Reflecting on Still/Moving: The Folds within Photography and Cinema

Sabeena Gadihoke

An extract from the essay featured in Projects / Processes Vol. 1 (HarperCollins India, 2019) which discusses a film programme curated by Sabeena Gadihoke and showcased at Serendipity Arts Festival 2018. 

Comprising of only still images, text and an extremely innovative sound track, The Host (2015), opens with the discovery of a notebook containing the hand-written letters of a young petroleum-geologist Christian O’Brien, who was sent to Iran as an employee of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (later British Petroleum or BP) in the 1930s. The book with a hand-written inscription was gifted by O’Brien’s wife Joy to the filmmaker’s mother. This leads Miranda Pennell to the official archives of the company where she rummages through photographs of the oil excavation in the Abadan refinery. Her search prompts her to meet the ninety-year-old Joy. The latter’s belief that the past, present and future exists along the same plane is serendipitous. This constructs the central premise of Pennell’s archaeological approach in the film as she negotiates the present of still artefacts through a return to the past while referencing the future of the same. For instance, we see sketches of the layout of the O’Brien household in Tehran from 1936. Pennell’s father, a friend of the O’Briens and an employee of the company lived in this house as well, and the future would witness the birth of the filmmaker here. The film is narrated through a whimsical first-person voice-over that constantly moves between the present time featuring Pennell in the BP archives, her life to come as a baby who would grow up in the same house in Tehran and the violent past of a colonial encounter. Kuhn suggests that memory work could bridge the gap between inner and outer worlds, demonstrating that inner worlds can be political and outer worlds need not be examined at the cost of the psyche—this is articulated powerfully in The Host. Looking through casual holiday photographs of her parents and their friends sightseeing, Pennell ironically comments: “Everyone loves a ruin. And everyone loves the ancient past instead of the recent past.” Her words make reference to a formative event in the recent past that would have implications for the history of Iran: the coup d’état that removed popularly elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh in 1953. This was initiated by British and American interests opposed to his bold initiative to nationalise oil. Interrogating the ethnographic gaze characteristic of other photographs of “natives” in the archive, Pennell constantly draws attention to ways in which their hosts—the Iranian people in this case—were marginalised and categorised as inferior. As employees of BP, her parents and their friends would participate in these discourses of colonisation.

*To read the essay in its entirety, kindly visit the Amazon link to purchase this, as well as other volumes focused on research and writing around Serendipity Arts Festival.