Kentridge’s Drawings for Projection are a closed-ended narrative, using a ground-breaking animation technique created by the artist himself, and can be read buy a multiplicity of post-modern theories. They are positioned as dialectic of self and memory as embodied in a post-colonial South African setting, where memory itself takes different forms.
Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev presents Kentridge’s work in a post-modern and post-structural light. First, she emphasizes the artist’s way to represent ‘otherness’ in terms of local and global, center and periphery in his drawings. Then, she focuses on Kentridge’s relationship and opinion on History, his refusal of a grand narrative, and the introduction of a more personal point of view in the narration of the story of South Africa.
Dan Cameron points at the portrayal of social inequalities in the films . Kentridge’s videos gain power from the use of surrealist imagery and socially realist caricature. In Cameron’s words, ”Kentridge is a master of timing: the transitions between scenes are fluid; the pace at which images come and go is satisfying.” It may not always be clear what is happening, but the design elements hold together perfectly and there is just enough continuity for the viewer to maintain focus. The morphing panoramas come to symbolize South Africa’s violent changes.
  At the center of Kentridge’s works are issues of moral responsibility, structures of offender-victim-relationships, as well as aspects of the individual and collective memory. Andreas Huyssen describes Kentridge’s strategy of continually erasing and overwriting of drawn information to thematize the passing of time. The metamorphic semiotic trace remains visible and can be read as a metaphor for the loss of historical memory, or cultural amnesia.
Kentridge draws and erases his charcoal drawings, recording the development with stop action film to create videos that are literally moving pictures. Some of the videos also include black-paper silhouettes, figures drawn in white chalk, as well as black and white news footage and documentary sound. Kentridge’s series constitutes a yet-to-be-continued investigation into the troubled, amnesiac white South African psyche. The artist’s ongoing project progresses beyond the stereotypes it originates from, toward a deeper human sympathy and high level of inventiveness, both poetic and technical, using a medium that Kentridge has made very much its own.
The paper by Vanessa Thompson and Leswin Laubscher describes how Kentridge’s project insists on the re-membering of atrocities, our personal and shared responsibilities for South African political violence, and the necessity of our taking note of its presentation. Kentridge communicates both the heritage of South Africa as well as what it means to be South African in the 21st century: the reflexive challenge, and the psychological possibility of healing in the creative reiteration of the traumatic.
Kentridge’s videos preserve the feeling of wonder that can still be evoked by a handmade flipbook. The sooty traces of the charcoal and the somewhat crude method come together to convey powerful images of the social explosion that convulsed South Africa in the last decade of its brutal racist regime.

Cameron, Dan, William Kentridge, Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, and J. M. Coetzee. William Kentridge. London: Phaidon. 1999.

Huyssen, Andreas, William Kentridge, and Nalini Malani. The Shadow play as medium of memory. New York: Charta Books Ltd. 2013.

Kentridge, William, Mark Rosenthal, and Michael Auping. William Kentridge: five themes. San Francisco, Calif: San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. 2009.

McCrickard, Kate, and William Kentridge. 2012. WK: William Kentridge. London: Tate Publishing.

Stam, Robert, and Toby Miller. Film and theory: an anthology. Malden, Mass: Blackwell. 2000.

Thompson, Vanessa, and Leswin Laubscher. "Violence, re-membering, and healing: a textual reading of Drawings for Projection by William Kentridge". South African Journal of Psychology. 36 (4): 813-829. 2006.