DRAFT: Zeno Writing (2002) an animated film by South African artist William Kentridge is based on Italo Svevo's novel from 1923 Confessions of Zeno. It "uses Kentridge's vocabulary of animation - torn-paper collages, shadow figures in procession, altered charcoal drawings, and archival film footage - to portray the novel's main character Zeno, a guilt-ridden figure in psychoanalysis, within the broader social cataclysm of an engulfing world war. Against an original soundtrack by composer Kevin Volans, the film follows the consciousness and anxieties of Zeno, drawing a likeness between his own malcontent, a symbol of the universally conflicted society after World War I, and our own today." Zeno Writing (11 minutes, 16 seconds) had its world premiere at Documenta 11 in conjunction with the multimedia performance and opera Confessions of Zeno (in collaboration with Kevin Volans, composer; Jane Taylor, librettist; the Handspring Puppet Company; and The Sontonga Quartet)." "About the Confessions project, William Kentridge explains: 'When I first read Italo Svevo's Confessions of Zeno, 1923 some twenty years ago, one of the things that drew me to it was the evocation of Trieste as a rather desperate provincial city at the edge of an empire - away from the center, the real world. I was intrigued how an Austrian Italian writing in the 1920s could have such a sense of how it felt to be in Johannesburg in the 1980s. In the years following this has persisted. And caused me to return to the book. But other elements have engaged me as well... Zeno, the hero of Svevo's novel, has remarkable self-knowledge. But it is a knowledge that is without effect. The absolute inability of self-knowledge to force Zeno to act, or at other times, to stop him from acting, feels familiar. People stuck at the edge of a historical project about to implode, stuck waiting for the eruption to happen. The teasing out of our ambiguous sense of place, and the convoluted relation we have to our own sense of self, form the starting point for the work….'" Quotes excerpted from Marian Goodman Gallery website.