Ghostly Intermediality: Zombie Media and Spectral Subjectivities in Penny Siopis’s Films

Penny Siopis’s films tread a distinctive political and aesthetic path. Like her art, they explore feminist, postcolonial, and environmental concerns, and display a preoccupation with issues of private and collective memory, histories of systemic oppression and of ideologies of segregation, and economies of extraction and exploitation. These concerns are addressed via an experimental approach to film form that is adapted to tell history otherwise. Through imaginative auto/biographical modes of narration, her films evoke the forgotten or censored stories of relegated subjects whose lives were marred by displacement, war, apartheid, racial discrimination, or by gender-based violence. Here, the author explores how Siopis constructs her spectral subjects intermedially, between writing, film, song and music, and between analogue and digital media. By resuscitating “undead media,” Siopis generates a hearing that is not there, and evokes ghosts through what we could call a “zombie intermediality.” In so doing, her films afford formidable cognitive and affective glimpses into some of the most crucial periods of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.