Epilogue: Disordered and Flatulent is a filmic study of father figures and generational inheritance. A narrative libretto, sung by a chorus of classical busts, guides the viewer through a sequence of vignettes interweaving fragments of Mikhael Subotzky’s biography with the collective memory of 21st century South Africa.

A wide array of historical images and photographs from the artist's archive are translated into filmic motion by his Sticky-Tape Transfer collage technique, hand-painted stop-motion and digital animation. Alongside various live-action sequences, these strategies unpick the visual mechanisms with which patriarchy self-propagates as the myths of Enlightenment, the Dutch Golden Age and Fathers of the Nations are revealed as constructs inextricably tied to colonial conquest.

The film draws on several key images across its four chapters. In the first, Rembrandt’s The Anatomy Lesson of Dr Nicolaes Tulp (1632), is incised to spew forth colonial ships from The Dead Man’s Stomach. Concurrently, a photograph of Hermanus Van Wyk, an older man with whom Subotzky has maintained a friendship for nearly twenty years, is reimagined to explore this complex relationship and offer space for Hermanus to speak about his life and family history. His tale of migration, social alienation, incarceration and patriarchal violence provides a counterpoint to Subotzky’s story, across the gaping divide of class and race. Van Wyk’s bare-mattress life-raft is set adrift in painful memories of his childhood. It floats in the subterranean chambers of the animated photograph’s liquidising concrete before falling in with the lorries and buses on the arterial highways of 2020 as they travel together to the “Cape of Good Hope” with the colonial ships on the oceans of 1652.

Two portraits of Jan van Riebeeck, the first governor who established the Dutch colony in South Africa in 1652, intermerge in the film’s second chapter, The Dutch Gangster, which links the constructs of 17th-century European thought with particularly charged historical moments in the colonisation of South Africa. A photograph Subotzky took of his father walking into the ocean during the early stages of Motor Neuron Disease (ALS) provides the ground for a painful conversation between father and son in the third chapter, George Fading. These narratives are recapitulated in the final Chorale, where Subotzky and Hermanus come together in a live-action denouement to build and ceremonially burn a match-stick ship at the feet of the statue of van Riebeeck, which still stands on the Cape Town foreshore.

Epilogue: Disordered and Flatulent presents a complex expression of memory, myth and contested historical narratives. The sepsis of patriarchy is exposed in both the individual and social bodies as an invitation for the collective thought needed to break generational cycles of violence.

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