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.

Hollis Frampton (Jenkins, 2009), Incisions in History/Segments of Eternity

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?

UPCOMING EVENT: Miranda Pennell presents extracts from her new film

Friday 7th November
10.30am in Media Research Building, Screen 3, Goldsmiths

My research on the visual archive of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (now BP) asks how colonial archives can be reconfigured to construct new and productive critical histories. 

My approach to reworking archival fragments focuses on the intersection of imperial history and personal history, mixing photographic documents from an official, corporate archive with those from a personal one. But the research also generates and incorporates new photographic and textual documentation in the process, as part of its narrative.  I use the moving image not only as a container but as an activator of colonial photographs. I show how the artist’s reflection on, and narration of a process that reconfigures archival fragments, can elicit an active, engaged history of the post-colonial present.

The practical research sheds light on a cluster of theoretical issues around the nature of our engagement with archival documents, with still and moving images, and with the temporal category we call 'the past'.On Friday I will talk about some questions that I am currently grappling with - about problems to do with the writing of history, the writing of a PhD thesis and the place of the researcher/artist in this process.

Suggested Reading: Jaimie Baron (2014)  'The Archive Effect' in Projections Volume 6, Issue 2, Winter 2012: 102–120

Shared visual ethnography

Presentation by Christine Douglas
3rd October, Goldsmiths


My PhD applies the theories of shared visual anthropology and the methodologies of shared visual ethnography to explore experiences of breast cancer. Nine individuals diagnosed with breast cancer within the past 3 years (of the research starting) were given cameras and invited to film whatever was important to them for a period of 3 - 6 months (actual filming times have been 4 - 18 months). I was not present during filming unless invited into the frame. The research material has been edited into 9 individual films in collaboration with the participants. An installation of the films will take place early 2015.

Determining the theoretical framework and content for my final chapter has been (and continues to be) a lengthy and iterative process.

Referencing Jean Rouch’s assertion that: “No matter whether the story is plausible, no matter the camera or the mike, or the director, or whether a film was born or not, more important is what happened around the camera…” [V/O La Pyramid Humaine 1959] my final chapter theorises processes interior to the films within the context of the research encounter and the wider culture that envelopes the disease. I theorise how each participant has interpreted the research and related to their camera, and the process of audio-visual inscription. Within this framework, I also evaluate what the participants prioritised in the absence of a researcher-led thematic or interview based methodology,  and what questions these issues and the “open” research position raise.

There are 3 key areas I will address on Friday:
1. Cecilia Sayad’s book Performing Authorship has made me think again about how to frame the process of the participant’s audio-visual inscription.  In analyzing the films it interesting to read their inscriptions as performance and to analyse what shape it takes.
2. The filmmaking process as therapeutic - strong but conflicting evidence has emerged from my research.
3. I struggle to write in the first person and to be reflexive beyond an analysis of how I have influenced the knowledge produced in the research but even that has been difficult, largely because I regard writing, whether subjectively or objectively, about vulnerable individuals who are ‘identifiable’ (and not anonymised as is the norm in health/medical research) as an ethical minefield. In addition in my reflexive writing I revert frequently to empirical statements to clarify my arguments  - the ‘I’ of my writing soon morphing into (for me, I am ashamed to say the reassurance of) theoretical norms and also I cannot shake off the belief that expressing how I feel about ‘me’ and breast cancer (which I have not been diagnosed with) is self indulgent in a way that undermines my deep respect for what the participants have been through and continue to experience. Aspects of my work and writing though do (very consciously) revert and conform to a what might be regarded as a ‘scientific’ framework - for example my desire for a reproducible, repeatable methodology, and how I have situated myself in relation to the participants. So is there an undefendable gap - or is it an interesting tension?

Next session: Friday 7th November at 10.30am in MRB Screen 3, Goldsmiths.
Filmmaker Miranda Pennell presents her work using the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (now BP) Archive.