Sarah Nuttall is Professor of Literary and Cultural Studies at the University of the Witwatersrand, editor of
The chapter discusses Penny Siopis’s “tentacular art,” beginning with She Breathes Water and considering other cameo appearances of the octopus figure/footage in previous films and well as the significance of water, swimming, and diving in Siopis’s film work. A close reading of Obscure White Messenger reveals Siopis’s association between the degraded celluloid of the aquarium octopus footage (the octopus as Tsafendas’s “tapeworm”) and the synaptic disturbances of a brain labelled that of a “furiosus” by the judge at Tsafendas’s trial for the assassination of H. F. Verwoerd. The chapter discusses The Master Is Drowning and My Lovely Day, in part to consider the various iterations of “she” across the works but also the images of diving, swimming, and submergence as images of, in part, the artist herself as she dives into her wet mediums of ink and glue. In the films, the chapter argues, the analogue of the “painted line” is the subtitled narrative which is then shaken up or partially dissolved by the montages that flow beneath the words.
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