The Eye Filmmuseum in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, holds a collection of around 2,000 colonial-era films. They show scenes from former Dutch colonies, including Indonesia and Suriname. Many of these films are problematic because of what they show… and what they leave out. That is why Eye invited eleven artists to create new video works based on footage from these colonial archives. The project resulted in an exhibition titled Eye(s) Open: New Perspectives on Colonial Film Heritage consisting of ten works that engage critically and creatively with the archival images.

One of the most striking contributions came from the London-based artist and filmmaker Miranda Pennell. She repurposes propaganda films about a plantation in Sumatra into a haunting indictment of colonial exploitation. One could even call it haunted, because Pennell gives the video an unexpected narrator. She channels the thoughts of a long-dead orangutan that was taken to the Netherlands for display in a zoo. After its premature demise, the animal ended up stuffed in the archives of a museum in Amsterdam. The great ape refers to itself as a person – a nod to the Malay origin of the word orangutan, meaning “person of the forest”, which also inspired the video’s title. The brilliant soundtrack by composer Simon Fisher Turner, a frequent collaborator of Derek Jarman, adds another ghostly layer to the film. (At the top of this page is an excerpt from the 34-minute video. Below it is the trailer featured on Pennell’s website).

Pennell’s film employs several strategies that are typical of the audiovisual essay. It begins by appropriating existing images, an especially apt choice given its subject and theme. Pennell extracts footage from Eye’s archive to critique the extraction of natural resources that lay at the heart of the colonial project. Several sequences also adopt the supercut format. One montage, for instance, strings together a series of “The End” title cards.

But Pennell goes a step further. New footage shot in the zoological museum’s archives (an eerie repository of dead animals) serves as a visual echo of the historical images of the transport ship’s crowded cargo hold. Her edit unfolds almost like a poem or a song: certain observations return like a recurring refrain. Yet the film’s most powerful and inventive element is its performative voice-over. Pennell lends her own voice to the dead orangutan, giving added weight to its non-human point of view. That ghostly narration gives the film not only a non-anthropocentric perspective, but also a precolonial one: the voice of nature before it was silenced by colonisation.