Cinema is a persuasive art for telling the story of the world. Through images and sound, has the potential to give visibility to the circumstances that have shaped the course of history. Yet history is never easy to speak of, it is elusive, built on invented traditions, as historian Eric Hobsbawm showed us. A text, a photograph or a film can only ever offer an partial approximation of the memory of another time. They are sites where narratives and discourses are contested. To speak of history is therefore also to speak of representation, of those imaginaries that are constructed for us, as subjects of the world, unable to step outside it or beyond our own cultural frameworks. It is within this porous and slippery space that Miranda Pennell's cinema situates itself, from the perspective of a imaginary that breaks with the constructivist tradition of history. By examining archives, scrutinizing what is—or is not—present in the image, and analyzing discourses and what they reveal, Pennell has forged an essential path over the last two decades. Her work belongs to a cinema of appropriation that reclaims the archive and makes it speak, as other contemporary works, even with different approaches, by Susana de Sousa Dias or Kamal Aljafari.

In the summer of 2024, one film caught our attention. It was called Man number 4, and it was directed by Miranda Pennell. We were all witnessing — and continue to witness — an ongoing genocide, recorded on mobile phones filming and photographing the terror unfolding in Gaza, Palestine. Powerless, we watched those images on our social media feeds. A widespread sense of shock often gave way to a kind of apathy. The images were beginning to lose their meaning. Their constant repetition seemed to draw on the logic of fiction. Without realising it, we began to feel detached, trapped within an endless stream of horrific images in which the victims kept multiplying. Pennell sensed this, and Man number 4 invites us to look again, beyond their endless reproduction in our feeds. It does so by using the very same technological form, exposing the abstraction of the digital image. The indexicality of analogue photography had been lost; it had become necessary to understand the mechanisms of this new digital indexicality. By examining, in a forensic, almost clinical manner, the colours of the pixels in an image found on the internet, Pennell restores a sense of humanity and, with it, the forms of violence produced by images themselves. Man number 4 is, quite literally, a desktop film. We watch an image being manipulated with a mouse. The cursor moves across it, zooms out, travels up, down and from side to side. We begin at maximum magnification. The colours hardly mean anything. They reveal only the limits and different areas of the image. As the image gradually becomes clearer, forms begin to emerge: dark areas, lighter ones, a military tank, human figures. The voice-over also helps us enter the image. It is a war zone. It is an image of violence. An image of subjugation and humiliation. The man number four is a doctor, and it is even possible to identify where the photograph was taken. Yet the image also possesses a striking aesthetic force: the glare of a spotlight illuminates a group of half-naked men, while another group remains behind them in darkness, piled together as though they were a heap of rubbish. The photograph appears carefully composed. There is a mise-en-scène, and Pennell's work lies precisely in exposing that construction. Images are not neutral. They carry within them the power to inflict violence on those they depict. This is an image of power, of contemporary colonialism, of an army's domination over a people. In that summer of 2024, Miranda Pennell gave simple and honest expression to what many of us were feeling: that the images from Gaza revealed the colonial violence exercised by the State of Israel against the Palestinian people, and that this violence was so overwhelming that a single photograph could contain the brutality of what was taking place. In many ways, the method of Man number 4 is the same method Pennell has patiently developed throughout her work: a forensic investigation of the colonial past through the archive and everything it conceals.

The first phase of Pennell's filmography is, however, distinctive because, unlike her later archive-based work, it is composed of images she filmed herself. It is important to note that, even at this stage, these films are concerned with gestures and with the performances of bodies within the frame — something that would later become essential to her forensic exploration of archival images, where it is the human body that most insistently draws the filmmaker's gaze. These early films — which also reflect Pennell's background in dance — are edited as a choreography of the real. They are performative and, in that sense, less narrative, although they are not strictly "documentary" either. You Made Me Love You (2005) is particularly revealing in this respect. Contrary to the usual "grammar" of cinema, it is not the camera that follows the human body; rather, it is the dancers who attempt to follow the unpredictability of the lateral movement proposed by Pennell. This is an important subversion, not least because the dancers look directly at the viewer, establishing a relationship of constant (dis)trust, as though this three-minute "exercise" already contained the essence of the filmmaker's future work: the relationship between the one who looks and the one who is looked at (which is, after all, the fundamental relationship of cinema and of its own "contract", the suture established through cinematic enunciation). Films such as Human Radio (2001), Magnetic North (2003), Tattoo (2001) and Fisticuffs (2004) develop crucial aspects of cinematic language — sound, shifts in scale, and movement within the frame — almost as if testing the possibilities of the moving image, its narrative and discursive potential in relation to reality, always from a performative perspective.

With Why Colonel Bunny Was Killed (2010), Miranda Pennell transforms her object of study, or rather, shifts her methodological approach to cinema. As we have seen, her work has always been united by an interest in the human body and its cinematic potential. Here, however, the focus turns to the archive, primarily photographic, revealing the relations of colonial power embedded in some of the key geographies of the twentieth century — the century that witnessed the emergence of photography and cinema as methods for cataloguing the Other. Pennell thus assumes the role of an archaeologist, excavating the past from the official archives of colonial regimes. The film draws on the written memoirs of a missionary doctor (Dr T. L. Pennell) in Afghanistan and on photographs of the North-West Frontier of British India preserved in several British archives. By bringing together different sources, and through its editing of the photographs — lingering on specific details of the frame through close-ups — the essay film establishes a series of contrasts that gradually uncover the colonial discourse embedded both in the images and in the doctor's words. It is particularly significant that natural landscapes occupy such a dominant place within the frame, reinforcing the methods of British colonial control. This is especially evident in the clothing worn by both colonisers and indigenous people, but also in the way Pennell uses sound, alternating abrupt cuts with moments that emphasise the apparent familiarity of natural sounds. The film underscores both cultural difference and colonial arrogance, nowhere more clearly than in a dialogue between the doctor and a mullah about the sun and the changing seasons, exposing the distance between their understandings of the natural world and revealing the scientific hubris of colonialism. The film is especially revealing in its photographs of people, particularly men, where the smallest details — standing rather than sitting — reinforce colonial prejudice. Pennell intensifies the film's forensic dimension when she lingers on a photograph captioned “Where Col. Bunny was killed”. It is here that the appearance of coexistence is shattered, and the film becomes an exposition of war and conflict. Once again, the natural landscape stands as a witness to this violence, and to the ruins that will outlive destruction. Towards the end of the film, Pennell shows how the indigenous people occasionally appear only at the edges of the frame, while settler families or colonial soldiers occupy its centre. Everything is in order as long as everything remains “in its proper place”.

Pennell's project expands in the films that follow, firmly rooted in the archive, its photographs, and what they reveal about a troubled past. The Host (2016), Strange Object (2020) and Trouble (2023) offer oblique perspectives on different aspects of colonialism and the oppression of colonised peoples, particularly in the Middle East. These films also introduce Miranda's own voice, in a necessary gesture that brings her forensic inquiries into the process of uncovering the relations of power these images continue to produce decades later. In this respect, The Host occupies a unique place within her filmography, as it begins from the filmmaker's own family history. While investigating the history of British Petroleum in Iran, the film also investigates the involvement of Pennell's parents, as well as her own appearance in the archive as a child. At times, it takes on the qualities of a family album, complicating the range of sources from which Pennell reconstructs this history, alongside institutional archives. In many ways, The Host is also a film about Miranda's family and personal history — her name appears on boxes and drawings — and, in that sense, there is a tenderness to these intimate stories that is impossible to escape. The narrative begins by demonstrating the central importance of BP to Iran's modern history — and indeed to many of its present-day consequences. Once again, oil emerges as a curse. As a colonised country, Iran was denied Britain treated Iran as a colony and denied its people control over Iran's oil reserves, and, whenever it attempted to reclaim them, it faced international hostility, culminating in the overthrow of a government committed to nationalising the country's oil industry. From this fraught history, Pennell shows how the company documented its own structures of power not only through photography but also through maps, technical drawings and other artefacts. It is a striking example of the authority of colonial science over a territory regarded as untapped, whose resources existed to be extracted. The film is particularly compelling in the way these photographs constantly direct their gaze towards the colonial Other — those who were already there, and whose ways of life were transformed in the service of an extractive project. Pennell also reveals how family lives became entangled in this geopolitical history. Photographs of her parents, together with sketches of the house where they lived in Iran, become traces of this everyday colonialism. The Host includes a remarkable photograph of the oil complex in Iran. At first glance, it resembles a ghost town. Then, looking more closely, faint human figures begin to emerge. They are the traces of those who kept this colonial machine running.

Strange Object and Trouble begin from the same line of enquiry: the ways in which aerial bombing made colonial domination even more devastating. The photographs taken from military aircraft are deeply unsettling, articulating a telescopic form of power whose precision and force seem unstoppable. Pennell's voice-over makes this explicit, creating an intriguing relationship between the filmmaker's presence in the physical archive, looking at the photographs, and what those images reveal about the terror they record. In Strange Object, she turns to one of the earliest experiments in aerial photography and airborne military operations, carried out by the British ‘Z Unit’ in 1920. Although the geographical setting of this episode remains unspecified until the end credits, Pennell draws on the account of a Somali leader who put on his finest clothes to welcome these "angels" descending from the sky. At that moment, one of the deadliest machines of war was being invented — one that would go on to spread destruction indiscriminately. Trouble is perhaps Pennell's most personal film, as the filmmaker's own presence in the process of uncovering the archive becomes central to its method. Produced during the COVID-19 lockdown, the project undergoes a material transformation: photographs are printed and pinned to the walls; the sounds of the house and the street become part of its fabric. The convergence of past and present becomes so powerful that Pennell turns her archival cinema — already deeply engaged with our historical present — into a machine of images capable of encompassing every temporal layer of history. Trouble also constructs a remarkably inventive sonic architecture, introducing a Gothic dimension that resonates with the perspective on historical ‘haunting’ which the film develops.

Miranda Pennell's films are built from the fragments of the West's colonial history. They are powerful forensic readings into our own colonial crimes. They are, in that sense, stories of violence. As Trouble puts it: “Some ruins are sites of romance and imagination – and some ruins are sites of butchery and forgetting.” Looking across this body of work — from one film to the next and within each individual film — the power of these images lies in the performance of the past. And this performance is built upon the fictions of our national histories, creating mechanisms for analysing and resisting power. Stories of violence that rhyme with the stories of our present.