The Turning Liquid of the Real Available to Purchase

Building on techniques drawn from speculative analysis, this chapter explores Demitrios Tsafendas’s life as refracted in Penny Siopis’s film Obscure White Messenger. It offers an analysis of how Siopis finds ways of giving form to a traumatic past, at the intersection of Tsafendas’s tragic life and the psychic life of a state born out of a racial orgy. Ultimately, crossing the borders of consciousness is what is pursued in the film. This is done oceanically, by means of musical saturation and oneiric imagination, hence the idea of the “turning liquid of the real.” Forms of heightened perception akin to dream states are what the film achieves, thus taking us deeper into aspects of Tsafendas’s inner worlds.