Abstract

In The New Parthenon, as with her other films, Penny Siopis pieces together fragments of found footage of anonymous home videos, shot handheld on 8 or 16 mm film. The films are digitised first for sampling, but not digitally remastered, and are then combined with music and subtitles from various sources. These films narrate the stories of individuals, set against significant historical and political events. Evocativeness and anxiety are induced by the un-specificity of the connections between images and subtitles, heightened by the materiality of the amateur home video footage, often centred on quotidian family life and holidays, that has been reframed to narrate events that continue to reshape nations. I introduce the construction of a nation as a political community and examine how Siopis subverts narratives that connect ancient and contemporary Greece and its own internal antisemitic and nationalist conflicts to those of apartheid South Africa and imperialist Britain. I propose that the numerous representations of souvenir replicas and icons in The New Parthenon appear to perform a witnessing role to public and personal histories, while symbolically holding historical traumas in frozen form. I focus on Siopis’s mediated views of the Acropolis structures in the film, considering the symbolic bleaching of the Parthenon Marbles in the nineteenth-century British imaginary to track whiteness as a signifier of power. Siopis migrates this to signifiers of apartheid South Africa in order, I argue, to critique the narratives that maintain national imaginaries and to propose instead an aesthetics of reattachment.

摘要

在新帕台农神庙与她的其他电影一样，Penny Siopis 将发现的匿名家庭视频的片段拼凑在一起，这些片段是用 8 或 16 毫米胶片手持拍摄的。这些电影首先被数字化以供采样，但没有经过数字重新制作，然后与来自各种来源的音乐和字幕相结合。这些电影讲述了个人的故事，以重大的历史和政治事件为背景。图像和字幕之间联系的非特异性引起了唤起和焦虑，业余家庭录像的物质性加剧了这种情绪，这些录像通常以日常生活和假期为中心，经过重新构架以叙述继续重塑国家的事件. 我介绍了作为一个政治共同体的国家的建设，并研究了 Siopis 如何颠覆将古希腊和当代希腊及其内部反犹太主义和民族主义冲突与种族隔离的南非和帝国主义英国的冲突联系起来的叙述。我建议纪念品复制品和图标的大量表示新帕台农神庙似乎扮演着见证公共和个人历史的角色，同时象征性地以冰冻的形式保存着历史创伤。我关注电影中 Siopis 对雅典卫城结构的中介观点，考虑到 19 世纪英国想象中帕台农神庙大理石的象征性漂白，以追踪白色作为权力的象征。Siopis 将此迁移到南非种族隔离的能指上，我认为，这是为了批评维持民族想象的叙事，并提出一种重新依恋的美学。