Research project Modern Media and the Oil Industry
This project analyzes how films, in their respective social and cultural contexts, have enacted a form of micropolitics that worked towards the goal of naturalizing the consumption of oil.
Petrocinema Sponsored Film and the Oil Industry
While radio, television, and especially film have often been seen as formative for the advent and experience of modernity, their close relationship to the oil industry tends to be overlooked. The aim of this project is to re-write the history of 20th century media culture through the lens of petroleum extraction. Modern imaginaries have been shaped by oil as both a form of energy and a product since the early 20th century as oil became the condition for mobility and travel, modern urban living standards, and a host of new products. Beyond films produced by oil extraction companies themselves, a host of other films transgressing boundaries of genres, periods, and nations, depicts oil from different perspectives. This project analyzes how films, in their respective social and cultural contexts, have enacted a form of micropolitics that worked towards the goal of naturalizing the consumption of oil.
Project description
While radio, television, and especially film have often been seen as formative for the advent and experience of modernity, their close relationship to the oil industry tends to be overlooked. The aim of this project is to show that the advent of global media culture and petroleum extraction are historically linked and intertwined. Modern imaginaries have been shaped by oil as both a form of energy and a product since the early 20th century. Oil companies, spearheaded by Standard Oil as one of the world’s first and largest multinational corporations, then triggered a massive social and cultural change. Petroleum extraction prompted and accelerated the creation of new infrastructures around the globe. Oil was the condition for mobility and travel, modern urban living standards, and a host of new products including plastic, fabrics, pharmaceuticals – and the film strip. While Sweden and other European countries were not oil producing themselves, petroleum became a key resource of Western life and the basis of ‘Americanizing’ many Western and even non-Western cultures. Oil-based riches, poverty, and industrial divisions of labor were thematized widely in media from the novel to the silver screen. The possibilities seemed endless as oil became the pinnacle for what the conception of modernity could be about and speculations about its future possibilities appeared inexhaustible. Visual culture was constantly employed in campaigns to promote social and technical change. Moving pictures—by many considered modernity’s Leitmedium—and cinema culture were central to envisioning and shaping this future. In Sweden, for instance, petroleum-driven modernity became a key foundation of folkhemmet widely promoted in public service ads, industry promotion and consumer good advertisements, election films, and so-called husmors filmer, a form of infomercial produced 1952-75 which was directed at female audiences.
As this future has passed, a post-petroleum view on the interlinkage of oil and media in the making of modernity is overdue. Since the 1970s, eco-criticism has proliferated in the humanities, but petroleum extraction has not been studied in relation to global media culture. In filling this gap, our project follows an interdisciplinary approach in asking questions such as: How have oil and moving images been linked in industrial, material, aesthetic, and social terms? What was the historical role of film in informing, educating, or persuading mass audiences about this key energy resource, and what lesson does this history teach us about our present future’s ideas of sustainability and energy? How did the oil industry use moving images to organize petroleum extraction and to promote modernization?
Project members
Project managers
Marina L. Dahlquist
Professor i filmvetenskap
Members
Patrick Vonderau
Professor
