With the Studio Life films, Kentridge has transformed drawings, cameras and the artist himself into players on a stage set comprised of easels, furniture and tools, with the dance of art-making a riveting storyline delivered with Shakespearean precision. In the pair of Studio Life photogravure images Blackboard and Exercise 1, Kentridge can be seen at work on this stage in a blur of intensity and intention. We see the camera, the walls with works pinned up, and the remnants of erased drawings, footsteps, and gestures. If the cognitive processes of reasoning and remembering were able to be seen, this is how they might look. 

Some elements of the images remain static, as if having been worked out or completed to a point that allows for a shift of focus, while others seem to define the very idea of conjuring inspiration through work. Time, a present character and co-conspirator to an artist both familiar with being the subject and the interviewer, is as malleable in Kentridge’s working process for the animated films as it is in his drawings and prints. The ability to change form has manifested in Blackboard and Exercise 1, and sits in stark contrast to the contemplative moods of The Phillips Room and Felicia, Ida, Felicia.