... This is a three-way conversation between the filmmakers Penny Siopis, John Akomfrah, and Zenab Sedira that began in Beirut in 2015 and is taken up here as an extended exchange about conceptual overlaps in their work as well as processes of making film. Akomfrah describes Siopis’s filmmaking...

... Louis Armstrong August Musarurwa Penny Siopis soundtrack Demitrios Tsafendas Ralph Ellison ...

... This chapter explores the soundworld of Penny Siopis’s film works, taking its cue from her engagement with the life and music of August Musarurwa in Welcome Visitors! As a saxophonist and bandleader in 1950s Bulawayo (then in Southern Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe), Musarurwa wrote “Skokiaan,” a hit...

... 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...

... Penny Siopis’s film Communion revisits a historical enigma by commemorating aesthetically a haunting event that occurred in South Africa in 1952: police violence against the ANC’s Defiance Campaign of non-violent resistance against apartheid. This chapter offers a close reading of the film...

... 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...

... This chapter explores the constitutive bond between Penny Siopis’s paintings and films. Through a close reading of the dual showing of her Shame paintings (2002-2005) alongside the film Shadow Shame Again in 2021, as well as her 2019 exhibition Warm Water Imaginaries—which placed both mediums...

... 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...

... Penny Siopis awakens dormant images, coaxing forth a reincarnation of materials and matter. In the latter, she sees potential images, especially in her work with ink and glue, alchemically interacting with their strangeness, their plasticity, which offers an alternative vocabulary to formalism...

... 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...

... 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...

... This chapter discusses specifically Hellenic frames of reference in Penny Siopis’s films, focusing on her Greek family roots and on political events that marked the twentieth century dispersions of the Greek diaspora, including to the African continent. Theses dispersals were shaped, the chapter...

... The chapter demonstrates that She Breathes Water is an intervention on environmental violence that theorizes routes to a co-imagined, shareable future. Penny Siopis’s signature “de-mastering” strategies are deployed to invite an engagement with the monstrous nobuman, imagining what it might mean...

... In May 2020, scientists at the World Health Organization named COVID variants via letters of the Greek alphabet. Penny Siopis conjoins diseased celluloid with Greek mythology and the science of the viral in her film Celluloid Body to craft a figuring of an ill world in need of re-enchantment...

... 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...