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.

The ever-productive South African artist William Kentridge used the focused isolation of COVID-19 lockdown wisely. In March 2020, he started imagining the project that would result, four years later, in a nine-part series about the artist’s studio. Self-Portrait as a Coffee Pot was recently released on the subscriber service MUBI. It’s a bit astonishing that Kentridge could sustain this claustrophobic focus on the studio through all nine roughly 30-minute segments. But then again, this is an artist who has spent his career cracking open the quotidian acts of mark-making to tap into deeper frequencies of philosophical thought — only Kentridge, for instance, can summon from a scribble of charcoal or some torn paper bits an image of a horse that then somehow embodies all horses, from Pegasus to Napoleon’s Marengo. In the series, Kentridge endlessly circles the studio, mumbling about the absurdities of an art practice. He often talks to a double of himself, a seamlessly inserted video doppelganger. The two Williamses sit at a table, look at work, discuss life, aging, art, myth, the human body, and family memories.