Sarah Nuttall is Professor of Literary and Cultural Studies at the University of the Witwatersrand, editor of
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.
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