IN CONVERSATION | SIOPIS, BONGELA-DAVIS & MUYANGA 

On Saturday 28 September, The Centre for the Less Good Idea hosted an In Conversation between artist and filmmaker Penny Siopis and writer, editor, cultural worker and artist Milisuthando Bongela-Davis. 

For this In Conversation, while Siopis is physically present at The Centre in Maboneng, Johannesburg, Bongela-Davis joins via live-stream from Harlem, New York. Moderated by The Centre’s Impresario, Neo Muyanga, the conversation looks at, among other things, the links between autobiographical and archival material in order to tell personal and universal stories, and taking an embodied, conversational and collaborative approach to film. 

Material archives

What does it mean to look at the history of a people through photographs and moving images? Both Siopis and Bongela-Davis make use of archival footage in their films. For Siopis this is largely found footage, sourced from flea-markets and yard-sales, there is also her own family archive. Similarly, Bongela-Davis draws on both found footage of family and personal archives, and footage filmed herself. 

Both filmmakers, however, work with the genre of the home movie. In this way, the material itself is evidence of a particular way of seeing. In South Africa, this becomes a way of seeing along racial and cultural lines, too. 

For Siopis, navigating found footage is an exercise in grappling with a particular domesticity and intimacy, populated by imagery and activity that is at once foreign and familiar to her. For Bongela-Davis, the archive became a way of speaking to a collective ancestor through the faces and presences of the people represented in the footage. Both filmmakers speak to the notion that, holding found and archival footage in a contemporary way, allows for a certain cleansing, a refiguring, or a recalibrating of this footage. 

Rethinking Southern African cinema, and filmmaking like jazz

South Africa has a long history of producing films. Much of this has either been extractive, or follows the form and function of Western filmic traditions. Rather than labelling contemporary filmmaking in South Africa as “South African cinema,” explains Bongela-Davis, why not focus on the development of “Nguni cinema”? Engaging filmmaking as a tool that is political in the world, and with a specific set of politics and histories in South Africa, allows for a necessary rethinking of the methodologies and functionality of filmmaking, she explains. 

Both Siopis and Bongela-Davis share a style of composing and editing their films that follows a free-form, intuitive and jazz-like methodology. For both, there is a visual rhythm at work, and a collage-like process of working with footage that allows them to find the overall composition. 

Similarly, Bongela-Davis references American editor Walter Murch when explaining that editing is somewhat dreamlike in nature – a dream being described and interpreted, and subsequently reinterpreted as it’s made. For Siopis, the act of painting and of engaging with the canvas, is something that takes place in the dreamscape. Editing her films, she explains, is much the same – intuitive, improvisational, and exploratory.    

A Q&A session following the Conversation further reveals each filmmaker’s ways of thinking, working, and making decisions around narrative, storytelling and editing.   

CREDITS:  

DISCUSSANTS | Penny Siopis & Milisuthando Bongela-Davis 
MODERATOR | Neo Muyanga
MOMENTEUR FOR THE SO ACADEMY | Athena Mazarakis 

– David Mann