Introduction

Abstract

This chapter introduces Penny Siopis’s films to the reader, situates her as a South African artist and filmmaker and thereafter places her work in relation to wider cinematic traditions of thought and practice, including the essay film genre, cinécriture, Third Cinema, and African diasporic short film traditions. Reflections on the essay form by Theodor Adorno are drawn in as are Gilles Deleuze’s writing on the “irrational cut” as a mode that attempts to capture something of the movement of thought itself. These are in turn placed in conversation with the new work generated by the contributors to the book itself: writers, scholars, curators, filmmakers, and artists. The introduction draws out the signal arguments of each chapter to offer the reader an overview of the emerging field of Siopis scholarship and engagement. Penny Siopis’s almost exclusive use of found footage, her refusal of the device of the voiceover and her profound reworking of relations between word, sound, and image are foregrounded as radical contributions to the histories of film today, here in cosmopolitan collocation with the African South.