The Trouble
with the Archive
On the British Petroleum Films
of Sanaz Sohrabi and Miranda Pennell
Tatum Howey
In 1898, Alexandre Michon––a French cinematographer considered a pioneer of Azerbaijani cinema––used a Lumière cinematograph to film a short thirty-second scene of smoldering oil well gushers in Baku in what was then the Russian Empire. Oil Wells of Baku: Close View,1 contrary to its title’s suggestion, is filmed from a considerable distance away. A barely perceptible figure, presumably a laborer, gradually moves away from the wells and out of frame. Their diminutive size accentuates both the remoteness of moving image technology and the scale of ecological disaster. The film, despite its brevity, inaugurates the long history of photographic technologies’ entanglement with resource extraction and capitalism.2
As if preemptively taking up Kevin P. Coleman and Daniel James’ proposal that “[p]erhaps the most obvious place to begin an examination of the relationship between capitalism and the camera would be to consider the massive photo archives of multinational corporations,”3 two relatively recent non-fiction films trouble the archives of the petroleum company BP (known as British Petroleum until 1998) and their 20th-century oil operations in Iran. In Sanaz Sohrabi’s film, Sahnehaye Estekhraj (2023), translated as Scenes of Extraction,4 the Iranian filmmaker plumbs the colonial archives by focusing explicitly on how BP marshaled visual technology both ethnographically and geologically to further its oil extraction operations abroad. Analogous to Scenes of Extraction, British filmmaker Miranda Pennell’s The Host (2015),5 investigates both BP’s corporate and her own personal archives in an attempt to complicate her family’s involvement with BP. These films reveal the complex relationship between petroleum extraction, production, and image-making technologies––though both films are eventually limited by the archives they attempt to critique. A “heap of corpses” is haunting Europe.6 For Miranda Pennell, the rot is coming from somewhere inside the house. Pennell’s father, Montague “Monty” Mattinson Pennell, was a longtime British engineer and subsequent manager of the A.I.O.C. (Anglo-Iranian Oil Company.) The family, including Miranda, spent several sojourns in Iran––first at the infamous Masjed Soleyman oil field (MIS) and then in Tehran––variously from 1946 until 1973, when the Western Consortium of operating companies finally sold Iran’s oil reserves to the National Iranian Oil Company, nationalizing petroleum production in Iran for the first time.7 “Monty” Pennell’s career had taken shape within the sordid imperial history of oil extraction in Iran by the British government––a history marked by the usual colonial theatrics: land grabs masquerading as concessions, CIA-orchestrated overthrows dressed up as domestic coup d’états, and cultural hegemony miming modernization.8 Miranda Pennell’s auto-ethnographic film, The Host, attempts to reanimate this history through both found footage from her father’s amateur photography collection and BP’s company archives. In one sequence, for example, through voiceover, she describes her father’s documentation of a marriage custom in a local village where a cloth is held between the middle and index finger and waved in celebration: “[m]y father won’t see the meaning behind this semaphore, he’ll not decode the message this village has for him. But he’ll photograph it.”9 The Host, using predominantly archival material, attempts to glean historical debris from official records––all the seemingly ghostly apparitions in the field of vision of photographic documentation that inhabit the periphery of the official archive. The cast of characters featured include the often-marginal sideshows of history: the wife of an eccentric colonial geologist, a histrionic servant named Mohammed, along with A.I.O.C.’s Iranian laborers and local villagers, for example. As the title of her film suggests, and as Pennell notes in the film,10 The Host is a conceptual riff on two distinct but related interpretations of the word “host.” The first refers to Joy O’Brien––the wife of the idiosyncratic A.I.O.C. geologist Christian O’Brien––who hosted dinner parties in Tehran for the corporation’s guests and visitors, keeping an intricate and obsessive entertainment diary that included details of all the food served. The second refers to the parasitic nature of Britain’s petroleum exploration in Iran throughout the 20th century as those geologists, including Christian O’Brien, relied on indigenous knowledge to guide them in unfamiliar terrain and climate in search for the surface clues of oil.11 Pennell’s entry into colonial archives is through Joy, who had lived in the same British-appointed midcentury house in Tehran after the Pennells left. Throughout the film, Joy shares with Pennell anecdotal stories on colonial life in Iran. By way of Joy’s recollection, Pennell pursues a haphazard and often dead-ended investigation into the selective memory and historical amnesia of colonizers and their inheritors. Though Pennell’s initial meeting with Joy leads her to BP’s archives at the University of Warwick, Pennell’s engagement with the archival material remains detached. “Out of curiosity” Pennell searches for her father in the archives, yet nothing comes up.12 This is the only direct attempt Pennell makes at locating her own genealogical traces within the corporate archive, and what follows is not an interrogation or critique of her father’s or Christian O’Brien’s involvement with BP’s parasitic oil extraction but a series of detached observations and an extensive soundscape accompanying montages of found footage.
Miranda Pennell, The Host (2015), Promotional Material
A “heap of corpses” is haunting Europe.6 For Miranda Pennell, the rot is coming from somewhere inside the house. Pennell’s father, Montague “Monty” Mattinson Pennell, was a longtime British engineer and subsequent manager of the A.I.O.C. (Anglo-Iranian Oil Company.) The family, including Miranda, spent several sojourns in Iran––first at the infamous Masjed Soleyman oil field (MIS) and then in Tehran––variously from 1946 until 1973, when the Western Consortium of operating companies finally sold Iran’s oil reserves to the National Iranian Oil Company, nationalizing petroleum production in Iran for the first time.7 “Monty” Pennell’s career had taken shape within the sordid imperial history of oil extraction in Iran by the British government––a history marked by the usual colonial theatrics: land grabs masquerading as concessions, CIA-orchestrated overthrows dressed up as domestic coup d’états, and cultural hegemony miming modernization.8 Miranda Pennell’s auto-ethnographic film, The Host, attempts to reanimate this history through both found footage from her father’s amateur photography collection and BP’s company archives. In one sequence, for example, through voiceover, she describes her father’s documentation of a marriage custom in a local village where a cloth is held between the middle and index finger and waved in celebration: “[m]y father won’t see the meaning behind this semaphore, he’ll not decode the message this village has for him. But he’ll photograph it.”9 The Host, using predominantly archival material, attempts to glean historical debris from official records––all the seemingly ghostly apparitions in the field of vision of photographic documentation that inhabit the periphery of the official archive. The cast of characters featured include the often-marginal sideshows of history: the wife of an eccentric colonial geologist, a histrionic servant named Mohammed, along with A.I.O.C.’s Iranian laborers and local villagers, for example. As the title of her film suggests, and as Pennell notes in the film,10 The Host is a conceptual riff on two distinct but related interpretations of the word “host.” The first refers to Joy O’Brien––the wife of the idiosyncratic A.I.O.C. geologist Christian O’Brien––who hosted dinner parties in Tehran for the corporation’s guests and visitors, keeping an intricate and obsessive entertainment diary that included details of all the food served. The second refers to the parasitic nature of Britain’s petroleum exploration in Iran throughout the 20th century as those geologists, including Christian O’Brien, relied on indigenous knowledge to guide them in unfamiliar terrain and climate in search for the surface clues of oil.11 Pennell’s entry into colonial archives is through Joy, who had lived in the same British-appointed midcentury house in Tehran after the Pennells left. Throughout the film, Joy shares with Pennell anecdotal stories on colonial life in Iran. By way of Joy’s recollection, Pennell pursues a haphazard and often dead-ended investigation into the selective memory and historical amnesia of colonizers and their inheritors. Though Pennell’s initial meeting with Joy leads her to BP’s archives at the University of Warwick, Pennell’s engagement with the archival material remains detached. “Out of curiosity” Pennell searches for her father in the archives, yet nothing comes up.12 This is the only direct attempt Pennell makes at locating her own genealogical traces within the corporate archive, and what follows is not an interrogation or critique of her father’s or Christian O’Brien’s involvement with BP’s parasitic oil extraction but a series of detached observations and an extensive soundscape accompanying montages of found footage.
Still from Miranda Pennell, The Host (2015).
In The Host, Pennell notes she had no method that would rationalize her search, as opposed to the geologists, who interpreted aerial images looking for “hidden patterns” in the earth by plumbing and extracting image content “to pinpoint the location of the oil.”13 In one of the opening sequences, Pennell studies multiple renderings of a panorama image of the infamous Abadan refinery––at the time the largest in the world––telescopically trying to locate the workers who materialize as barely perceptible figures in the photograph. As in Oil Wells of Baku: Close View, the petrol infrastructure looms large over the nearly indiscernible figures beneath it. The scale of the panorama, in performing the industrial weight of the British empire, in turn, cannot register those that make its machineries operable. Pennell, while occupied with oil extraction and visual regimes, does not move toward a logical conclusion with her investigation but instead seeks to uncover, through contextually ambiguous filmic digressions on national histories, the mythmaking of imperial ontology itself. The Host, as Pennell describes it, “is about the stories we tell about ourselves and others, the facts and fictions we live by—and their consequences.”14 In one sequence, Pennell quotes extensively from an unnamed British ambassador’s description of former Prime Minister Mosaddegh, whom he portrays as “[c]unning, slippery, and completely unscrupulous… short with bandy legs, looks like a cab horse… Diffuses a slight reek of opium… and negotiates using negative and feminine tactics… He has a daughter in a mental home in Switzerland.”15 Though Pennell does little to historically situate this passage, this characterization of Mossadegh, who nationalized the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company in 1951 and was overthrown in a CIA-orchestrated military coup in August 1953, is clearly part of an effort to project a racial taxonomy onto a foreign other, largely incited by the loss of British control over Iranian oil. In the voiceover in the next sequence, Pennell quotes from another archival document, again without giving context or commentary: “[m]ost Iranians are introverts…Their emotions are strong and easily aroused. But they continually fail to test their imaginations against reality and to subordinate their emotions to reason. They lack common sense and the ability to differentiate emotion from facts… Often, not finding the world to their dreams, they relapse into indolence and do not persevere… Nearly all classes have a passion for personal gain and are ready to do most things for money. They are vain and conceited and unwilling to admit to themselves that they can be in the wrong. They are always ready to blame other people.”16 This critique of Iranian subjectivity, which Ervand Abrahamian aptly names a “racial diatribe,” is from a memo from the British Embassy in Tehran written in 1951, the same year as the nationalization of A.I.O.C. 17 Pennell’s inclusion of both racial diatribes—the British ambassador’s and the Embassy memo—shows the corporate and national construction of a racial other as justifiably suitable for exploitation and subjugation, and how imperial ontology was produced through these fictions. Pennell, near the end of the film, will include how, when her family left Tehran for England for the last time, “Mohammad, the head servant, will cry openly. My mother will put this down to his Iranian disposition.”18
The spectral forces at play in Pennell’s film include the dominant machinations of imperial imaginations and colonial occupation through the apparition of the A.I.O.C. geologist Christian O’Brien, who, in turn, is haunted by the colonial ghosts of the past. Pennell illustrates this by describing how O’Brien, through misidentification, was involved with the discovery of the Chogha Zanbil ziggurat while he was on a petrol exploratory expedition for BP with geologist Victor Boileau in Southwest Iran. O’Brien mistakes a cuneiform script for “an unusual, decorated stone” while stumbling around the Khuzestan province.19 His initial confusion over the cuneiform tablet causes him to pause, prompting him to notice how the landscape around him was in fact an ancient complex, which was eventually identified as Elamite. Boileau and O’Brien would take their findings to nearby Susa, where the French Archeological Mission was conducting excavations. O’Brien subsequently teaches himself to read cuneiform after this ‘discovery’. This sequence of events allows Pennell to draw a comparison between cuneiform and exploratory geology, both replete with signs that can be read, translated, and extracted from. As described by Pennell in the film, O’Brien “[draws] on his experience of fieldwork and of spatial and temporal mapping in order to read signs from the distant past.”20 Pennell chronicles how O’Brien will eventually become “convinced he has discovered the origins of human culture,” publishing a series of pseudo-scientific texts on people he refers to as “the shining ones” or “benevolent colonizers,” enlightened-beings––most likely aliens––who combined their DNA with local tribesmen to produce homo sapiens.21 Pennell seems to be suggesting that the psychic structure of the colonialist is one that relies on the constant production of a mythology with which to redeem itself––including racist, colonial epithets disguised as supernatural mythology. Pennell’s soundscape often matches this extraterrestrial theme with otherworldly tones that penetrate precise moments to dislocate the archival images.
In Pennell’s film, BP’s corporate archive is both animated and undone, the images brought out of their sanitized context through these sounds, which emphasize the mythmaking nature of an archive’s narrative. That is, while these images first appear as simply as the story of British oil exploration and extraction, the soundscape tells a different story of how corporate and national narratives are radically unstable, and just that, fictions. The dissonant sounds not only fracture certain images, for example, through the stark asymmetry between discordant synthesizer and the formality of black and white photographs of oil executives in one sequence but also do not allow us to passively experience the archive in those instances, demanding that we attune instead to its multiple significations. However, these sequences are somewhat inconsistent and are in direct contrast to the overall audio, where Pennell uses Foley to provide sounds that accompany the action or environment in the photographs. The sequence of images, sound, and informative narration seems to suggest that it is hardly unexpected that a geologist working for A.I.O.C. should believe that he has found the origins of civilization while excavating the surface of the Iranian desert. Pennell, in fact, delivers all this backstory with a monotone voiceover, leaving much room for speculation of her own assessment.
Miranda Pennell, The Host (2015), Promotional Material
Despite the prescient investigation into Britain’s colonial occupation of Iran, Pennell is not performing a rescue operation of the margins or scouring archival fissures. Instead, The Host replicates the same logics of archiving she seeks to critique, the indexicality of which inscrutably always positions an Other outside of it. There are moments where this occurs explicitly, as when The Host exhibits photographs of Iranian laborers who “look straight through the lens at me.”22 Pennell’s voiceover continues: “I want to get them back into their box, but they are holding me against my will.”23 The Abadan refinery situated in the Southwest oil fields of Iran, where these laborers would have worked, was notorious for its dilapidated conditions, which housed tens of thousands of workers in the shanty towns known as Kaghazabad (literally “Paper City” in Persian). Pennell never shows us Paper City, and whether photographic evidence of it exists within BP’s archives or not, a clear distinction is evident between the midcentury modern mansions, which housed white oil workers, and the toxic and degraded conditions Iranian workers were forced to live in. The oil fields were described by the locals as “a state within a state,”24 and BP’s administration was rife with “racial discrimination in the management and accommodation of the workforce.”25 Middle Eastern studies scholar and political theorist Timothy Mitchell describes how these conditions eventually lead to “a series of strikes in 1945–46, including a three-day general strike in the refinery at Abadan and across the oil fields.”26 In contrast to the representation of Iranian oil workers, whose pictures are shown long enough for us to stare at, Pennell performs a withholding operation with her own family’s photographs through a rapid montage sequence, where we are given little time to properly discern the images in which her family appears. Curiously, even ironically, these images are frequently used as the promotional material for the film. I read this as a way to avoid critiquing her parents or subjecting them to the viewer’s gaze in the same way the anonymous workers are. In a review of the film with Sight & Sound, Sukhdev Sandhu remarks on the relatively infrequent instances of Pennell’s anthropological gaze.27 For a film whose genre could be easily described as ethnographic in its fixation on and representation of Iranian oil workers, Sandhu’s conclusion––that Pennell’s film avoids the anthropological––seems rather short-sighted. The lack of engagement with the circumstances of the Kaghazabad shantytown and the avoidance of critically situating her family’s participation in the exploitation of those laborers is perhaps the most obvious example of this lack of acuity. Pennell remarked in an interview that she did not want to place blame solely on her parents as it was “a different time.”28 However, a tangential but perhaps illuminating historical detail, though not included in the film, might help contextualize contemporary affects at the time. The poet Dylan Thomas, who was initially hired by BP to do a promotional documentary on Abadan, rescinded his offer after bearing witness to not only the literal segregation of the oil town but the blatant discrimination deployed by British employees there, of which Pennell’s father would have been a part. With his own brand of continental racism, Thomas wrote in a letter: “I sit in the lounge of this posh Guesthouse for horrible oilmen and listen to Scotch engineers running down the Persian wops; I go, with a pleasant Persian guide, through endless museums, palaces, libraries, houses of parliament, till my […] and my boredom bleed.”29
Sanaz Sohrabi’s maximalist research-based film projects are, in her own words, concerned with the “historical overlap between extraction of crude oil and technologies of vision.”30 As Scenes of Extraction suggests, photography, along with extractive capitalism, is “premised upon a fiction of endless accumulation in a finite world.”31 Sohrabi, who was a PhD student at Concordia University in Montreal while making the film, creates meticulously researched essayistic films. Scenes of Extraction, which screened at Open City’s 2023 festival in London, is the second film of a trilogy on resource extraction, the first being One Image, Two Acts (2020). Scenes of Extraction opens by presenting the connection between the development of the Trans-Iranian Railway, the modern nation-building project, and foreign control over oil extraction, pointing to how the nation-building project in 1938 was funded by oil revenue. Like Pennell, Sohrabi uses only found footage, largely from BP’s archives, and both films deal with an abundance of archival material to underscore how these archives are produced to support imperial narratives of modernization. When considering the film, we realize that much of this footage that masquerades as scientific expertise is propaganda for Britain’s imperialist ambitions. As Sohrabi points out to us through voice-over, the intended distribution of these films was for marketing and campaigning purposes and to further the industrial pursuits of the British colonial government. Both filmmakers comment on “[t]he workers who dwell on the fringes of the infrastructure and the photographic frame.”32 For Sohrabi, the workers in the archive “become part of the larger image of modernization and nation-building in Iran,”33 while for Pennell they remain undetectable, submerged within the overwhelming landscape of the Abadan refinery.
For Sohrabi however, the instrumentalization of the camera is what is fundamentally disassembled in Scenes of Extraction, or what she refers to as the “image-world of oil built on erasure.”34 There is a near-constant use of composite images and of rendering in three dimensions the flat surfaces of the image, which rotates kaleidoscopically throughout. Iranian laborers are cut out, only to be placed onto alternate surfaces––time and place are ruptured, all pointing to an attempt to intervene into historical and national narratives, which in turn disfigures the linear logic of archival organization. These collaged images mediate the already hypermediated space of the photographic image by way of editing processes. This dismembering of the archive is also accompanied by an expository voiceover from Sohrabi speaking in Farsi, accompanied by subtitles. For Sohrabi, these images of oil extraction reveal the networks of imperialism; it is how she traces its entrails. Fundamentally, Sohrabi’s film makes us question what becomes rendered “easy to see” through the production of colonial image-worlds. For example, archival footage of an explosion during seismographic exploration in Eastern Iran was not just evidence or celebration of colonialist oil exploration and progress but was also an account of both the recording and destroying of the earth. Extraction and photography are collapsed into the same libidinal economy. The image here is depicted in its most unsentimental form: it both extracts and represents the extraction of the earth––it is antithetical to preservation, an anticipation of ruin. Sohrabi critically asks us: “How can one archive destruction?”35
What both these films show us is how image-making emerges in tandem with colonial and imperial projects. That is, that the scopic regimes and visual indexes that made photography usable as a colonial and imperial tool were shaped and constituted by hegemonic, racialized, and gendered taxonomic definitions of the human and its colonized subject. As oil and cinema scholar Mona Damluji critically gestures to, “oil makes modern ways of seeing possible.”36 Damluji points to not only the critical role petroleum had on the development of celluloid (which is a petrochemical by-product) and film technology, but also to the extent to which American and British oil companies filmed their operations.37 Both Sohrabi and Pennell attempt to undo these colonial heritages by intervening in what Damluji refers to as the “oil media archive,”38 albeit in different ways. Pennell, in the vein of historian Ann Laura Stoler, uses an ethnographic and auto-ethnographic approach to the archive, while Sohrabi comparatively analyzes colonial technologies of viewing—taking these archives as propaganda for scientific and industrial pursuits of the British colonial government. In both Scenes of Extraction and The Host, documentation itself and the ethics of bearing witness is what is being questioned. These films are part of a larger trend in cinema that could be called the ‘experimental investigatory film,’ often centered around those who foment the archives, where the filmmaker is akin to a sort of investigator who discloses that which has been occluded from view. Pennell herself has described her role as a “filmmaker [turned] forensic detective” who “pieces together hundreds of photographs in search of what she believes to be a buried history.”39 This investigatory role of the photographer is of course not new, as Walter Benjamin writes in his treatise on photography: “Isn’t the task of the photographer… to reveal guilt and to point out the guilty in his pictures?”40 Here, however, the investigator is not the photographer but the filmmaker, whose investigative role Hal Foster has traced to artists such as Harun Farocki, Trevor Paglen, and Hito Steyerl.41 These filmmakers mobilize documentary and archival modes and are “concerned less with exposing a given reality behind representation than with reconstructing an occluded reality.”42 Reconstruction, reclamation, and reworking are just some of the methods archival interpretations perform in order to foreground what archives omit or what Andrew Barry has dubbed its “systematic absences.”43 Barry goes on to discuss how, in particular, oil archives “do not address, except in passing, the question of the relation between corporations and the states of both oil-producing and oil-consuming countries,” and, with this, are able to avoid social and political implications within their stacks. 44 While BP’s archives contain documentation of colonial and parasitic petroleum extraction, evidence of poor working conditions, and racial subjugation, none of this is ever explicitly remarked on.45 As I argue, Pennell performs a similar operation to that of the oil archive. By tactfully evading an explicit critique of the oil archives themselves and her family’s involvement in colonial petroleum extraction, Pennell fails to leverage her film as a productive intervention into the archive. Given that oil corporations both withhold and curate their archives, as “they are not held publicly accountable to disclose the full contents of their holdings and make them available for general access,”46 both Pennell and Sohrabi’s films are missed opportunities for a ruinous approach to the archive.
BP’s official archives, which are stored at the University of Warwick in Coventry, have recently met increased scrutiny from climate activists and the press alike,47 and typify the association of photography and the moving image with the investigatory, albeit through nefarious surveillance strategies. A multinational company, BP, formally known as the Anglo-Persian Oil Company, which then became the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (A.I.O.C.), built its fortune on its initial petroleum extraction in Iran. Wrestling with the difficulties of an unmarketable history, BP has leaned into its identity as a multinational “heritage brand”48 rather than attempting to obscure its unsavory legacies. (For example, a disturbing phrase on one of BP’s landing pages reads: “There is much more to the story of [BP] than Anglo-Iranian.”49) This is part of a much larger rebranding and campaign strategy for BP, which, in 2000, pivoted to a play on its acronym–“Beyond Petroleum”–after pledging to invest more in renewable energy sources, most notably solar. The corporate archive is privately managed by BP, not by the University of Warwick staff, and has been described as “an insidious example of the close connection between the fossil fuel industry and our public institutions.”50 Since establishing its archive, BP has been accused of a slew of targeted surveillance campaigns against climate activists who have protested against BP’s presence at the university. In 2015, a student who was a member of Warwick’s divestment movement, Fossil Free Warwick, was being surveilled by both BP and the university, who “shared regular updates about his movements as well as his social media activity.”51 Their use of CCTV footage to regularly track climate activists is another predictable yet unsettling example of the entwinement of image-based investigations and oil corporations.
Sanaz Sohrabi, Scenes of Extractions (2023), Promotional Material
Historically, oil corporations have used photography and the moving image for their public relations campaigns. Many of these companies had their own film production units, most notably Shell. Shell Film Unit produced hundreds of films that were adopted into high school and university curricula and were often shown theatrically at the beginning of feature length films.52 Shell has been acknowledged by film historians as creating documentary’s first international film movement, producing over 130 films in the 1950s and substantiating the need for a petroleum film distributor, London’s Petroleum Film Bureau.53 John Grierson and Robert Flaherty, considered pioneers of documentary film, both made films for oil corporations.54 The films these corporations produced––which ranged from instructional and promotional videos on products to foreign petroleum exploratory ventures to science and environmental concerns––deployed a self-reflective investigatory approach to both the inner workings of the oil industry and its influence on contemporary life, most notably the massive social and cultural changes wrought by petroleum use.55 As Mona Damluji has described , the “[f]ilms and photographs staged at the behest of petroleum company public relations offices over the past century have worked through routine channels of advertising, cinemas, schools, industrial expos, and social media to seamlessly equate the story of oil with the experience of modernity.”56 However, though these oil corporations embraced the documentary film as a medium,57 its introspective nature was largely performative. As Pennell and Sohrabi’s films show, much of the image-based works produced by oil companies push what can only be described as justification for oil extraction through its concurrent civilizing missions in underdeveloped countries. The transparency of BP’s oil archive,58 given its residence at a public university and the accessibility of its film-based media,59 is largely paradoxical given their propensity for extrajudicial monitoring of their critics. While both Pennell and Sohrabi’s films thank the BP archives for their generosity and help in accessing its documents, neither acknowledges the fraught relationship with a corporate archive housed on a university campus. This, I argue, is evidence of what Barry describes as the oil archives propensity to both foster and respond to controversy while also serving “to channel debate toward a quite specific set of questions. In this way, criticism is enabled but it is also, at the same time, contained within limits.”60 These films intervene in the oil archive––either by interjecting personal histories or, in Sohrabi’s case, literally cutting up its contents. However, both remain largely faithful to and lack a critique of the archive as an institution itself.
The archive holds what we collect out of our fear of dispersion; it is a hoarding device. As Benjamin put it: “[p]erhaps the most deeply hidden motive of the person who collects can be described this way: he takes up the struggle against dispersion.”61 BP’s archives exist in the highly controlled and mediated space of an institution, whose containment and preservation are exemplary of the continuation of imperialist imaginaries and colonial histories. The archive’s presence at a university is indicative to how these logics persists in the maintenance of imperial histories. Archives are not, as Foucault would describe, the “library of all libraries.” They are not static and unsusceptible to the effects of “time and place.”62 Instead, they require constant modification to survive and in order to maintain particular histories. Central to this protracted modification process is the maintenance of BP’s collection of photographs and moving images from over a century of their surveying and propaganda efforts. The relationship between image-based objects within the archive and the archive as an institution is important here. The photograph, argues John Berger, rather than being a continuation of the other fine arts, can be more accurately described as the technification of memory, as “[w]hat the camera does, however, and what the eye in itself can never do, is to fix the appearance of that event. It removes its appearance from the flow of appearances and it preserves it, not perhaps forever but for as long as the film exists.”63 The photograph fixes and preserves the event, while the archive attends to this photographic material in an effort to preserve colonial memory. The BP archive aids and abets the preservation of a particular version of colonial history in these photographs. Both Miranda Pennell and Sanaz Sohrabi are keenly attuned to this deliberate façade, where the appearance of an event within the archive is not so much suspended as it is manipulated. In order to disorient the homogeneity of the photographic archive, they employ what Berger describes as unilateral memory, which insinuates that “[m]emory works radially, that is to say with an enormous number of associations all leading to the same event.”64 Both filmmakers are able to render images utterly chronopoetic by giving time to them, pulling out the multiple timelines which are compressed onto their surface.65 Sohrabi achieves this through her persistent use of collage and Pennell mostly through her voiceover analysis of colonial mythmaking.
The scholar Jaimie Baron defines “the archive effect” in film as the phenomenon that occurs when the archival document is disoriented in its static and hierarchical position and is instead rendered on the level of experience.66 Some noted examples of recent films that track this archival disruption include the use of women’s amateur film travelogues in Courtney Stephens’ Terra Femme (2021); Bill Morrison’s Dawson City: Frozen Time (2016), which repurposes a medley of moving-image material surrounding 20th-century life in the city; Rebecca Baron’s Detour de Force (2014), which recontextualizes audio and 16mm on thoughtographer Ted Serios; Sierra Pettengill’s Riotsville, U.S.A. (2022), which uses archival film on the reproduction of towns to train riot police in the 1960s; much of the work of Kevin Jerome Everson; and Tiffany Sia’s archival assemblages on Hong Kong such as What Rules the Invisible (2022). Baron, taking cue from Vivian Sobchack, suggests that these films should be understood instead as “a mode of reception” rather than as a coherent “film object.”67 That is, these films produce phenomena through which the viewer, in recognizing the use of archival footage in the film’s production, becomes aware that the conditions of our lives “are neither universal nor permanent,” but alterable, able to be understood differently.68 Baron’s definition of the archive effect is particularly generative for tracking how both Pennell and Sohrabi, whose non-fiction works would be considered found footage or appropriation films, point out the possibility of archival disruptions to their viewers. The BP archive is rendered porous, its meanings alterable. Pennell and Sohrabi’s archival disruptions, while of course not new, are crucial in penetrating, and thus disorienting, corporate and colonial archives. These films contribute to an archival turn that Stoler––and many others working critically with archives––have spoken about, defined by challenges to universal claims of truth made by archival collections. This turn characterizes archives, specifically colonial archives, as “both documents of exclusions and as monuments to particular configurations of power.”69 The works belonging to this turn demand that we answer how power and our knowledge-making systems submerge or marginalize other knowledges. They demand us to see how colonial archives construct an imaginary history, particularly for the state. For Pennell and Sohrabi, this approach is crucial in their attempt to either rescue marginalized and “buried histories”70 or allow “new discourses to emerge.”71 The filmmakers show us that an archive is never a totality, despite its attempts to calculatingly limit alternative narratives. What they point to is that archives are not static objects, but rather sites of production. Archives have justified and continue to justify colonial and imperial projects, while generating the visual and cultural registers states could suture national identity to. As Pennell would observe when investigating BP’s colonial documents:
“I know that these are only representations, illusions made from traces of silver on paper. But as I continue to search, my suspicions are confirmed that the imperial beings that rule over the globe are able to do so because in fashioning these paper doubles of the world, they conjure the power to reshape the original. The archive did not simply register, it produced the world it described, measured, and named.”72
However, archival films are often hindered not only in their inability to decontextualize the archive for their viewer, but also in their tendency to replicate archival conventions. This is largely due to the obvious fact that these films are limited to the archives themselves, and so cannot escape their logic. Of course, though both Pennell and Sohrabi’s films are supplemented by outside texts to situate or give context to the material, these films can never escape their object of critique, they can never escape the archive. This is the Janus face of archival spoiling, and the obvious limitation to Pennell’s desire for a sense of absolution. However, this is not to say that the active, perpetual undoing of imperialist aftermaths is ineffectual or unnecessary, but rather that their methods and compulsions should not be inscribed within one of colonialism’s most enduring academic conventions: the ethnographic impulse.
While deconstruction and the interjection of personal archives are but two methods for engaging with colonial scopic regimes, and given the limitations of only working with inherited materials and the propensity in recreating colonial logics, we might ask: What other methods might be used for much-needed intervention? Onyeka Igwe’s two films, a so-called archive (2020)73 and No Archive Can Restore You (2020),74 might provide an alternative approach to working with troubled archives. Igwe’s No Archive Can Restore You takes its name from Julietta Singh’s experimental novel. In it, Singh asks: “Is it too bold to say that the time of the archive has passed?”75 Igwe was employed, shortly before she made these films, cataloguing colonial ephemera in the British Empire and Commonwealth Museum collection. While all three filmmakers––Pennell, Sohrabi, and Igwe––deal with colonial archives, Igwe deliberately occludes its contents from view. In both films, Igwe’s camera surrounds but remains on the outside of the dilapidated Nigerian Film Unit archives in Lagos––which were part of Britain’s Colonial Film Unit––fractioning the colonial archive; that is, never allowing it to fully inhabit the frame. Detached voices from a colonial past are played throughout, placed over images of rotting film canisters and the excess of neglected archival material. In an attempt to spoil the archives, Igwe never recovers the British Empire from its vinegar syndrome––a continuous and irreversible chemical reaction caused by improper storage of film––but leaves these colonial archives to disintegrate in the wastebin of history. Though Pennell and Sohrabi both crucially attend to BP’s colonial archives and their own personal stakes in its violent history––Pennell as the daughter of colonialists and Sohrabi as an Iranian herself––I wonder if these films could have, instead of sustaining the continued maintenance of the archive’s preservation, participated in its ruin.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
BIOGRAPHY
Tatum Howey is a writer and doctoral candidate based in Los Angeles whose work circles around the political implications and potentials of risk. Both their writing and scholarship explore the de-individuation of risk, where risk is understood as the vulnerability of being in relation. Their research is currently centered on the artist Hamad Butt, a seropositive artist making toxic work at the height of the HIV/AIDS epidemic. Their work has been featured or is forthcoming in Wonder Press, The Capilano Review, Commo Magazine, and LUX.
Editors: Lior Shamriz, Neha Choksi