured 
by changes of light and shadow as the day unfolds, but also by the 
movement of bodies, engaged in the daily rhythms of living out (or selling) 
time within these spaces. 
(van Veuren, 2008: 
http://www.uj.ac.za/multimedia/NewsandEvents/tabid/8176/ArticleType/ArticleView/articleId/
 241/Default.aspx  visited December 8, 2008) 
 
In our everyday experience of time we cannot see the shadows of a building pass 
across the fa?ade of its neighbour, time passes too slowly, we ?notice an aspect? which, 
according to Wittgenstein we cannot pin down or define temporally; but here, we can 
experience this due to the drawing out of the liminal moment through the compression 
                                                
20 In 2006 they were invited to participate in the 9th Havana Biennale as well as the Venice Architectural 
Biennale. During the same year video and photographic works from the minutes project were exhibited at 
Private Practice in the Lister Medical Building in central Johannesburg. In 2007 they were invited to 
participate in Same Places (curated by Maja Marx) at the Aardklop Festival in Potchefstroom, South 
Africa and at the Design Indaba in Cape Town, South Africa, RIBA Gallery (London, UK) and Delft 
University (Netherlands). Also in 2007 minutes was invited to the 7th Sao Paolo Architectural Biennale. 
Finally, 2008 saw work from minutes screened in Berlin as part of the Performing South Africa festival at 
the Hebbel Am Ufer Theatre and at the University of the Witwatersrand (South Africa) at the 
Johannesburg and Megacities Phenomena Conference. 
 
 61 
of time and we are drawn to the patterns behind our arbitrary boundary divisions of 
time.  
 
While we may be able to intellectually predict the movements and patterns that govern 
our lives, Minutes documents these patterns and allows us to experience them as, 
according to Van Veuren ?The sounds and pulsating movement of people, cars, taxis, 
goods, light and shadow in and around spaces and structures become a legible text? 
(ibid: 
http://www.uj.ac.za/multimedia/NewsandEvents/tabid/8176/ArticleType/ArticleView/articleId/241/Default.as
 px ). In this way, Minutes allows us to experience the process and not just the moment. 
It is an opening up of formerly veiled processes of perception. 21 
 
What also emerges is the power of the sun in determining the movements of people 
and where they gather. It seems that our experience of space is dictated by those 
areas that receive sun and it becomes clear that this is where we will experience that 
space from. In addition, the rhythms and movements that our metabolism and 
experience of the world allow us to experience are rendered almost incomprehensible 
while the slower rhythms that we are usually unaware of take precedence and we can 
focus on them. On a micro scale a day in the life of a hawker is mapped in a trembling 
danse macabre between his stall and his favourite spot in the sun. On a macro scale 
these patterns take on the form of natural phenomena. The ebb and flow of the tides 
becomes the primary filter through which we are invited to experience Jozi22 life as 
masses of commuters are pushed in and pulled out with the rising and the setting of 
the sun.  
 
Buchan alludes to the liminal state of the animator and the animated through the 
example of time lapse animation where time is compressed and a blooming plant that 
takes a number of hours or days to open, can be experienced by the viewer in a few 
seconds 23. In this way, by speeding up a transformational process that is happening in 
nature all the time but which our own, natural perceptions fail to observe, the blooming 
plant is endowed with ?life? that is beyond the vegetative: 
 
                                                
21 David Attenborough uses time lapse to allow us to see the ?ferocity? of sea anemones and starfish that 
are too slow for our ?natural? perceptions to interpret in ?real? time. (Planet Earth, 2006: Disc 3; 29.50) 
22 Colloquial for Johannesburg 
23 For spectacular examples of time lapse animation see David Attenborough?s The Private Life of Plants, 
1995 
 62 
The metamorphosis which these dead materials undergo transcends them 
to a realm of half-life, beyond our experience, thereby elevating them into a 
dimension where anything is possible.  
(1998: 23) 
 
This ?half-life? is the realm of the uncanny which according to Freud ??is that class of 
the frightening which leads back to what is known of old and long familiar.? (1953: 1)  
 
Or as Vivian Sobchack notes in the introduction to Meta-morphing: Visual 
Transformation and the Culture of Quick-Change:  
 
?its confusions of the animate and the inanimate?(is) uncanny ? uncanny 
not only in the sense of being strange and unfamiliar but also in the sense 
of being strangely familiar.  
(2000: xi) 
 
Something strange and uncanny also occurs in certain sequences when a shadow 
sweeps in a perfect arc across this microcosm of human experience. In these moments 
we transcend the space-time of our everyday familiarity and enter a cosmic space-time. 
The shadows cast by the rising sun are fluent, calm, purposeful and implacable; they 
seem to highlight the arbitrariness of human existence. A packet blown by the wind or 
by the displaced air from a passing vehicle between frames seems to pick up a half-life 
of its own and in a number of sequences the movements and concerns of human 
beings are so fleeting and generalized that they become a blur of arbitrary activity 
whose neurotic essence is foregrounded in mindless spasms of uncanny stop-start 
motion.  
 
In an article on his collaborative work entitled Intersection: An instance of spatial usage 
in urban Johannesburg (2008)24, van Veuren draws on French philosopher Henri 
Lefebvres? analytical work on the use of space under his term ?spatial practice? to 
facilitate a detailed analysis of time lapse footage of a particular area over an extended 
period of time. Van Veuren shows how such an analysis can reveal dynamics of spatial 
usage as well as conflicts around the usage and control of urban spaces which in turn 
can stimulate debate within the spheres of the social sciences and geography.   
 
                                                
24 In Farber (ed.), 2008: 108 - 115 
 63 
The concept of ?spatial practice? introduces the idea that a society ?secretes? its own 
spaces through a complex interrelation between the city and how it is used and 
understood by its inhabitants and that the functioning of a city relies on a certain level 
of agreement between its inhabitants in terms of how spaces are used and traversed:  
 
The structure of everyday movements between and within our understood 
(and expected) spaces, on a micro and macro level, produces those 
spaces.  
(Farber, 2008: 110) 
 
Van Veuren goes on to analyse a specific piece of time lapse footage of the corner of 
Small Street (a pedestrian mall cutting north-south across the CBD) and Jeppe Street 
(a busy one way street connecting Johannesburg east?west) in terms of the patterns of 
spatial practice it reveals. The camera was set up to capture the activity around the 
street corner over a period of 24 hours with the camera programmed to take one 
photograph every twenty seconds. This compressed 24 hours into three minutes of 
footage. What emerges and the critique that follows is dependant, first and foremost on 
the transformation of space and time that time lapse animation facilitates. 
 
The area receives an almost steady flow of pedestrian traffic and is presided over by a 
?no hawkers? sign which is blatantly ignored by those vendors that recognise the 
captive market that are funnelled through the area. During the day, the space is 
occupied by a newspaper stand and a food stall as well as by a number of women 
advertising hairstyles that are available at a nearby salon or pavement hairstylist. At 
night, the corner belongs to the security guards who gather around the mbaules 
(pierced metal drums used for fires) for warmth and who take turns to search for more 
fuel for their fire. A dustbin is used as a site for dumping all sorts of plastic and paper 
rubbish which lasts for no more than an hour before it is picked up by people who have 
further use of it. 
 
The usage of the street corner described here may be understood to reveal 
these issues in a microcosmic fashion: even though the sequence of 
occupants may not know each other, there is something of a shared, 
networked project in their usage of the space. Each supports the other in a 
relay process, contributing to a kind of gentle piracy which makes the 
corner viable and usable in various ways both in the day and at night. This 
process is undertaken without any reliance on an institutionally granted 
 64 
right to do so, and in fact the ?no hawking? sign signals the underlying clash 
of interests. 
(Farber, 2008:115) 
 
In his conclusion, van Veuren notes that the tension between the governmental 
demarcations of the space as one meant for transient passage only (?No Hawkers?) and 
its use by its inhabitants as an island of commercial transaction, social interactions and 
stable human presence clearly shows a spatial practice at odds with the space itself 
(ibid). These kinds of insights proliferate throughout the numerous films that make up 
the minutes project and can be read as a text to aid an understanding of the spatial 
practices at play in Johannesburg and which can be drawn upon and referenced at a 
time when the renewal of the CBD is a major concern in government and the social 
sciences.  
 
Minutes shows us life as we know it but as we have never experienced it. Through time 
lapse photography, Minutes draws out those liminal spaces, places and communities 
that are usually hidden in the bricks and cracks of Johannesburg?s CBD. Minutes gives 
us a new way of seeing our world and a new way of being in our world. 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 65 
Chapter 4 
 
Richard Penn: Mirrors and Origins 
 
 
 
A short time later, Grotowski was seeing a draft of Main Action, and I had a 
small fragment in which I was walking, carrying an object for another actor. 
Grotowski stopped us. He said there was something in my work, in what I 
had done. For me this was strange because I was just walking. 
(Schechner and Wolford, 1997: 434) 
 
I find it difficult to remain as scholarly when thinking and writing about my own work as 
an artist as I have tried to be in previous chapters of this dissertation. Subjects that 
have informed my interests and my work include cosmology, quantum physics, 
genetics and performance and I am an expert in none of them. Often the links between 
these subjects are intuitive and I relish the freedom of this associational interplay to 
lead me to new discoveries. The common thread that links these subjects is a question 
of origins: How did our universe begin? How does the very large relate to the very 
small? Where do we come from? What is the process of individuation that out of the 
impossible noise of atoms and genes can emerge such subtle nuances of human 
behaviour? My point here is that my work is not about individuation as such, nor is it 
about performance or metamorphosis or genetics or the birth of our universe. I did not 
take photographs with metamorphosis in mind and I had never even heard of 
?metastable? states until I happened to see a reference in the index of a book on 
Deleuze and Guattari that I had borrowed to read up on cinema. My discovery of Jerzy 
Grotowski25 was even more fortuitous as out of the thousands of books in the 
Wartenweiler library at Wits University I happened to notice the title of one as I walked 
past it ? At Work with Grotowski on Physical Actions by Thomas Richards. In Grotowski 
I discovered the most uncanny parallels in the way in which he describes what 
Richards calls the inner action and the way in which I had tried to express the curious 
hold that a certain set of photographs, taken in my third year of study in 1997, held over 
me. In this chapter I will discuss these new areas of research whose common subject 
                                                
25 Jerzy Grotowski was a Polish theatre practitioner and theorist who founded the Polish Laboratory 
Theatre with Ludwik Flaszen in 1959. In the late 1960?s, on tour with Akroolis, The Constant Prince and 
Apocalypsis cum figuris, he and his Laboratory gained international acclaim. He was especially admired 
for the quality of his actors and the raining methods he had developed. By the late 1960?s, Grotowski had 
become widely acclaimed as the foremost theatrical figure since Brecht and the man who has done the 
most to bring about the reevaluation of theatre and the premises upon which it is based (Lillian Vallee and 
Robert Findlay in Osi?ski, 1986: 7 ? 9) 
 
 66 
is, in some way, the exploration of origins and then attempt to show where my own 
work is located in relation to these ideas.   
 
The phrase ?Art as vehicle? was first used by Peter Brook in a talk delivered in 1987 
called Grotowski, Art as vehicle. In Grotowski?s own essay entitled From the theatre 
company to Art as vehicle (1993), he differentiates between Art as Presentation and Art 
as vehicle. The central departure in this regard is that Art as presentation refers to a 
theatre event in which the action is performed for the perception of the audience. The 
audience watches, makes sense of and interprets the piece. Art as vehicle is on the 
other end of the spectrum and creates the action for the actors themselves.  
 
At the other extremity of the long chain of the performing arts is Art as 
vehicle, which looks to create the montage not in the perception of the 
spectators, but in the artists who do.  
(Richards, 1995: 120) 
 
Art as vehicle was one of the central physical research areas at Grotowski?s Pontadera 
Workcenter26 since 1986 and it centered around finding within the melody and the 
vibration of traditional songs, that which is truly ancient, that which seems to flow 
through the body ?like a river? all the way back through the generations and the 
ancestors of the performer to attain the body memory of something truly primal.   
 
You must face all of the classical questions of the performing arts. For 
example: But who is the person who sings the song? Is it you? But if it is a 
song from your grandmother, is it still you? But if you are discovering in you 
your grandmother, through your body?s impulses, then it?s neither ?you? nor 
?your grandmother who had sung?: it?s you exploring your grandmother who 
sings. Yet it can be that you go further back toward some place, toward 
some time difficult to imagine, when for the first time someone sang this 
song. I?m speaking about a true traditional song, which is anonymous. We 
say: It?s the people who sang. But among these people, there was 
someone who began. You have the song, you must ask yourself where this 
song began.  
(Grotowski in Thomas, 1995:46) 
                                                
26 The Workcentre of Jerzy Grotowski was founded in 1986 at the Centro per la Sperimentazione e la 
Ricerca Teatrale in Pontedera. Here, performers are asked to dedicate at least a year to work with 
Grotowski and his assistants on ?Art as Vehicle?. 
 67 
 
So, according to Grotowski, the work around physical actions should be seen as, in 
some ways, separate from a theatrical performance. Importantly, the goal of this work 
is not a method for arriving at a performance (Art as presentation) but rather the 
exploration and discovery within the person doing the work of some root that lies 
behind the action. This is not to say that it was entirely separate from Art as 
presentation but that its goal could be nothing other than the exploration itself. Thomas 
differentiates between Stanislavski?s27 work on physical actions and Grotowski?s: 
 
With Stanislavski, the ?method of physical actions? was a means for his 
actors to create ?a real life,? a ?realistic? life in performance. For Grotowski, 
rather, the work on physical actions was a tool to find this ?something? in 
which there would be a personal discovery for the one doing. For both 
Stanislavski and Grotowski physical actions were a means, but their ends 
were different. 
(Thomas 1995: 78) 
 
Thomas talks about this discovery as ?inner action? and the way in which Grotowski and 
Thomas explain the effect of the work seems to almost uncannily articulate my own 
personal experiences and discoveries through photography, animation and drawing. 
 
In 1997, in my third year of study at the Fine Arts Department at the University of 
Witwatersrand in Johannesburg I took a number of photographs of my father (See 
Fig.10.1 ? 10.3). In these photographs he was engaged in banal, domestic activities 
such as putting on his shirt, putting on his socks and sitting down and arranging 
cushions on a couch. Eleven years on these images still fascinate me and offer up new 
information and new discoveries. It took a few years before I was able to locate the 
power of the work and when I did I wrote the following: 
 
At the heart of the holocaust museum at Yad Vashem, preceded by a dark, 
spiral corridor, are 6 candles in a pitch black room lined with mirrors. Their 
reflections are a universe of points in space. Sometimes when my father 
shifts his weight or combs his beard it is as if he is the flame at Yad 
Vashem. He is expanded as on a digital timeline so that the palimpsest of 
                                                
27 The jacket cover of Jean Benedetti?s biography of Konstantin Stanislavski, states that ?no one has had a 
greater influence on acting as we know it than Stanislavski?. He founded the Moscow Art Theatre and 
developed the only fully worked-out method of acting available. 
 68 
his animated form becomes visible. When my father moves, every nuance 
and articulation of gesture echoes back through generations to his roots in 
a village in Lithuania. There are moments and gestures that cause time to 
slip and he is standing between mirrors and the present is a locus from 
which the past and future radiate. 
 
After this realization, I felt a great urgency to visit my great aunt who was the oldest 
living Penn in South Africa. After the visit I attempted to document the experience: 
 
The last of the living, Lithuanian Penns in South Africa had a thick Yiddish 
accent, she lived through the pogroms and she fled the Russians in World 
War One and the Nazis in World War Two. She died a week after I spoke to 
her. As she spoke, her accent, her tone of voice, the precise way that her 
glasses sat on her nose and her chin nodded slightly above her chest, the 
mole above her lip, the upholstery of the sofa and the texture of my pants 
caused the present to slip and she was a thousand people. 
 
It was at this point that I discovered Jerzy Grotowski?s explorations of ?inner action? 
through working with traditional songs. Grotowski describes the result as a discovery 
that  
 
it is not any longer your grandmother who sings, but someone from your 
lineage, from your country, from your village, from the place where the 
village was, the village of your parents, of your grandparents? Finally you 
will discover that you come from somewhere. As one says in a French 
expression ?Tu es le fils de quelqu?un? (You are someone?s son). You are 
not a vagabond, you come from somewhere, from some country, from 
someplace, from some landscape. There were real people around you, 
near or far. It?s you two hundred, three hundred, four hundred, or one 
thousand years ago, but its you. Because he who began to sing the first 
words was someone?s son, from somewhere, from someplace, so, if you 
refind this, you are someone?s son. If you do not refind it, you are not 
someone?s son; you are cut off, sterile, barren.  
(Grotowski in Thomas, 1995: 47) 
 
After much contemplation a memory returned to me and I realized that in those 
gestures and body positions I was not only seeing my father putting on his shirt but 
 69 
also watching my grandfather praying in his house in Yeoville. He would amble slowly 
and aimlessly around the house with the characteristic, Jewish sway that accompanies 
prayer. I would watch him from the dining room through the lounge and into the 
entrance hall as he would appear and disappear through the doorways. Like so many 
memories, I remember other details like the feel of the crocheted, white table cloth over 
its felt undercloth and the dust in the frame of the Larry Scully print above the couch; It 
seemed impossible to me how dust could appear inside a closed frame.  I began to 
think how far back I am actually ?seeing?. Am I watching my grandfather?s father as he 
bent over to build a fire in his village in Lithuania as well? Or his mother as she bent 
over to collect water? I realized that this natural performance of a daily, domestic 
activity was, in fact, a dense and multi-layered palimpsest and it was as if I was 
standing in a glass-walled elevator with my own reflection and reflections of reflections 
exploding outwards from the singularity of the present. I was making self portraits 
across generations. 
 
Starting from details, you can discover in you somebody other ? your 
grandfather, your mother. A photo, a memory of wrinkles, the distant echo 
of the colour of the voice enable you to reconstruct a corporality. First the 
corporality of somebody known and then, more and more distant, the 
corporality of the unknown one, the ancestor. Is this corporality (sic) literally 
as it was? Maybe not literally ? but yet as it might have been. You can 
arrive very far back, as if your memory awakens. This is a phenomenon of 
reminiscence, as if you recall the Performer of primal ritual. Every time I 
discover something I have the feeling that it is what I recall. Discoveries are 
behind us and we must journey back to reach them. With the breakthrough 
? as with the return of an exile ? can one touch something which is no 
longer linked to origins but ? if I dare say to the origin.  
(Grotowski in Thomas 1995: 78) 
 
What became interesting for me at this point was the question as to how far back you 
can go? Thomas hints at the scope of the ?inner action? when he says it is like  
 
discovering in their melodies and rhythms a coded potentiality of organic 
presence for the human being, almost an organic score. 
(Schechner and Wolford, 1997: 433) 
 
 70 
If we want to go back in time to discover something like an origin the genome is our 
living record: ?Every important event in human history has been written into our genes 
whether it happened four billion or just a few hundred years ago. All you need to know 
is where to look? (Ridley, 1999: disc 1, track 1, 2.30sec).  
 
All human genes are packaged in 23 pairs of chromosomes. Ridley describes the 
genome?s structure like a book written in letters, words, sentences and paragraphs. 
Genomes are written entirely of three letter words using only four letters (A)denine 
(G)uanine (C)ytosine (T)hymine. In total there are around 60 ? 80 000 genes in the 
human genome and they are written on long chains of sugar and phosphate called 
DNA molecules and each chromosome is one pair of very long DNA molecules (disc1, 
track 5, 1:45). Interestingly, the 4 letters that make up the 3 letter words in the human 
genome are the same in all organic matter. CGA means Arganine and GCG means 
Allenine in all living creatures from mites to orangutans, fever trees to blister beetles, 
even viruses.  
 
Wherever you go in the world, whatever animal, plant, bug or blob you look 
at, if it is alive it will use the same dictionary and know the same code. All 
life is one. The genetic code, bar a few tiny local aberrations mostly for 
unexplained reasons in the ciliate protozoa is the same in every creature. 
We all use exactly the same language. 
(Ridley, 1991: disc 1, track15, 2.55) 
 
Presently, the only way an organism can attain genes is through its parents, However, 
it is thought that in the dark history of life?s past, the first organisms who utilized genes 
may have had very few of them, maybe even just one gene and that there may have 
been widespread trade or even burglary of genetic information. If this is true then we 
did not come from one Luca (Last Universal Common Ancestor) but from the genes of 
lots of different species whose lineages are untraceable (Ridley, 1991: disc 1, track 14, 
1:00). So, in terms of origins ?Seaweed is your distant cousin and Anthrax one of your 
advanced relatives. The unity of life is an empirical fact.? (Ridley, 1991: disc 1, track 16, 
1:26) 
 
To illustrate this notion of a common ancestry to all living things, Ridley quotes a 
passage from Alexander Pope?s An Essay on Man (1734) which is worth repeating 
here: 
 
 71 
All forms that perish other forms supply  
(By turns we catch the vital breath, and die),  
Like bubbles on the sea of Matter borne,  
They rise, they break, and to that sea return. 
 
Pope conjures images of a fluid, changeable, organic soup from which matter forms, 
congeals or arises. It is matter in a ?metastable? state, bursting with plasmatic potential. 
Gilles Deleuze turned his attention to the process of individuation which is the 
emergence of the individual from the general or the virtual into the actual. 
 
Deleuze takes his concept of individuation from Gilbert Simondon who uses information 
theory to describe individuation in physical and biological systems. Simondon 
examines the hylemorphic schema or form-matter model of individuation that has 
dominated western thought from Aristotle to the 20th Century. He uses the example of 
the manufacture of a brick using malleable clay and a wooden mould but disagrees 
with Aristotle?s view of the malleable clay as the matter and the mould as the form. 
Simondon argues that both the clay and the mould have matter and form but that the 
clay is in a metastable state, i.e. it possesses unevenly distributed potential energy with 
the capacity to effect transformations. According to Simondon, the quality of the clay is 
the source of its form and the mould puts a limit to the molecular organisation of the 
clay as it fills the mould. In Simondon?s model, the mould is not passive in the process 
of individuation but rather communicates a resonating action throughout the clay that 
changes the molecular organisation of the clay itself.  Bogue sums the process up as 
follows: 
the malleable clay, initially in a pre-individual, metastable state, possessed 
of potential energy and capable of assuming any number of stable shapes, 
interacts with an external milieu (the mould), which sets up an internal 
resonance within the clay and allows the clay?s uneven distribution of 
energy (potential energy) to assume an even distribution. 
(Bogue,1989: 62) 
The multistable image (duck-rabbit) can be seen as a representation of ?matter? in a 
metastable state moving toward ?form? or individuation but frozen during the moment 
when it is between two distinct forms. It is as if we experience and re-experience the 
process of individuation as we become aware of first the rabbit then the duck, then the 
rabbit etc.  
 72 
Simondon also looks at the process of crystallisation which he describes as the 
passage of a substance from a metastable, amorphous state to a stable, crystalline 
state, to illustrate his ideas regarding individuation in physical and biological systems. 
The crystallisation process is initiated when a ?seed? crystal is introduced into a different 
substance in a metastable state. This seed crystal communicates its structure to a 
molecule in the substance which passes it on to a new molecule down the line and so 
on. In this way the process of individuation occurs between each crystal and the 
metastable substance in between, the crystal representing simultaneously the result of 
individuation and its cessation. ?Individuation, therefore, precedes the individual? (ibid: 
62).  
The difference between animate and inanimate matter is that the former remains in a 
relative metastable state and the latter has become stable. In this way animate matter 
continues to change, develop and transform through perpetual individuation while the 
latter has ceased the activity of change, process and becoming. In inanimate matter, 
individuation is complete.  The animate world in which we live is in a constant and 
perpetual state of individuation, change and flux, the cessation of which, according to 
Simondon, constitutes death (ibid: 62). 
For Deleuze, a metastable substance is a difference in itself in that it represents 
potential for all forms and individuation is the process by which that difference 
differentiates itself (ibid: 62). But this differentiation is not fully stable, only in relation to 
other states on different levels of metastability.  
We perceive matter and form, individual and environment, species and 
individual, as distinct categories, but these are only the products of 
individuation, the masks in which pre-individual, metastable differences 
appear to us.  
(ibid: 64). 
In their examination of the work of Frans Kafka, Deleuze and Guattari re-interpret the 
significance of Oedipal readings of his work. This entire discussion is not relevant to my 
purposes here but their discussion of the transformation of Gregor Samsa into a beetle 
in Metamorphosis (1915) brings together the work in the previous chapter on 
metamorphosis as a transgression of boundaries and categories with the idea of 
metastable states, individuation and the unity of life.  
 73 
In order to illustrate Samsa?s process of ?becoming-other?, Deleuze draws on the 
evolutionary relationship between a particular kind of orchid and the wasp that 
pollinates it. In this relationship, it seems that the plant is responsible for creating itself 
in the image of the wasp in order to attract the wasp but Deleuze describes the process 
as a mutual one where the wasp becomes part of the reproductive apparatus of the 
orchid as well. For Deleuze, it is not that ?images? are created of one another but there 
is an actual becoming-wasp of the orchid and a becoming-orchid of the wasp, a 
dissymmetrical deterritorialisation of categories (ibid: 111). Gregor Samsa is in this 
perpetual state of deterritorialisation with the insect, which leads him in Deleuze?s 
words:  
To cross a threshold, to reach a continuum of intensities which no longer 
have any value except for themselves, to find a world of pure intensities, in 
which all  forms are undone, all significations as well, signifiers and 
signifieds, in favor of a non-formed matter, of deterritorialised fluxes, or a-
 signifying signs. 
(ibid: 111) 
For me, Samsa and the insect as well as the orchid and the wasp seem to be drawing 
from the metastable state of difference within difference, from the common genetic 
soup of the ancient past which contains all potential forms. They are moving closer 
towards metastability and toward the origin. An analogy for this metastable state is the 
static or ?noise? that you get from an untuned television set.  
 
When you tune an analog television ?between? stations where there is no broadcast 
signal, the television receiver picks up other, random signals that are present in the 
environment. This random signal appears to us on our screens as ?noise?, ?snow? or 
?static?.28 These signals are made up mostly of thermal noise from the device itself as 
well as stray electromagnetic fields from other electronic household devices but at least 
                                                
28 These microwaves were accidentally discovered by Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson in 1964 while 
they were working at Bell Labs in Holmdel, New Jersey trying to find faint radio waves. In order to do 
this they needed to eliminate all interference from the receiver. When they had done this they found a 
low, mysterious and steady noise that seemed to come from all areas of the sky at day and at night and it 
was a hundred times stronger than they had anticipated. They were convinced that this noise was coming 
from outside our galaxy although they were not aware of any radio source that might account for it. At the 
same time, just sixty kilometers away, Robert H. Dicke, Jim Peebles, and David Wilkinson, 
astrophysicists at Princeton University, were trying to search for microwave radiation in this region of the 
spectrum. When they were told of Penzias and Wilson?s ?problem? they immediately identified their 
?noise? as residual cosmic background radiation from the Big Bang. In 1978, Penzias and Wilson were 
awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics for their joint discovery. 
 74 
one third to one quarter of the signal consists of the residual radiation from the Big 
Bang. This un-designed signal ?between? channels is, for me, like the primal, 
metastable protoplasm, not yet possessing any stable form but with the potential to 
assume all forms. The randomly flickering pixels represent nothing and absolutely 
everything at the same time. 
 
I first started to use static in my own artwork in a playful way. I made a number of large 
pastel drawings which essentially brought these contradictions together. I created 
?static? through pointillist mark-making in bands across the page and used solid bands 
of colour to evoke test patterns. These were used as a backdrop over which I 
superimposed various household objects (irons, plates, knives, forks, plugs etc), 
portraits of family and family friends and the facades of newly built housing estates 
referenced from Johannesburg suburbs such as Dower Glen and Glen Eden (See 
fig.11.1 ? 11.6). 
 
My animated film Resident 2 deals specifically with Johannesburg, crime and 
immigration. It had, at its core, the idea that Johannesburg is a place where, on any 
given Sunday, old men go off to play bowls armed with guns. Very often events such 
as these remind me of that moment in the Hollywood movie The Matrix (1999)  where 
the same black cat passes the same open doorway, signifying a ?glitch? in the system 
and offering up an explanation of deja vu. It?s a kind of reality slip where I am forced to 
do a double take and I am reminded that Johannesburg is full of double takes.  
 
The film is made up of live action background footage and an animated morphing 
sequence that is filled with static. The sequence morphs from a gun to a phone to a 
bowls player to a male graphic to a female graphic to a toilet to a screw driver to bars 
to a car to an aeroplane to a Kudu emblem from  the Kruger National Park to a 
kangaroo to a bowls player and back to a gun. The backgrounds alternate between 
domestic imagery, voyeuristic footage of suburban houses, rural ?roadtrip? footage, 
footage of men in whites playing bowls and a re-enactment of a car break-in scenario. 
The background imagery is often shown as split screens and the audience is asked to 
view incongruent imagery simultaneously. The static morph sequence occupies center 
screen in the foreground. The final sequence of the film is comprised entirely of colour 
graded static. The background is a stable light grey and the morphing sequence which 
fades in and out is white. Blue, green, red, black and yellow static-filled objects from 
the morphing sequence tumble across the screen as the film fades to black. The only 
 75 
sound track is of gun shots which at first function as sound transitions for the 
background cuts and later become more random and unpredictable. This film and the 
pastel drawings represent my first use of static as a visual medium through which to 
express an account of Johannesburg as a place of contradictions, as a liminal place 
where meaning has not yet been attributed to objects, where bowls and guns collide in 
a semantic clash. It is puzzling, amusing and frightening at the same time (See fig 12.1 
? 12.4).  
The photographs that remain central to my work have gone through major 
transformations from their original state. The originals were taken using outdated, 
3200ISO film which made them extremely grainy. Using my father?s dark room and 
enlarger I chose details within the pictures to blow up. Once developed I used iodine to 
bring up the contrast and then re-photographed them with the same fast film stock and 
repeated the process (See Fig 13.1 ? 13.2).. This act of zooming in and looking closer 
and closer at the image, almost through the image, began to mirror my investigation of 
origins and this point marked the transition from photography into drawing. 
I felt that the mechanical process of photography had taken me as far as I wanted it to. 
I knew that the grain of the photographs was something that I wanted to explore 
through drawing and I started with some head and shoulder drawings of my father in 
dots (See fig.14). These images swiftly faded into fields of dots as if they were extreme 
close ups of the photographs. The closer I got, the deeper I got, the more the image 
seemed to dissolve and the ?grain? of the dots asserted their presence until my attention 
passed from the figurative (the ?Performer of Primal ritual?) to the abstract, from the 
image of my father and his father to the dots that constituted the image. These fields at 
once represent the atoms that make up the human form, the genes that constitute the 
individual, the metastable state before individuation occurs and the static noise of an 
un-designed signal (See fig.15). 
  
It has always fascinated me that an image taken by a telescope orbiting the Earth can 
produce a picture of a portion of the sky that is thousands if not millions of light years 
away and millions of light years across. These distances are incomprehensible from a 
human perspective of space and time.  These images can be filled with dots that are 
themselves, thousands of light years across. Many of the images of deep space are 
brought to us by numerous telescopes which record small areas of the sky to be fitted 
together like a jigsaw puzzle. I have used the format of these images to bring the very 
 76 
large and the very small together pictorially and to infer not only an inward looking 
process but an outward one as well (See fig.16). 
 
I have also been interested in how we often seem to ?inherit? our parent?s or even our 
sibling?s handwriting. Sometimes I will see a note written by my mother and for a 
moment I recognise it as my own. This is strange to me because I learned to write at 
school, not from my parents. There is something similar happening through the gesture 
of handwriting as with my father?s ?performance? of putting on his shirt and the writing 
drawings emerged from this peculiarity (See fig.17).  
 
The danger inherent in these drawings is that the viewer can easily mistake them for a 
mechanical printing process and admire or reject them for their formalist and decorative 
qualities alone. Something is needed to draw the viewer closer, to challenge the easy 
act of viewing the drawings and allow a certain degree of access to the narrative I have 
outlined in this chapter. I plan to achieve this through the titles and through the framing 
of the work. In terms of framing, they require a presentation that brings the viewer 
closer and encourages a kind of looking that is more ?peering? in nature. To this end I 
am using the idea of display cases as a starting point from which I will design individual 
frames/boxes that will mount into the wall. The work will sit at a forty five degree angle 
and will not be easily viewed in the usual way of standing two meters away. The viewer 
will be asked to come closer and peer into the frame. In addition, the titles of the 
drawings come from direct quotes from the research I have gathered above so a field 
of dots will be titled ?You are someone?s son? or ?the distant echo of the colour of the 
voice?. In this way I hope to challenge an easy reading of these drawings and to invite 
the viewer into the narrative from which the works emerged. 
 
The video work titled ?Mirror? for which I was awarded the merit prize and an exhibition 
space at the Everard Read Art Prize in 2006, is comprised of 20 video portraits of my 
father shot in the house where I grew up in Orange Grove, Johannesburg. Each portrait 
is shot either through some kind of doorway, as a reflection in glass or as a silhouette. 
They are intimate moments of my father as he is engaged with everyday rituals such as 
brushing his hair, reading a book, sitting on a couch etc. The installation of these works 
will need to create a ritualized, quiet space within which to view these moments (See 
fig.18).   
 
In some respects I feel that this chapter reads more like a second proposal for a new 
dissertation. The research that informs my work is not centered on metamorphosis or 
 77 
animation and the theorists and writers that I count as central to an understanding of 
my work are introduced in this chapter for the first time. Nevertheless, ideas around 
origins are bound up in plasmaticness, transformation and multistability. This, as I have 
discovered, forms the foundations of my practice as I dip into the metastable soup and 
try to bring an intimacy into focus for as long as it allows before ?they rise, they break, 
and to that sea return?. 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 78 
Conclusion 
 
The notion of ?origins? has emerged as a central theme in this dissertation. In my own 
practical work I started off by working with photographic imagery in which I examined 
certain gestures of my father which threw me back to my childhood and brought to the 
surface moments and images of my grandfather. These photographs became portraits 
across the generations. Tracking in on these images to find whatever ?essence? may lie 
beneath the surface, the grain of the photographs started to take on a kind of genetic 
significance as well as resembling, in their dispersal of units across a field, galactic 
images of the far reaches of our universe taken by modern telescopes. In this way the 
idea of the very far and the very large started to come together with notions of the very 
close and the very small in the dotted drawings in ink on paper which I subsequently 
embarked on. At the same time I learned that static ?noise? contains residual radiation 
left over from the Big Bang which lent further significance to these images as well as to 
my animated film Resident 2 (2000) and the pastel drawings which I was working on 
prior to commencing this degree . The origins of gesture, of life, of familial bonds and of 
the universe are bound up in the techniques and idioms with which I depict this process 
of peering into the past through images of the present. 
 
Metamorphosis is also bound up by the idea of origins. Eisentstein?s ?plasmaticness? 
and Cholodenko?s ?animatic? seem to have been formulated as a description of 
individuation, the subject?s discovery and movement into selfhood from the boundless 
zones of the unconscious. These zones are described by Deleuze as a metastable 
state where everything and anything is possible. W.J.T. Mitchell situates the 
metastable image within this category, which he links with Freud?s fort-da game of 
disappearance and return which, in turn, is fundamental to the individuating subject.  
 
The stated intention of this dissertation is to explore the use of metamorphosis by 
selected South African artist/filmmakers. My point of departure is the liminal positioning 
of the animator between the successive frames in a film and the absolute control over 
movement, space and time which this allows. William Kentridge embraces this space 
between frames as an active site of narrative development through the facilitation of 
?fortuna? which he describes as ?something other than cold statistical chance, and 
something too outside the range of rational control? (Cameron et al, 1999: 118). Fully 
inhabiting the liminal space between frames, Kentridge describes his working process 
as one of ?stalking? as he moves between the drawing to make alterations and the 
camera to record them. Here, in this time between, he allows associational relations to 
 79 
take the narrative reigns.  Metamorphosis - ?an effect in which a cinematic image, 
whether 2- or 3-dimensional, appears to effect a transition in form over time.? (Buchan, 
1998: 21) can lend itself to the direct visualisation of metaphor, although, as my 
examination of Michael Jackson?s music video for Black or White (1991) demonstrates, 
there is the problematic tendency for this transformation to eliminate otherness and 
difference and in so doing, to reduce all forms of identity to a non-critical kind of 
?sameness?.   
 
In my discussion of metaphor, I stressed via ideas expressed by Cynthia Ozick and 
Paul Ricoeur, the necessity of history and memory in the metaphorical process. While 
a ?semantic clash? is essential for the transferral of meaning in metaphor, the kind of 
?semantic annihilation? evident in the morph sequence from Black or White clearly 
defeats the accrual of meaning which is the purpose of metaphorical language. In 
contrast, the harnessing of palimpsest through the technique of incomplete erasures is 
central to William Kentridge?s working process. This practice leaves traces of history 
and memory embedded within the very medium of the work and does not allow for an 
easy reading of obliteration and sameness in the metamorphoses that he animates.  
 
In my examination of Lara Foot Newton and Gerhard Marx?s And There in the Dust 
(2004) I pointed to the metamorphic design of the world and the characters which 
broaden the scope of the film to implicate not just a single, specific village but the entire 
country in the tragedy of baby Tsepang. The metaphorical use of materials and the 
transformations these materials undergo over time also allows the audience to actively 
participate in the imagery and meaning of the film. 
 
Finally, we saw how time lapse animation has the effect of transforming reality in such 
a way that we can experience it in a different manner. The Minutes project by Mocke 
Lodewyk Jansen van Veuren and Theresa Collins condenses time and facilitates new 
insights into the use of space in central Johannesburg and how these insights are 
being picked up by city planners and the social sciences.  
 
In all these case studies metamorphosis is used to depict a contested subject matter in 
a country whose recent political history is one of change, transition and uncertainty. In 
their own way these artists have harnessed the ability to move between frames and to 
control all aspects of their constructed reality in order to effect a transformation of 
perspective, a transformation of reality and a transformation of meaning.  
 
 80 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 80 
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Art, New York in association with Harry N. Abrams, Inc., Publishers. 
Bogue,R. 1989. Deleuze and Guatarri. London and New York: Routledge 
Bowie, M. 1991. Lacan. London: Fontana Press 
Breidbach, A. 2006. William Kentridge: Thinking Aloud, Conversations with Angela 
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Illustrations 
William Kentridge, Felix in Exile (1994) 
 
 
           
Fig. 1.1 frame capture from Felix in Exile (1994)           Fig.1.2 frame capture from Felix in Exile (1994) 
 
 
          
  
Fig. 2.1 frame capture from Felix in Exile (1994)            Fig. 2.2 frame capture from Felix in Exile (1994) 
 
          
Fig. 3.1 frame capture from Felix in Exile (1994)           Fig. 3.2 frame capture from Felix in Exile (1994) 
 
          
Fig. 4.1 frame capture from Felix in Exile (1994)           Fig. 4.2 frame capture from Felix in Exile (1994) 
 
 
 
Gerhard Marx and Lara Foot Newton, And There in the Dust (2004) 
 
 
Fig. 5 frame capture from And There in the Dust (2004) 
 
     
Fig. 6 frame capture from And There in the Dust (2004) 
 
 
Fig. 7 frame capture from And There in the Dust (2004) 
 
 
 
                  
 
Fig. 8.1 frame capture from And There in the Dust (2004)     Fig. 8.2 frame capture from And There in the Dust (2004) 
      
 
       
 
 
 
                
 
    
    
Fig. 9 frame capture from And There in the Dust (2004) 
 
 
 
Richard Penn 
 
 
 
 
 
Fig. 10.1 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Fig. 10.2 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
   Fig 10.3 
 
   
 
   
 
   
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Fig. 11.1 Johannesburg on Any Given Sunday, 2002-5 (pastel on paper) 
 
 
 
 
Fig 11.2 Johannesburg on Any Given Sunday, 2002-5 (pastel on paper) 
 
 
 
 
 
Fig 11.3 Johannesburg on Any Given Sunday, 2002-5 (pastel on paper) 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Fig 11.4 Johannesburg on Any Given Sunday, 2002-5 (pastel on paper) 
 
 
 
 
Fig 11.5 Johannesburg on Any Given Sunday, 2002-5 (pastel on paper) 
 
 
 
 
Fig 11.6 Johannesburg on Any Given Sunday, 2002-5 (pastel on paper) 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
   
 
Fig 12.1 frame capture from Resident 2, 2004                  Fig 12.2 frame capture from Resident 2, 2004  
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
   
 
Fig 12.3 frame capture from Resident 2, 2004  Fig 12.4 frame capture from Resident 2, 2004  
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
        
 
 
 
     
 
 
 
   
 
 
 
 
Fig 13.1 Mirror, 2004 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Fig 13.2 Mirror, 2006 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
  
 
Fig 14 Untitled Ink on paper, 2008  Fig 14 (detail) ink on paper 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
      
  
Fig 15.1 Untitled Ink on paper, 2008            Fig 15.1 (detail) ink on paper 
 
 
  
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
  
 
Fig 15.2 Untitled Ink on paper, 2008 
 
 
 
 
 
Fig 15.2 (detail) 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Fig 15.3 Untitled Ink on paper, 2008 (Made from wrinkles) 
 
 
 
 
 
Fig 15.3 (detail) 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Fig 15.4 Untitled Ink on paper, 2008 
 
 
 
 
 
Fig 15.4 (detail) 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Fig 15.5 Untitled Ink on paper, 2008 
 
 
 
 
 
Fig 15.5 (detail) 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Fig 16.1 Untitled Ink on paper, 2008 
 
 
 
 
  
 
Fig 16.2 Untitled Ink on paper, 2008  Fig 16.2 (detail) 
 
 
  
  
Fig 16.3 Untitled Ink on paper, 2008  Fig 16.3 (detail) 
 
 
 
 
         
               
Fig 16.4 Untitled Ink on paper, 2008   Fig 16.4 (detail) 
 
 
 
 
   
  
Fig 16.5 Untitled Ink on paper, 2008   Fig 16.5 (detail) 
 
 
 
 
         
Fig 17.1 Untitled Ink on paper, 2008 
 
 
 
 
           
 
Fig 17.2 Untitled Ink on paper, 2008 
 
 
 
 Fig 17.2 (detail) 
  
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Fig 17.3 Untitled Ink on paper, 2008 (detail) 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
      
  
Fig 18.1 Mirror, 2006 (frame capture)           Fig 18.2 Mirror, 2006 (frame capture) 
 
 
      
  
Fig 18.3 Mirror, 2006 (frame capture)           Fig 18.4 Mirror, 2006 (frame capture) 
 
      
  
Fig 18.5 Mirror, 2006 (frame capture)           Fig 18.6 Mirror, 2006 (frame capture) 
 
 
 
 
 
 
      
  
Fig 18.7 Mirror, 2006 (frame capture)           Fig 18.8 Mirror, 2006 (frame capture) 
 
        
 
Fig 18.9 Mirror, 2006 (frame capture)            Fig 18.10 Mirror, 2006 (frame capture)