Can You Write a History?

Abstract

This chapter understands Siopis’s films as a form of cine-writing. The interest that moves it is not purely formal, however, for the cine-writing in her films is in no way independent of the stories they construct; it is a mode of writing beyond the book, born of the task of telling history otherwise. Combining found footage with sound and subtitles, her films tell untold or censored histories that are markedly alternative. They speak to auto/biographical concerns and to instances of colonialism, war, apartheid, migration, globalization, and ecological crisis, being at the same time the bearers of intense aesthetic/affective experiences beyond the historical and distinctive art objects in dialogue with a number of experimental traditions. Working through what the chapter terms her paragrammatical, scripto-visual film language, the discussion circles in particular around the unspeakable subject produced by Siopis’s work; this seen as a distinctive and compelling form of post-medium, intermedial film-thought.