“Your Shadow Blocks My Sun”: Reading Alternative Narratives in The New Parthenon and Other Films by Penny Siopis

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.

Introduction

Nuttall

2024

It Will Always Be You

Kentridge

2024

This chapter offers a discussion in nine points by a fellow artist-filmmaker that highlights aspects of how Penny Siopis’s films intervene in film form and as cinema. A focus of the discussion is how sound and image work to defamiliarize each other, so that sound makes the viewer see something differently or the image makes us hear something differently. The unspoken or unsolvable riddles of sound in the films make the viewer active and complicit, it is argued, trying to make connections and find echoes, and becoming an active sense-maker. The films are thus often constituted by brilliant surprises and their figuring of various brainstorms mean that the medium becomes the medium of thinking itself. Water appears in multiple filmic sequences, in each case carrying echoes of other waters, bodies or water or memories of water: these are the liquid worlds of Siopis’s films.

Can You Write a History?

Rascaroli

2024

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.