Penny Siopis’s Film Fables

Penny Siopis's Obscure White Messenger (2010) tells the story of Dimitrio Tsafendas, the man who assassinated South African Prime Minister HF Verwoerd in 1966. The film combines samples of found home-movie footage, a mixed soundtrack, and text that runs over the images like subtitles, relaying the story. From this text, we learn that the architect of apartheid was stabbed to death in Parliament by Tsafendas, who had been employed there as an official messenger. It turns out that Tsafendas was an illegal alien, a stateless wanderer who had passed through the otherwise well-guarded gates of access to the highest levels of government by some mysterious bureaucratic error. Tsafendas was of mixed race: his Greek father lived in Lourenco Marques (today's Maputo) where Dimitrio was born, and his Mozambican mother worked in his father's household as a domestic labourer. The video presents footage of these diverse places while the soundtrack plays traditional Turkish music, the two together translating the sights and sounds of the subject's life into aesthetic heterogeneity. In her film, Siopis examines this remarkable encounter between an exemplary exponent of the National Party's politics of racial separation and an obscure figure of stateless hybridity. Developing an experimental cinematic structure of montage, she finds an innovative way to speak about the traumatic apartheid past in a modernity of dislocation and crisis. Her approach reinvents the conditions of documentary practice, moving beyond the stale oppositions of fact and fiction in order to propose a new way to tell stories of subjective and geopolitical resonance. Moreover, Obscure White Messenger proposes the cinematic means to transcend the violence of political and epistemological oppositions – between truth and falsehood, purity and hybridity, nationality and statelessness – in a post-apartheid present when xenophobia, anti-immigration policies and nationalism are resurgent and exist in paradoxical relation to the international flows of commodities, migrant labourers and information that define globalization. Obscure White Messenger exemplifies Siopis's thematic concerns and filmic style, which she has established gradually over several interrelated works since 1997. My Lovely Day (1997) explores the travels of the artist's maternal grandmother to Greece, England and South Africa in the early twentieth century, comparing and contrasting her experiences with a coming era of mobility under contemporary global reality

Art · African history and culture studies · Cinema and Media Studies · South African History and Culture

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