Dr Sophie Everest
Sophie Everest (she/her) is a documentary filmmaker and Senior Lecturer in Film Practice at the University of Manchester. Her research focuses on film as a method for investigating collection histories, particularly in relation to colonial legacies, underrepresented communities, and the institutional production of knowledge. She leads practice-based projects that combine cross-archival research with creative documentary to generate new responses to heritage collections. She also co-runs Belle Vue Productions, an independent production company developing collaborative films with cultural organisations and community partners.
Re-assembling the Colonial Field:
Amateur film archives, museum natural history, and the production of knowledge
The amateur film reels, taxidermy specimens and hand-written diaries produced by the aristocrat and colonial landowner Maurice Egerton during a hunting trip in Sudan in the late 1920s are now dispersed across several collections-based institutions, including Manchester Museum, Cheshire Archives and Local Studies, and the North West Film Archive. This paper gathers these materials back together for the first time since their shared moment of production to view them as a multi-media record of a single colonial encounter. In doing so, it asks what new forms of knowledge might emerge when we range across institutional boundaries to assemble histories from dispersed archival traces.
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Working across museum objects, written records, and amateur film reveals connections that remain invisible within any single collection. In particular, it brings into view the central role of Sudanese hunters whose knowledge, skill, and labour underpinned both the hunting expedition and the production of the resulting natural history collections and film images. Their presence is fragmentary within each archive, but collectively these traces challenge assumptions about unilateral colonial authority in the field, suggesting a more negotiated and interdependent set of power relations.
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This approach suggests that archival gaps are not simply absences but structured silences inherent in processes of making and produced by institutional practices of collection, documentation, and interpretation. Amateur film archives from the early decades of film are often marginalised for their historical indeterminacy and unreliability, yet take up considerable space in our national and regional film collections. Here I suggest that when read alongside other kinds of objects and documents acquired during the colonial project of ‘collecting and picturing’ (Ryan: 1998) these film objects can draw new attention to underacknowledged labour and disrupt institutional accounts of provenance.
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By reconnecting dispersed materials in this way, this paper a) contributes to broader histories and theories that destabilise archives as sites of coherent knowledge and b) demonstrates how colonial histories of cinema are distributed across heterogeneous collections. Ranging the gaps across these sites not only has the potential to recover marginalised actors but also disrupts expectations of one-way colonial power, opening space for alternative, more complex accounts of how knowledge, images, and collections have been produced. More broadly, it proposes cross-archival work as a generative methodology, capable of producing new research questions and enabling creative interventions that respond to absence, fragmentation, uncertainty and contradiction within the colonial archive.