Sarah Nuttall is Professor of Literary and Cultural Studies at the University of the Witwatersrand, editor of
This chapter explores the manifold ways in which Penny Siopis’s transnational essay film The New Parthenon invokes “the concentrationary” (David Rousset): a logic of destruction and violation against the human that did not vanish with the defeat of Nazi Germany or the end of the Second World War but is still pervasive today, even, as it becomes increasingly visible, in countries that call themselves “democratic.” Drawing on Jean Cayrol’s notion of “Lazarean art,” an art of the in-between, the chapter traces the suggestive ways in which Siopis’s audiovisual essay—not a film about concentration camps proper, not even about a particular camp—both invokes and enables viewers to resist “concentrationary” logics. This is done via more oblique modes of correspondence, gesture, metonymy, asynchronicity, or dissonance, allowing us to move with, and be moved by, the residual resistances of the material to which the film also gives force.
Advertisement
