For Miranda Pennell, history and the present exist on the same plane: each helps us understand the other. The filmmaker and visual artist is deeply committed to major causes and firmly held beliefs. A significant part of her work explores European colonialism—particularly British and Dutch colonialism—through the excavation and recontextualisation of archival materials. She also addresses other pressing political issues, including Palestine.
Her films have won awards at major festivals such as the Berlinale, FIDMarseille, the Viennale, IDFA and the International Film Festival Rotterdam, while her work is also shown in galleries and exhibitions. Wild at Heart visited Miranda Pennell’s exhibition, H Is for History, N Is for Now, at Solar Gallery during Curtas Vila do Conde, where we interviewed the British artist.
Wild at Heart: History and Now may seem contradictory to many people. I know that, for you, they are not. Why do you bring these apparently distant things together in the same space?
Miranda Pennell: I am interested in active history. We have to ask what history is for, what it does and what we want from it. For me, history is valuable insofar as it speaks to us in the present and perhaps disturbs the present. These are the kinds of histories that remain alive and provide useful tools for thinking about the world today.
That relates to my role as a filmmaker, researcher or historian. Historians have traditionally specialised in particular periods, as though eras were discrete and separated from one another. But whenever I research a period—recently, for example, I have been looking at Dutch colonialism in Indonesia, in the former Dutch East Indies—I find that it is always slippery. Policies and regimes are constantly changing, adopting different forms of language, while histories are continually being contested. These forces are acting upon societies and regimes all the time; everything is in a constant state of flux.
This contradicts the idea of history, or colonialism, as a single, static object. When I make films, I look at images from the past while asking: Why look at this? What is its relevance? What is the point?
Film is a temporal medium and, as such, can offer a sensation or an experience of time. Literature can do this too. I find it exciting to use film to destabilise certainties about the progress of time and about the relationship between past, present and future.
We often say that history is written by the winners. Do you believe cinema can provide some form of justice?
History is written by many people and is constantly being contested. There are professional historians and academics, but also politicians, activists, civil-society groups, students and artists. All of these people are continually acting upon, shaping and fighting over history, trying to determine how the future will look back on the present moment.
I would like cinema to open up a space for justice. I do not know whether cinema itself can deliver justice, but it can create a space in which all of us can discuss what justice might look like. I am wary of overstating the power of individual artists, filmmakers or films.
We know that certain films can emerge at a particular moment, trigger broad social debate and bring about change. In general, however, I see myself as part of a constellation of voices attempting to negotiate the present moment.
For me, history is valuable insofar as it speaks to us in the present and perhaps disturbs the present. These are the kinds of histories that remain alive and provide useful tools for thinking about the world today.
In your case, can working with archives also be a way of preserving memory? There are stories within them that may be lost if we do not bring them to light.
Most of the archival records I work with are actually testimonies produced by the powerful, and by perpetrators, if we want to use that word. They are often propaganda; that was the historical function of those images, and it continues to shape how they operate in the present. I therefore have to do something with them that encourages the viewer to look at them critically.
In that sense, my work is somewhat different from that of people who foreground the testimonies of the oppressed and make those voices heard. I often do not have access to such testimonies. I therefore find it important, at particular moments in the narrative, to create a space in which the viewer can recognise the presence of another experience: that of the person or culture being photographed.
Sometimes I use fiction or speculation to create room for an imagined testimony to which neither I nor, in all probability, the viewer has access. My position differs from that of filmmakers who can speak from within a colonised culture or who are able to seek out and record testimonies directly.
How do you choose your subjects? Does an idea usually come to you first, or do you research extensively until you discover the subject you want to explore?
I have been primarily interested in British colonial history. That interest began when I discovered stories of colonialism among my own ancestors. I am always shocked by how little I know before I begin researching. Once I do the research, I feel compelled to do something with what I find.
For my most recent film, A Person of the Forest, I was commissioned by the Eye Filmmuseum to work with its colonial archive. That is how I came to engage with that particular collection. The Sumatra plantations represented in the material were owned by British, Dutch, French, Belgian and American interests, so all of them were implicated.
I usually begin with the material. I encounter an image or a series of images and feel that I have to do something with it, because it speaks to me.
The film I made before that began with an image from Gaza. I was deeply distressed by the images I was seeing on social media and felt quite paralysed by this extraordinary phenomenon of so many people witnessing so many images of atrocity and cruelty.
I normally work with a large number of images, particularly still photographs. I spend a great deal of time with them, trying to understand how they connect or how I might connect them. This project was unusual because I felt I had to take a single image, speak to it and slow down the entire process of looking. I wanted to spend time with one image. I like the idea of slowing down the rate at which we look and thinking carefully about what happens when we look at an image, especially in the age of social media.
You mentioned discovering colonial histories among your own ancestors. Portugal confronts similar questions and, in a sense, we are all in the same boat. Do you think Europeans should experience a greater sense of collective guilt?
No. I think it is very important not to focus on guilt or shame, but rather on responsibility and shared histories. I have realised how little I knew. I have Dutch friends who were astonished by what they saw in the film I made using material from Sumatra.
That lack of knowledge is a real problem. If we are to have shared futures, we need some common understanding of what happened in the past. Guilt and shame are unhelpful, unproductive emotions; it is very difficult to act from them. The question is not how guilty we should feel, but what we can do.
I hope these conversations can be empowering and help us think about how to move forward together… if that does not sound too idealistic.
You have explained how you select your subjects and materials. What seems more difficult to describe is how you find the form. Your use of archival material can be very bold and artistically unexpected. How do you decide not only what to say, but how to say it? And do you feel a particular responsibility when working with such sensitive material?
When I was working on Strange Objects, for example, I encountered a series of photographs that I found incredibly beautiful. I then realised that they depicted destruction: the aerial bombing of a beautiful piece of architecture. The photographs dated from 1920.
I read a book on the history of aerial bombing, and it made me deeply upset and angry to understand that history: the idea of controlling the world from the skies. From the outset, its intention was genocidal, aimed at destroying the means of life.
My problem is that, after carrying out the research, I have these images and an enormous amount that could be said about those particular photographs, that narrative and that bombing campaign. There are many possible and compelling stories. I have to ask myself: What is the one essential thing I want to convey? I want people to understand, in their gut, what it took me an entire book to comprehend.
There is something important about communicating through the gut. I cannot cover a film in words. I do not want to lecture the audience or make them feel that they are being lectured. So how can I convey, from my gut to yours, a deep understanding of the fundamental dynamic at work—whether the subject is aerial bombing or the genocide in Gaza? I want viewers not merely to grasp complicated, abstract concepts, but to feel and understand them.
I like the idea of slowing down the rate at which we look and thinking carefully about what happens when we look at an image, especially in the age of social media.
That concerns impulse more than form. Because it is impossible to tell everything, I have to identify the most important feeling or understanding. Sometimes that takes the form of a metaphor. In researching the Sumatra plantations, I read academic writing that uses metaphors: the plantation as a gigantic machine or as a human laboratory in which gender and racial relations are tested. I remember those images. Scholars face a problem similar to mine: after conducting their research, they have to communicate it, and they often find striking imagery through which to convey these histories and concepts.
In terms of form, I spend a great deal of time looking at still and moving images, watching them repeatedly. I try to convey what an image does to me and how it affects me. Sometimes that means emphasising a particular detail; at other times, I use sound to direct the viewer’s attention.
My guide is what the images do to me and how I feel about them. I then try to recreate, or almost restage, that experience for another viewer. You may come to share my feeling about an image, or see what I see within it. Looking at images is complicated; a great deal is happening within them. By taking you through one detail and then another, I am guiding you through the image by means of my own experience of looking.
Do you see yourself primarily as a filmmaker or as a visual artist… or does that distinction not matter?
I do not think it matters. In some ways, it depends on whom I am speaking to. I am quite committed to single-screen films and to the cinematic experience.
At the same time, I find it very exciting to work with an exhibition space and to think about how viewers move through it, encountering a series of different images or films. Yet mine is fundamentally a filmmaking practice: I work extensively with editing and framing, although those are, of course, artistic practices too.
When you make your films, do you imagine them being screened in a cinema?
Yes, I do. My latest film, A Person of the Forest, was made for an exhibition at the Eye Filmmuseum, but I feel marginal to both cinema and the visual arts. Many people probably feel the same way. I am outside the mainstream of both industries and markets.
Nevertheless, because of the way I work with sound and image, I want a dark space and I want the sound to be properly heard. I am sure visual artists want that too.
There is nevertheless an important difference. In a gallery, visitors may enter halfway through the film; they have to be fortunate to arrive at the beginning.
I would not be surprised if many people who saw my film at the Eye Filmmuseum entered halfway through and stayed for three minutes out of its total running time of 34 minutes. They can do that in that space. It is a large exhibition containing a great deal of work. A solo exhibition might be slightly different.
My films are structured with a beginning, a middle and an end. I think it is fine to enter halfway through, watch the ending and then stay to see the beginning. But I definitely construct them sequentially. In that sense, I am very much a filmmaker: the way information is revealed over the course of a film is extremely important to my practice.
