Miranda Pennell, November 2014
I think of recreating my experience inside the archive and my encounter with images for another viewer. The film is to some extent a dramatisation
of my research process.
I am approaching the writing of my thesis through
the practice. I want to connect the insights produced through the practical
research process, and also attend the way those insights were produced
and interpreted. I want to foreground experience – of the researcher in the
archive and of the imagined viewer. Here
I focus on a section about The author as an
Actor in History. This writing
is an early draft, a beginning about where research begins. I presented this at Goldsmiths alongside 3 sections of my film which reworks the photographic archive of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (BP).
The text is unreferenced but owes something to Cecelia Sayad's Performing Authorship: self-inscription and corporeality in the cinema (2013) and to Michel Certeau's The Writing of History (1988).
Finding
a body in the archive
Historic time consists only of a past, whose chief claim to superiority is that we’re not part of it.
I have been rifling around inside the photographic
collection of the BP archive for sometime, making lists, making notes, finding
things, getting lost, losing the plot, keeping going. There is a medium through
which so many incongruous and anachronistic archival materials are filtering, which
requires indexing. After all that digging-around and sniffing-out, there
remains a body that needs to be exhumed, whose evidence needs bringing out into
the light. The body is there all along, shadowing my search, yet for various
reasons, I don’t pay attention until it becomes impossible to step around it. I
reach an impasse and cannot find the thread that that will connect all the different
shades of grey within the incongruous, sprawling photographic worlds I have set
aside. I cannot begin.
I decide to make records of my presence in
the archive – for example the fact of me sitting here, looking for signs of where
the trouble all began, wondering what it is exactly that these pictures are
telling me, going through the motions of what I think the real historians on the other desks are doing. Immediately the digital registration of
voice and gesture roots my retrospective glance in the here and now. Now, the history I seek-for gains a
lively future, by means of my encounter with it in the present tense.
This beginning, this ‘now’ avows the very
conditions, the possibilities and the limits of a search for that ghost, that historical
other. By making my presence (and my present) felt, the stage on which the past
is to be performed is brought into view. I am suddenly more than ready to
begin. I have begun.
Having trespassed momentarily across the
frame of representation, I find I have crossed over into the film I am
making, and it becomes apparent
that I too am a historical character among all the others who are the subject
of my enquiry. Although still inside the archive, I am simultaneously inside a
bungalow in SW Iran in 1936 – but now endowed with the vantage point of a
historical actor, from which I can freely address the other historical actors –
not on equal terms, but as a restless researcher who inadvertently got stuck inside
her own film. Neither completely inside nor completely outside the time of the document
in which I invest my imagination, I occupy a space that moves endlessly between.
From my newly avowed vantage point, I can describe this movement between, and with that description emerges the
articulation of the site of production of historical meaning - the place where
a particular person, with her own history, encounters objects, fragments of a
past and becomes bound up in that history. And how that meeting place becomes
the story she tells about the stories we tell about the past, about all that is
known, and all that is part of the unknowable beyond.
Life starts to bleed into research, present
into past, subjective experience into the historical record, personal memory
into imperial history, the extra-filmic into the filmic. However this realisation quickly turns to
anxiety, because I wonder, who is this ‘I’ and where will this lead her – and me?
