‘When a work lands the excitement is physical’: William Kentridge interviewed

Watching William Kentridge’s film Self-Portrait as a Coffee-Pot is like being submerged inside his mind, inside the coffee pot maybe. There’s so much going on both visually and intellectually that there’s no room at all for a viewer’s own feeble thoughts.

Superficially, the film is a look inside the South African artist’s studio and an invitation to watch him work. Over four-and-a-half hours and nine themed episodes you see him making his familiar expressive drawings in charcoal and ink, but this studio is also a stage; there’s dance, puppetry, dips into history, astronomy, philosophy. ‘I wanted to try and make something that was not a documentary and that wasn’t fiction,’ he says, and he has. It’s utterly absorbing – and also funny.

Not long after the film begins, Kentridge bifurcates. His single self, heavy-set, nearly 70, silver-haired, dressed in his usual white shirt and grey trousers, becomes two life-size Kentridges who pace the studio, explaining the work, bickering with each other.