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List of contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Marina Dahlquist and Patrick Vonderau
Oil Rhetoric
Chapter 1: Oil Media Archives
Mona Damluji
Chapter 2: “All the Earmarks of Propaganda”: Teapot Dome, The World Struggle for Oil, and Defining Corporate Rhetoric
Jeremy Groskopf
Chapter 3: Oil Aesthetics: BP, Greenpark Productions, and the Projection of Prestige
Patrick Russell and Steve Foxon
Advertisements and Sponsorship
Chapter 4: On the Road with Mickey and Donald: Walt Disney, Standard Oil and the Golden Gate International Exposition of 1939
Susan Ohmer
Chapter 5: Petroleum and Hollywood Stardom: Making Way for Oil Consumption through Visual Culture
Marina Dahlquist
Chapter 6: The American Petroleum Institute: Sponsored Motion Pictures in the Service of Public Relations
Gregory A. Waller
Chapter 7: Industrial Film and the Politics of Visibility
Brian R. Jacobson
Transformation of Oil Politics
Chapter 8: “In India's Life and Part of It:” Film and Visual Publicity at Burmah-Shell from the 1920s to the 1950s
Ravi Vasudevan
Chapter 9: Creating Partners in Progress: Shell Communicating Oil during Nigeria’s Independence
Rudmer Canjels
Chapter 10: “Fuelling Apartheid:” Documentary Film in the Service of Apartheid
Jacqueline Maingard
Selected Bibliography
Index
About the author
Marina Dahlquist is a Professor of Cinema Studies at the Department for Media Studies at Stockholm University, Sweden. Her research interests include historical reception studies, educational and industrial films, as well as issues of globalization. She recently published The Institutionalization of Educational Cinema: Educational Cinemas in North America and Europe in the 1910s and 1920s (eds Marina Dahlquist & Joel Frykholm, 2019), Exporting Perilous Pauline: Pearl White and the Serial Film Craze (2013) and is a recipient of a research grant from Riksbankens Jubileumsfond (The Swedish Foundation for Humanities and Social Sciences)
(2020-2023) with the project Modern Media and the Oil Industry.
Patrick Vonderau is a Professor of Media and Communication Studies at the University of Halle, Germany.
Summary
Petrocinema presents a collection of essays concerning the close relationship between the oil industry and modern media—especially film. Since the early 1920s, oil extracting companies such as Standard Oil, Royal Dutch/Shell, ConocoPhillips, or Statoil have been producing and circulating moving images for various purposes including research and training, safety, process observation, or promotion. Such industrial and sponsored films include documentaries, educationals, and commercials that formed part of a larger cultural project to transform the image of oil exploitation, creating media interfaces that would allow corporations to coordinate their goals with broader cultural and societal concerns. Falling outside of the domain of conventional cinema, such films firmly belong to an emerging canon of sponsored and educational film and media that has developed over the past decade. Contributing to this burgeoning field of sponsored and educational film scholarship, chapters in this book bear on the intersecting cultural histories of oil extraction and media history by looking closely at moving image imaginaries of the oil industry, from the earliest origins or “spills” in the 20th century to today’s post industrial “petromelancholia.”
Foreword
Explores the direct relation of cinema to the history of petroleum extraction through the lens of sponsored film.
Additional text
This timely volume offers a groundbreaking exploration of the relationship between oil, the oil industry, and cinema, showing how, across a range of places and times, petroleum and the business of its extraction have structured the moving image—and, in turn, culture, politics, and everyday life. Petrocinema is an invaluable contribution to sponsored and nonfiction media studies, industrial history, and the energy humanities alike.
