Petrocinema: Sponsored Film and the Oil Industry 9781501354137, 9781501354168, 9781501354151

Table of contents :
Title Page
Copyright Page
Contents
Figures
Acknowledgments
Introduction
A.R.T., or a Heuristics for Analysis
About the Chapters
Notes
Part 1: Oil Rhetoric
Chapter 1: Oil Media Archives
Navigating Oil Archives
Archiving Oil Media
The Oil Media Archive and Its Limits
Conclusion: Oil Histories and Energy Futures
Notes
Chapter 2: “All the Earmarks of Propaganda”: Teapot Dome, The World Struggle for Oil, and Defining Corporate Rhetoric
Of Oil, the Interior, and Teapot Dome
Industrial/Educational Films Inside and Outside of the Government
Production and Release Controversy Over The World Struggle for Oil
Conclusion
Notes
Chapter 3: Shell-BP: A Dialogue
Prologue: Hidden Power
Act One: Distant Neighbors
Act Two: Cast in a New Mold
Epilogue: Power in Perspective
Notes
Part 2: Advertisements and Sponsorship
Chapter 4: On the Road with Mickey and Donald: Walt Disney, Standard Oil, and the Golden Gate International Exposition of 1939
“A Literature and a Litigation”
“The Great West Is Now in Readiness”
“Devoted Workers and Millions of Friends”: Collaborating with Disney
The Standard Parade of 1939
“Let’s Make Some Advertisements”
The Travel Tykes “See Standard First”
The Race to Treasure Island
“An Exotic Chow-Chow”
Notes
Chapter 5: Petroleum and Hollywood Stardom: Making Way for Oil Consumption through Visual Culture
Petroculture and the Restless Age
Hollywood Glamour and Oil Marketing
Conclusion
Notes
Chapter 6: The American Petroleum Institute: Sponsored Motion Pictures in the Service of Public Relations
The American Petroleum Institute and the US Bureau of Mines
Oil for Victory
The Oil Industry Information Committee: Oil Progress Week
The Last Ten Feet
Style and Genre in the Public Relations Film
Conclusion
Notes
Chapter 7: Industrial Film and the Politics of Visibility in the Early Years of North Sea Oil
French Petrocinema
Mythmaking on the High Seas
Filming Frigg
Media Strategy and the Image of Risk
Notes
Part 3: 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
Oil in South Asia
Promoting Consumption: Economies, Aesthetics, Archives
Print Publicity
Film Publicity
Sponsored Film and Film Companies
The Affective Fforce of Objects: Burmah-Shell’s Tins
Notes
Chapter 9: Creating Partners in Progress: Shell Communicating Oil during Nigeria’s Independence
The Shell Film Unit
Filming Oil
Working for the Oil Industry
Voices and Music
Versions and Release
Conclusion
Notes
Chapter 10: “Fueling Apartheid”: Documentary Film in the Service of Apartheid
Production Contexts
South Africa’s Life Line and the Threat of Economic Sanctions
The Film
“On Course” with Caltex
Conclusion
Acknowledgments
Notes
Contributors
Index

Citation preview

Petrocinema

ii

Petrocinema Sponsored Film and the Oil Industry

EDITED BY MARINA DAHLQUIST AND PATRICK VONDERAU

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Inc 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in the United States of America 2021 Volume Editor’s Part of the Work © Marina Dahlquist and Patrick Vonderau Each chapter © of Contributors For legal purposes the Acknowledgments on pp. ix and 245 constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design: Namkwan Cho All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Inc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Dahlquist, Marina, editor. | Vonderau, Patrick, editor. Title: Petrocinema : sponsored film and the oil industry / edited by Marina Dahlquist and Patrick Vonderau. Description: New York : Bloomsbury Academic, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2020034876 | ISBN 9781501354137 (hardback) | ISBN 9781501354144 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: Petroleum industry and trade in motion pictures. | Sponsored films–History and criticism. Classification: LCC PN1995.9.P39 P48 2021 | DDC 791.43–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn​.loc​.gov​/2020034876

ISBN HB: 978-1-5013-5413-7 ePub: 978-1-5013-5414-4 ePDF: 978-1-5013-5415-1 Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India To find out more about our authors and books visit www​.bloomsbury​.com and sign up for our newsletters.

Contents List of Figures  vii Acknowledgments ix

Introduction  Marina Dahlquist and Patrick Vonderau  1

PART ONE Oil Rhetoric   13 1 Oil Media Archives  Mona Damluji  15 2 “All the Earmarks of Propaganda”: Teapot Dome,

The World Struggle for Oil, and Defining Corporate Rhetoric  Jeremy Groskopf  33 3 Shell-BP: A Dialogue  Patrick Russell and Steven Foxon  51

PART TWO Advertisements and Sponsorship   79 4 On the Road with Mickey and Donald: Walt Disney, Standard

Oil, and the Golden Gate International Exposition of 1939  Susan Ohmer  81 5 Petroleum and Hollywood Stardom: Making Way for Oil Consumption through Visual Culture  Marina Dahlquist  117 6 The American Petroleum Institute: Sponsored Motion Pictures in the Service of Public Relations  Gregory A. Waller  136 7 Industrial Film and the Politics of Visibility in the Early Years of North Sea Oil  Brian R. Jacobson  162

vi CONTENTS

PART THREE Transformation of Oil Politics   181   8 “In India’s Life and Part of It”: Film and Visual Publicity at Burmah-Shell from the 1920s to the 1950s  Ravi Vasudevan  183   9 Creating Partners in Progress: Shell Communicating Oil during Nigeria’s Independence  Rudmer Canjels  208 10 “Fueling Apartheid”: Documentary Film in the Service of Apartheid  Jacqueline Maingard  225 List of Contributors  245 Index  248

Figures 1.1 Home landing page of the BP Video Library website  22 1.2 Liberate Tate’s art performance of “Human Cost” was staged in the Duveen Gallery, Tate Britain, in April 2011 (one year after the start of the BP Gulf of Mexico disaster) to shame the corporation, draw attention to the cultural establishment’s complicity, and demand the Tate to put an end to BP sponsorship  24 1.3 BP Video Library webpage featuring the Persian Story  26 3.1 Innovative and ominous close cinematography from The Rival World (1955), the Shell Film Unit’s first “blockbuster” production  61 3.2 UK cinema lobby card for BP’s leisurely Oscar-winning short Giuseppina (1959)  63 3.3 Fragile nature, encroaching industry: a typically strong ­ composition from The Shadow of Progress (1970), BP’s ­ eminently debatable intervention into the emerging ­ environmental debate  67 4.1 Cover, Standard Oil Bulletin, April 1939. In this ­image, childhood and Disney merge to become the public face of Standard Oil Company of California  91 4.2 “Made for Punishment” ads drew analogies ­between the motor oil’s qualities and Disney characters’ ­personalities  95 4.3 Grumpy and the “grabby buttercup.” The ­distinctive personalities of the seven dwarfs enliven ­encounters with unruly nature  99 4.4 Eastern seaboard section of the “Race to ­Treasure Island” map. This pictorial map enabled readers to track the progress of the “Race to Treasure Island” and highlighted historic sites and typical features of each state  104 5.1 Mobiloil Movie Smooth Performance, published in the ­Saturday Evening Post, January 13, 1934  118 5.2 Mobiloil Movie Blizzards Be Darned, published in the Saturday Evening Post, January 27, 1934  120 6.1 Cover, Business Screen 7.14 (1953) special issue: The Oil Industry and the Screen  137 6.2 Three of the films sponsored by Oil Industry Information Committee, initially released as part of the annual Oil Progress Week  152

viii FIGURES

 7.1 Total—Solutions techniques pour stopper la fuite de gaz sur ­Elgin / Total—Technical Solutions to Stop the Gas Leak on Elgin 12 April, 2012  163  7.2 L’Ile d’Acier advertisement (c. 1967)  168   7.3 Opening title sequence of Les Sept Iles de Frigg (1978). Frame enlargements   172  7.4 Les Sept Iles de Frigg (1978). Frame enlargement  173   7.5 Animations by Arcady for Les Sept Iles de Frigg (1978). Frame enlargements  174   8.1 Kerosene ad  189   8.2 Tins for India  194   8.3 Kerosene tins on the river  201   8.4 Postcard: Oil in the backwaters  202   8.5 Brochure: peasant household and refinery  203  8.6 Pather Panchali tremor of modernity  204   9.1 An advertisement for the Shell Film Library and its films. The library contained over 120 films in 1956. Science and Film, June 1956, 2  210   9.2 Shell-BP’s “cinerovers” would tour various districts and regions of Nigeria with a 16 mm projector, a generator, speakers, and a collapsible screen on the roof. “More Requests for Films,” Shell-BP Bulletin, May 1963, no. 1, 3  212   9.3 The personal experience and history of Mr. Badejo was part of the Shell People advertisement campaign. West African Review, Oct. 1959, 640  214 10.1 Cars and buses “grind to a stop” on Queen Elizabeth Bridge, Johannesburg  234 10.2 The importance of the railways for distribution 236 10.3 The image strategically advertising Caltex  238

Acknowledgments T

he idea for this book first grew from an international conference, Drilling through the Screen: Modern Imaginaries and the Oil Industry, held at the Department of Media Studies at Stockholm University in the October of 2015. This was a lively event, and many of the participants helped us in articulating ideas for the organization and structure of this book. We would especially like to recognize the contributions of Bjørn Sørenssen (Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim) and Torkel Thime (the Norwegian Oil and Gas Archives/State Archives, Stavanger) in creating interest in this area of research on industrial and sponsored film. Bjørn in particular has been an early advocate of researching interlinkages between oil and film industries, having organized a symposium on industrial film at the Norwegian Petroleum Museum in Stavanger already back in 2010. We also would like to warmly thank all the other participants at this event for their willingness to develop their papers into book chapters, and also for their patience regarding the subsequent book production process. Financial aid came from the Swedish Foundation for Humanities and Social Sciences (Riksbankens Jubileumsfond, P19-0403:1) and Stockholm University. Special thanks to the Faculty of Humanities and the Head of Department at Media Studies, John Sundholm. Finally, we would like to express our sincere appreciation to Erin Duffy and Katie Gallof and their coworkers at Bloomsbury Academic for all their support and efforts in making this book a reality.

x

Introduction Marina Dahlquist and Patrick Vonderau

It is doubtful whether any single industrial development has brought so many sweeping changes to the world as has petroleum. No industry has wrought a revolution in manners, customs, mode of living, relation of the individual to society in so short a period as has the petroleum industry, along with its allied and dependent industries.1 AMERICAN PETROLEUM INSTITUTE, 1930

I

n his Book of Lantern: Being a Practical Guide to the Working of the Optical (or Magical Lantern) (1888), Thomas Cradock Hepworth credits the “introduction as illuminants of the hydrocarbons, under the name of petroleum,” in having had a significant share in a by-then massively spreading use of this media technology, “for now a few pounds will purchase a better instrument than was procurable at any price twenty years ago.”2 While the magic lantern itself has been known since at least 1659, it is only after 1820 that this apparatus for the projection of glass slides turned into the world’s first domestic media machine. Several innovations helped to make this possible, such as the incorporation of photography into otherwise painted series of slides, visual effects such as dissolves, and, most importantly, new and powerful illuminants such as those based on oil.3 Although petroleum lamps soon came to be replaced by electric illumination as still images began moving and screens began to grow, the use of oil only kept increasing in all kinds of technical media. In 1889, Eastman Kodak introduced a flexible, transparent roll film made from a substance called celluloid, a petroleum by-product. A few years later, film projections started to offer new experiences everywhere, in the “form of captured, organized, and released light-heat-energy-movements.”4 All media, in the sense of technical means of mass communication, rely on matter and

2 PETROCINEMA

energy, but cinematic projections made their material base—the flickering images of easily burned film strip—certainly felt in specific ways. Oil became a frequent topic among motion picture engineers, as “oil on film,” dirt, torn sprocket holes, and other damage done to reels required technical fixing;5 more importantly, oil also quickly turned into a topic of films themselves, such as the The Story of Petroleum (1926), for instance, coproduced by the US Bureau of Mines in cooperation with the American Petroleum Institute to showcase “the latest engineering and technical developments of the petroleum industry.”6 Screened in cinemas as much as in schools and other nontheatrical venues, various forms and formats of film subsequently came to shape people’s values, beliefs, and feelings, practices, and habits over the course of the twentieth century in unprecedented ways.7 It thus certainly owes a lot to cinema when, as the American Petroleum Institute noted in 1930 as cited before, “the petroleum industry, along with its allied and dependent industries,” had “wrought a revolution in manners, customs, mode of living, relation of the individual to society in so short a period” like no other. This book studies the historical relation between cinema and petroculture in order to underline the role of moving images in the way an energy regime was established in the twentieth century. “Cinema” here is approached as an “open system,”8 one whose institutional borders were both clearly defined and often contested. This includes long features that were screened theatrically alongside nontheatrical film circulating within companies, schools, or associations and later on television. Cinema contributed to the century’s dominant energy regime not so much in a direct, political, or propagandistic sense, but through forms of sponsorship and “usefulness”: by informing, educating, and entertaining. While film occasionally was used by specific social institutions to officially propagate oil as a resource or condition of modern life, it more often served to fuel the socially transformative potential of various micropolitical practices. Cinema, in other words, became a realm of activities meant to have public effect, and to shape the tenor of collective life, while not fitting into the traditional paradigms of political action, with bodily affect, social tempers, political moods, or cultural sensibilities as key targets.9 In focusing on this form of cinema as a medium for energizing micropolitical practices geared toward the adoption of petroculture, the volume seeks to demonstrate that an understanding of historical precedence, and of media history in particular, is important for managing today’s problem of energy and political agency. Since the earliest days of cinema, many international companies have used film and later video systematically to educate their staff, explain and organize work processes, promote goodwill, market products, and record their own history. Since 1910, Standard Oil followed by Shell, BP, and Mobil have

Introduction

3

been producing and circulating moving images for various purposes including research and training, safety, process observation, or promotion. General Electric, Krupp, Imperial Chemical Industries, and countless others made thousands of films, printed film catalogues and, set up film libraries all over the world where their films could be rented for free. Though it is estimated that 300,000 industrial and institutional films have been made in the United States alone—far more than any other type of motion picture—this film type is still little known. Such industrial and sponsored films include not only educationals such as The Story of Petroleum but also commercials and documentaries 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. Beyond these films produced by oil extraction companies themselves, a host of other films has shown oil as both a source of energy and as resulting in a broad variety of products and services, including plastic or car travel. Such films are to be found everywhere, transgressing boundaries of genres, periods, and nations, including features, news items, or driving instruction films. How did film and later video, in their respective social and cultural contexts, enact forms of micropolitics that worked toward the goal of naturalizing the consumption of oil as energy and product, and thus to commodify oil? This is the central question at the heart of this volume. In bringing up this and related questions, this volume also interfaces with the work of scholars who have begun to trace the history of how the “hydrocarbon imagination” has been central to the development of film as a medium, such as Nadia Bozak in her book The Cinematic Footprint: Lights, Camera, Natural Resources from 2013.10 In the humanities and social sciences, “petroculture” is a critical term often used to emphasize the ways industrial and postindustrial societies are oil societies through and through. They are shaped by oil in physical and material ways, from the automobiles and highways we use to the plastics that permeate our food supply and built environments. Oil literally propelled humanity into a different era of mobility and consumption. Oil companies, spearheaded by Standard Oil as one of the world’s first and largest multinational corporations, created new infrastructures around the globe, the conditions for mobility and travel, modern urban living standards, and a host of new products including plastic, fabrics, pharmaceuticals, and the film strip. Even for countries that were not oil producing themselves, petroleum became a key resource of Western life and the basis for “carbon democracies” based on “fossil capital.”11 Subsequent oil-based riches, poverty, and industrial divisions of labor were thematized widely in media from the novel to the silver screen; up until the late 1970s, visual culture was almost constantly employed in campaigns to promote social and technical change. Moving

4 PETROCINEMA

­ ictures—by many considered modernity’s Leitmedium—and cinema culture p were central to envisioning and shaping this future. As this future has now passed, a post-petroleum view on the interlinkage of oil and media in the making of modernity appears 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 book examines modern media and petroleum extraction and consumption by breaking down its general research interest into questions such as: How have oil and moving images been linked in industrial, material, aesthetic, and social terms? How did the oil industry use moving images to organize petroleum extraction and to promote modernization? What was the historical role of film in informing, educating, or persuading mass audiences about this key energy resource, and how does these objectives affect our present future’s ideas of sustainability and energy? Ideas and ideals of progress, autonomy, or mobility have been centrally linked to the historical conditions of a fossil fuel society. These values are quite literally “fueled by fossil fuels, as are so many of the other values and aspirations that we have come to associate with the freedoms and capacities of modern life.”12 Our modern imaginaries have been shaped by oil as both a form of energy and a product since the early twentieth century. In many ways, media power relates directly to both “biopower” (i.e., the management of life and population) and “energopower” (the harnessing of fuel), as the use of energy always is entwined with representations and narratives about modernity and the environment.13 No medium illustrates this better than cinema, given its dependence on fossil fuels and their photochemical derivatives. Accordingly, film and cultural historians including Mona Damluji, Rudmer Canjels, and Patrick Russell have in the past provided specialized accounts of how film has been used to promote petroleum in Iraq, the Netherlands, or the UK.14 This collection further broadens the scope by bringing these scholars in a dialogue with others in order to explore the relation of cinema to the history of petroleum extraction through the lens of industrial and sponsored film. This volume connects existing research concerning sponsored, industrial, and educational film to issues of energy and ecology. Over the past twenty years, a flurry of international research activities has been initiated to study industrial, sponsored, and other nontheatrical films, including the biennial Orphans Film Symposium, since 1999; several special issues of the journal Film History; the edited volumes Films That Work: Industrial Film and the Productivity of Media, Useful Cinema, Learning with the Lights Off: Educational Film in the United States, Films That Sell: Moving Pictures and Advertising, and The Institutionalization of Educational Cinema: North America and Europe in the 1910s and 1920s;15 filmographies and field guides;16 and the establishing

Introduction

5

of specialized archives such as the Prelinger Archives in San Francisco. This volume is situated within this vibrant field of research on film and media. In doing so, it suggests petroleum extraction as a new analytical lens to revisit issues related to “useful cinema’s” usefulness, to bring up the term Charles Acland and Haidee Wasson apply in their anthology Useful Cinema,17 and invites to shed new light on documentary film history.

A.R.T., or a Heuristics for Analysis In research on industrial and sponsored film, materials have often been analyzed following three sets of parameters. A first tendency has been to look out for generic patterns: the building blocks, structures, and, importantly, uses made of any given film, or what Thomas Elsaesser called the “three As,” that is, questions about the Auftraggeber (who commissioned the film), Anlass (what was the occasion for which it was made), and Adressat (to what use was is put or to whom was it addressed), rather than the auteur.18 Following the “three A,” in the sense of a largely text-based approach to sponsored film, archivists and scholars have compiled filmographies and charted the more familiar genres of oil industrial film production.19 These include widely circulating prestige documentaries, travelogues, advertising, sales promotion, and public service films alongside safety training and other instructional materials distributed only within the oil industry itself. Yet while industrial and sponsored filmmaking can be partly read within the established tradition of documentary history, not everything can be explained by pointing to genre conventions. Certain conventions may exist that make a film recognizable as an industrial or sponsored film, but they are pliable to whatever organizational purpose the filmmaker has to meet, some scholars have argued.20 From this point of view, industrial film is a strategically weak and parasitic form in the sense that it can assume the appearance of other, more stable genres and formats and pass as a scientific film, an educational film, or a documentary for specific strategic reasons. Consequently, a second tendency has been to complement the “three As” with the “three Rs,” or areas of purpose, that media can serve in industrial organizations: record (institutional memory), rhetoric (governance), and rationalization (optimizing process).21 Examples from the oil industry include company presentations at trade fairs that are records of a major event in the life of a corporation; splashy image films that are part of a rhetoric aiming to induce cooperation with the outside world; or instructional films that introduce workers to the safety requirements of oil drilling.

6 PETROCINEMA

Behind this approach was not so much an intent to classify, but rather to raise a simple question: Why do industrial organizations produce, and store, so many media in the first place? Following the trail of the “three Rs,” a trail initially inspired by the writings of Lisa Cartwright on medicine’s visual culture, by organizational scholar JoAnn Yates, and especially James Beniger’s classic study, The Control Revolution,22 this second research tendency has come to focus on the pragmatics of film. It sees sponsored film as a cultural text that only can be read through the organization that produces it. It also proceeds vice versa, studying the ways film and other media technologies produce such organizations in the first place, by creating safe work situations or by managing workflows under water, for instance. A third and final tendency in industrial film scholarship has been to go beyond a narrow focus on social and corporate organization by studying sponsored media as part of larger cultural series. Industrial and sponsored films are not only defined by their individual use; their usefulness is contingent to historical change and indicative of a broader relationship between culture and power. Emphasizing an institutional perspective, scholars thus have put a spotlight on the ways media coordinate their goals and interests with broader social and cultural concerns. Accordingly, they ask us to start our exploration by mapping the sites where such media are shown, to focus on their recurring topoi, and to understand them as ever-changing objects, rather than finite artifacts—subject to constant re-versioning and reinterpretation, as they continue circulating in society. Where and how, for instance, have such materials been programmed and exhibited? What stereotype formulas may we find in industrial and sponsored films, and how do they help compare or contrast the specifics of industrial filmmaking? Finally, how are ephemeral materials endowed with new meaning as they are becoming part of a canon of nontheatrical materials that is curated online, or made available on DVD?23 This volume brings these three strands of investigation together, working out a selection of materials that highlights the dominant forms and formats of petroculture’s cinema. Complementing the “three As” and “three Rs” of the earlier mentioned tendencies, we are thus also asked to pay attention to the topologies, topoi, and the transience of sponsored media, or what we may call the “three Ts,” if only to playfully suggest, by way of this acronym, a new meaning be attributed to the notion of A.R.T. Expanding the traditional canon of films and methods, contributions to this volume have these various “As,” “Rs,” and “Ts” come together in their explorations of the relation between moving images and petroleum extraction. This collection of essays consists of original chapters, eight of which are revised versions of papers presented at the symposium “Drilling through the Screen: Modern Imaginaries and the Oil Industry,”

Introduction

7

­ rganized in 2015 by the editors at Stockholm University, while an additional o two have been commissioned for this book. Contributing to a burgeoning field of film scholarship, the chapters 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 twentieth century to today’s postindustrial “petro-melancholia.”24

About the Chapters Mona Damluji’s opening chapter outlines the challenges of navigating oil archives. Sponsored films have not been preserved or been the epicenter for research in film and cinema studies to the same extent as fiction films. Prints have often been destroyed when they were no longer useful and rarely been prioritized for restauration. The lack of documents regarding production and exhibition further complicates archival work. As Damluji points out, ours is a critical moment both in the history of oil and in the history of oil media. While oil companies now are recognized as “full-fledged historical actors” and as counterpart to what Andrew Barry terms the oil archives,25 and although their websites may facilitate new forms of access to archives, these companies still pose a challenge to scholars when it comes to what is made accessible. Oil rhetorics is by no means a new phenomenon. The oil industry was from the early days a highly political industry, as evidenced by its corporate communications. Jeremy Groskopf, in his chapter, takes up the case of The World Struggle for Oil (1923), a controversial, feature-length educational coproduced by the Sinclair Consolidated Oil Corporation and the Bureau of Mines. Groskopf analyzes this film as an example of the slippage, in corporate educational films, between education and indoctrination, testifying to the growing recognition of the political value in corporate rhetorics in early educational pictures. Patrick Russell and Steven Foxon, engaging in a playfully written fictive dialogue between Royal Dutch Shell and British Petroleum, imagine how these two companies would have responded to each other in regard to their corporate film production. Based on archival work and practitioner interviews, Russell and Foxon explore and compare these companies’ cinematic narratives and their respective activities after the Second World War. In her contribution to this volume, Susan Ohmer analyzes the collaboration between Walt Disney Studio and Standard Oil of California in a 1939 national marketing campaign to promote travel to the Golden Gate International Exposition in San Francisco. In newspapers, comic books, promotional films, and in

8 PETROCINEMA

Standard Oil’s own corporate publications, well-known Disney characters such as Mickey, Donald, Goofy, Snow White, and the Seven Dwarfs were used to draw attention to the exhibition as well as the drive to get there. Marina Dahlquist, in turn, brings up another 1930s case that illustrates the then new possibilities of petroleum-driven progress: Mobil’s advertisements for lubrication and gas in the company’s so-called Mobiloil Movies. Planned as elaborate tie-ins, movie-like storyboards were regularly published in magazines such as The Saturday Evening Post or Collier’s, intertwining modern automobile culture with Mobil products, new film releases, and glamorous Hollywood stars. Moving images were also usually part of multiple-media efforts that included print advertisements, pamphlets, slidefilms, exhibits, and other materials. Gregory A. Waller’s chapter examines the production and distribution of motion pictures as part of the extensive public relations efforts undertaken by the Oil Industry Information Committee (OIIC), a branch of the American Petroleum Institute (API) founded in 1948, as part of the organization’s efforts to improve the public standing of the industry. The wide-ranging activities of the OIIC provide an illuminating point from which to study the broader field of the period’s discourse about the petroleum industry, the mobilization of film and other media, and also the increasing prominence of public relations cinema in postwar America. The significance of industrial film in shaping public awareness about twentieth-century industrialization is also analyzed in Brian R. Jacobson’s contribution. Taking a notorious 2012 gas leak at the Elgin platform, an offshore drilling rig in the North Sea owned by French petroleum company Total, as his case, Jacobson analyzes the moving image’s critical role in shaping public knowledge about industrial processes within the company Total. Jacobson argues that already in the 1970s, in the wake of the oil crises, film productions established rhetorical strategies for smoothing over the risk and teaching the public about the rewards of offshore extraction that continue to structure industrial visibility today. In the wake of the environmental exhaustion and political crises that the age of oil and oil politics has left us with, it’s rewarding to return to the meaning of cultural work in relation to oil extraction. Ravi Vasudevan undertakes a mapping of the Burmah Shell Oil Company role in the development of filmmaking practices in India from its origins in 1928 to the 1950s. The company, whose remit was to retail petroleum products and market agricultural equipment, invested in advertising, publicity, and promotional material in print and audiovisual media, including advertising films. The company went beyond a purely instrumental relation to film production, producing advertising, promotional, instructional, and educational films, and films promoting postcolonial state planning. Its history invites us to locate documentary practice in a rather complex genealogy of institutions and functions—including the overlaps of

Introduction

9

government, industry, market-driven, civil/educational, and aesthetic engagements. The 1950s was a period of intense flux and political change, leading to an increase of countries that became independent from colonial rule. As a result, international operating companies were forced to change their operations in many (former) colonial countries, ranging from commercial strategies, staffing policy, or local and global public relations and advertisement strategies. In these changing times making use of local film production was seen as a useful and powerful instrument. In his contribution, Rudmer Canjels discusses the Nigerian Shell film unit that started in 1959, two years after the discovery of oil in commercial quantities and one year before Nigeria’s independence. Manned by key creative and technical personnel from the main Shell film unit in London, the unit was however designed to be taken over by trained local staff. The films were mostly geared to possible new Shell workers, as part of the Africanization policy intended to increase the number of Africans in the workforce, as well as to politicians with whom Shell had to negotiate licenses, rentals, and royalties. The situation in South Africa was somewhat different. Jacqueline Maingard, in her chapter, focuses on the British scriptwriter and film director, Donald Swanson, who in the 1950s wrote scripts and directed films for the South African State Information Services, commissioned by African Film Productions, the production arm of the powerful Schlesinger Organisation in South Africa. By using the propaganda film, South Africa’s Life Line (Die Slagaar van SuidAfrika, produced in the 1950s but exact date unknown), as case study, Maingard shows how the film came to emulate a mode and style of filmmaking Swanson first learned at Gaumont-British International in the 1940s, when he wrote scripts for the British Railways series. This early training, and the colonial films he subsequently made in Africa, positioned him in a network of colonial film and filmmakers that gave shape to his ideological worldview.

Notes 1 Oil (New York: American Petroleum Institute, 1930), 177. 2 Thomas Cradock Hepworth, The Book of Lantern, Being a Practical Guide to the Working of the Optical (or Magic) Lantern (London: Wyman & Sons, 1888), ix. 3 Erkki Huhtamo, Illusions in Motion: Media Archaeology of the Moving Panorama and Related Spectacles (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013), 276. 4 Andrej Ivakhiv, “The Art of Morphogenesis: Cinema in and Beyond the Capitalocene,” in Shane Denson and Julia Leyda (eds.), Post-Cinema: Theorizing 21st Century Film (Falmer: Reframe Books, 2016), 740.

10 PETROCINEMA

5 See, for instance, various volumes of the Transactions of the Society of Motion Picture Engineers, published by the Society of Motion Picture Engineers. 6 “Educational News and Editorial Comment,” The Elementary School Journal 28, no. 10 (June 1928): 722–3. 7 Lynn Badia,Imre Szeman and The Petrocultures Research Group, After Oil (Edmonton, CA: University of Alberta, 2016), 12. 8 Patrick Vonderau, “On Advertising’s Relation to Moving Pictures,” in Bo Florin, Patrick Vonderau and Yvonne Zimmermann (eds.), Films That Sell: Moving Pictures and Advertising (London: BFI, 2016), 1–19. 9 Jane Bennett, “Postmodern Approaches to Political Theory,” in Gerald F. Gaus and Chandran Kukathas (eds.), Handbook of Political Theory (London: Sage, 2004), 51. 10 Nadia Bozak, The Cinematic Footprint: Lights, Camera, Natural Resources (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2012). 11 Timothy Mitchell, Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil (London and New York: Verso, 2011); Andreas Malm, Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming (London and New York: Verso, 2016). 12 Badia et al., After Oil, 12. 13 Dominic Boyer, “Energopower: An Introduction,” Anthropological Quarterly 87, no. 2 (2014): 309–33. 14 Mona Damluji, “The Oil City in Focus: The Cinematic Spaces of Abadan in the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company’s Persian Story,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 33, no. 1 (2013): 75–88; “The Image World of Middle Eastern Oil,” in Hannah Appel, Arthur Mason, and Michael Watts (eds.), Subterranean Estates: Life Worlds of Oil and Gas (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2015), 147–64; Rudmer Canjels, “From Oil to Celluloid: A History of Shell Films,” in Jan Luiten van Zanden (ed.), A History of Royal Dutch Shell. Vol. 4 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 6–33; The Dynamics of Celluloid on the Roads to Independence: Unilever and Shell in Nigeria (Hilversum: Beeld en Geluid, 2015); Patrick Russell, Shadows of Progress: Documentary Film in Post-War Britain (London: BFI, 2010). 15 Film History (special issue on ”Small-Gauge and Amateur Film”) 15, no. 2 (2003): 123–271; Film History (special issue on “Nontheatrical Film”) 19, no. 4 (2007): 339–448; Film History (special issue on “Nontheatrical Film”) 25, no. 4 (2013): 1–160; Vinzenz Hediger and Patrick Vonderau, eds., Films That Work: Industrial Film and the Productivity of Media (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2009); Charles Acland and Haidee Wasson, eds. Useful Cinema (London and Durham, NJ: Duke University Press, 2011); Devin Orgeron, Dan Streible, and Masha Oregon, eds., Learning with the Lights Off: Educational Film in the United States (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2012); Florin, de Klerk, and Vonderau, Films That Sell; Marina Dahlquist and Joel Frykholm, eds. The Institutionalization of Educational

Introduction

11

Cinema: North America and Europe in the 1910s and 1920s (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 2020). 16 Rick Prelinger, The Field Guide to Sponsored Films (San Francisco: National Film Preservation Foundation, 2006). 17 For a discussion of the term “useful cinema” see Acland and Wasson, Useful Cinema. 18 Thomas Elsaesser, “Archives and Archaeologies: The Place of Non-Fiction Film in Contemporary Media,” in Hediger and Vonderau, eds. Films That Work. 19 Damluji, “The Oil City in Focus”; Canjels, “From Oil to Celluloid”; Russell, Shadows of Progress. 20 Vinzenz Hediger and Patrick Vonderau, “Record, Rhetoric, Rationalization. Film and Industrial Organization,” in Hediger and Vonderau, eds., Films That Work. 21 Ibid. 22 Lisa Cartwright, Screening the Body: Tracing Medicine’s Visual Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995); James R. Beniger, The Control Revolution: Technological and Economic Origins of the Information Society (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986); JoAnne Yates, Control through Communication: The Rise of System in American Management (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989). 23 Acland and Wasson, Useful Cinema; Orgeron, Streible, and Oregon, Learning with the Lights Off. 24 Stephanie LeMenager, “Petro-Melancholia: The BP Blowout and the Arts of Grief,” in Imre Szeman and Dominic Boyer, eds. Energy Humanities: An Anthology (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkings University Press, 2017), 470–85. 25 Andrew Barry, “The Oil Archives,” in Hannah Appel, Arthur Mason and Michael Watts (eds.), Subterranean Estates: Life Worlds of Oil and Gas (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2015).

12

PART ONE

Oil Rhetoric

14

1 Oil Media Archives Mona Damluji

M

y first encounter in an oil media archive was with a VHS tape in the British Petroleum (BP) Archive that could not be played. A second encounter had me handling a fragile film reel stored in its original canister. Viewing the oil company film on a Steenbeck in a dark basement-level screening room of the British Film Institute was a nerve-racking experience: the celluloid crackled insistently throughout, threatening imminent demise. Next came a stack of photo albums whose pages were filled with aging prints sealed underneath delicate plastic sheets. Individual images demanded every sort of speculation, since no names, locations, or dates accompanied the albums. While studying petroleum company–sponsored films of the Middle East, I have worked in several archives over the course of a decade in search of moving images, still photography, artwork, and other cultural productions sponsored by oil companies—what I call oil media. These earliest encounters troubled my assumptions about what conducting research in corporate archives would be like. How could one of the world’s wealthiest and most powerful corporations be so inconsistent and apparently uninterested in archiving its media? It was not until I later tracked down the existence of the lesser-known BP Video Library (BPVL) that I realized a major transformation of how the oil company approached media archiving, film in particular, was underway. Access to BP’s film archive would soon be radically different from the experiences I described here. On my first visit to the BPVL, I marveled at stacked shelves of film reels and VHS tapes in an open plan room that housed hundreds of BP’s sponsored films. On that occasion, I requested permission to view a pristinely kept print of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (AIOC)-sponsored film Persian Story (1952, Greenpark Productions). Afterward, I remarked to a friendly staff

16 PETROCINEMA

person about the film’s significance in the context of Iran’s political history and her reply startled me. As it turns out, BP was in the middle of digitizing the collection stored in the South London video library and in less than a year the archived films would be available for anyone to watch online. Today, years after I began my research, BPVL’s website offers open access to a searchable interface where visitors can stream digitized versions of the company’s film holdings dating back to 1921.1 At face value, the presentation of the online archive suggests complete access to BP’s film history. And yet, my current research on Iraq Petroleum Company–sponsored films, which are almost entirely missing from the BPVL archive, has demonstrated that this is not the case. In this chapter, I am concerned with how oil companies archive media in general and sponsored films in particular. When corporations do archive oil media, access to those repositories can be confusing and confounding. While some corporate media archives (like BP) are housed at a public university, others (like Shell) are just about impenetrable to academic researchers. Still others are altogether inaccessible. My purpose here is to begin to map the uneven terrain of oil media archives for academic researchers. What I call oil media archives includes the various manifestations of media collection and preservation by petroleum companies: online and offline, digital and analog, cataloged and undisclosed. Oil media archives include films, videos, photographs, and other media objects, each ripe for analysis, and also the published and unpublished paper trails and oral histories that help to trace the complex origins, making, publicity, and reception of oil-sponsored media. As a counterpoint to the hyper-visibility of digitized films on the BPVL website, which I will describe and contextualize in detail in the latter half of this chapter, my early encounters in the BP corporate archive point to the existence of films that are thoroughly documented in writing but nowhere to be found or watched in the archives. These findings led me to consider the complex ways in which, as Renée M. Sentilles contends, “our relationship with sources [change] as they become more accessible, more abundant, and less tangible.”2 Entanglements and contradictions become increasingly apparent when moving between “real” archives—that is, material repositories containing historical documents and analog media objects—and their relatively accessible online counterparts.3 Generally, the separation of digital and nondigital practices of archiving films into online and offline spaces that do not explicitly refer to each other can be misleading. In the case of BP, it is apparent that available online and offline archives produce incomplete and disjointed collections of oil media; one should be careful to consult one and not the other. This chapter sets out to make oil media archives visible and recognizable as “full-fledged historical actors” and a counterpart to what Andrew Barry terms

Oil Media Archives 

17

the oil archives.4 It opens a conversation about how researchers might navigate the numerous and variable practices of archiving oil media in the era of digitization. To do this, I examine how BP, the corporation whose archives I am most familiar with, archives its sponsored films and associated paper trails. I also draw attention to how their approach has excluded numerous films from their seemingly complete collection. In particular, I have determined that while the BP Archive acquired the Iraq Petroleum Company’s paper archive, films were excluded from this acquisition. The BPVL is missing all but one of the company’s sponsored films from Iraq, which are difficult and sometimes impossible to track down elsewhere. My focus on BP should not suggest that its practices are universal. Rather, it presents a case study of a corporation that is among the first to establish open free access to their online media archive.5 As I will discuss, BP’s impetus to undertake a media digitization and archiving project should be understood as a calculated interpretation of the film collection’s commercial value—licensing footage as a revenue stream— and cultural value—mass circulation of BP-sponsored images as well as promoting the idea of BP as a cultural sponsor. BP’s accessible visual media library of high-quality film footage fosters the reproduction of its content. The website’s slickness—that is, the aesthetic simplicity, ease of searchability, and editorial freedom to select still images or video clips with precision—commands an authority to create and limit how oil and oil modernity is imaged and imagined for mass audiences. As I have written about elsewhere, nearly a century ago, BP and other oil companies established public relations offices to promote film sponsorship widely, from internal training films for oil workers to widely distributed prestige documentaries, or what I term “petrofilms,” for theatergoers, film societies, and classrooms.6 In short, today’s digital media archive continues the BP’s long-standing mission of shaping how audiences—inside and outside of the industry—see themselves in relationship to oil.

Navigating Oil Archives In Archive Stories, Antoinette Burton’s insists upon “the necessity of talking about the backstage of archives—how they are constructed, policed, experienced, and manipulated.” She reminds us that colonial archives “served as technologies of imperial power, conquest and hegemony” and therefore should not be mistaken as neutral repositories of documentary evidence.7 This reminds us to be attentive to the ways that archives mediate the production of knowledge and in particular how the archives of the world’s most powerful

18 PETROCINEMA

and profitable oil companies reproduce corporate hegemony. Katayoun Shaifee and Andrew Barry have written about BP’s archives in illuminating detail, guiding scholars and provoking new avenues of inquiry.8 However, they neither deal explicitly with the significance of audiovisual media in the archive nor examine how BP archives media. Until recently, the study of oil was chiefly the domain of political scientists who have narrowly framed its local histories and global effects in economic terms as rent. Excluded from these approaches, Shaifee and others have pointed out, are any serious consideration of “the activities of oil operations, or the ways in which the oil itself, as a liquid material and historical actor, was extracted from under the ground, transported, and sold with political consequences for the state, political community and nation, and possibilities for democracy.”9 In the past several years, scholars across the humanities and humanistic social sciences have charted new trajectories and embraced innovative methodologies for studying oil and its institutions, infrastructures, and images.10 The official BP Archive is housed in the Modern Records Centre at the University of Warwick in Coventry, UK. Since 1993, the BP Archive has operated independently of the university to make the oil company’s large cache of documents and other materials (photographs, periodicals, newspapers, etc.) available to researchers. Shaifee’s historical account of BP’s paper archiving practices offers an important context for any person interested in how oil companies shape knowledge production. Her essay draws a critical link between archive’s emergence and the company’s origins in southwestern Iran at the beginning of the twentieth century. BP’s collection can be traced to 1921, when the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (AIOC) first decided to preserve all inhouse documentation of its operations. This decision, Shaifee points out, concurred with AIOC’s new efforts to expand the documentation of its activities in Iran, using the normative practices of British colonial administration such as maintaining documentation of official communications, reports, and memorandum. Further, the company initiated the extensive photographic and filmic documentation of its operations and infrastructure, as I have documented elsewhere.11 Accompanying the corporate impulse to document and preserve records of its activities was the consolidation of the formal administration of oil operations during the interwar period. For example, the company created new specialized departments for exploration, research and development, public relations, and labor. At the same time, Shaifee explains, “increasing demands by Indian and Iranian oil workers for improved conditions in housing and work triggered increasing attempts by company officials to make, in their view, the

Oil Media Archives 

19

benevolent aspects of oil operations transparent and others, such as striking oil workers and the calculation of production rates, reserve estimates, and royalties, secret.”12 Indeed, the strategic management of information has always been a central part of the company’s operations, and continues to be until today as Barry explains in a separate essay.13 For decades, BP gave sole access to its trove of corporate record keeping to the official company historians, R. W. Ferrier and James H. Bamberg, who were commissioned to write a three-volume compendium detailing the company history (published between 1982 and 2000). Following the publication of the final volume, several years after the university-based archive opened, the company granted researchers access to a reading room. To view materials in the reading room, a researcher must request explicit permission from the company in advance. Thereafter, the researcher can receive access to a searchable online database and make an appointment to view them in person. However, a recent campaign by students at the University of Warwick has pointed out troubling limitations as to what materials can be accessed and who can access them.14 Barry distinguishes the historical archives established by petroleum companies, such as the BP Archive, from the continuously expanding online libraries of digital oil company reports, budgets, and so forth—which he terms “oil archives.” His essay theorizes oil corporations’ ongoing production and management of information about themselves through the framework of open-access online transparency. “The emergence of oil archives,” he explains, “is both the product of conflict between corporations, international organizations, and their civil society critics and an attempt on the part of corporations and international institutions to govern such relations.”15 The immense scale and scope of the openly accessible online archive serves to promote the image of transparency, which Barry contends is misleading and intentionally so. “If oil corporations,” he notes, “were once regarded as arrogant, the archives project an image of humility and piety as well as confidence.”16 Barry, however, characterizes the oil archives in terms of their “systematic absences,” excluding and masking unattainable information through the proffering of inestimable documents for public scrutiny. “But corporate archives are also image archives,” as Vinzenz Hediger and Patrick Vonderau compel historians to recognize in Films That Work.17 Exactly how BP makes, keeps, and represents its immense collection of moving images has yet to be addressed. And so, this chapter sets out to do that. In their essay, Hediger and Vonderau offer three useful framings for understanding why industrial films are made and how they are used by corporate

20 PETROCINEMA

i­nstitutions: Record, Rhetoric, and Rationalization. “Record” refers to film’s utility as a means to document operations and thus build an institutional memory. “Rhetoric” refers to the ways that film and other media can establish shared language, values, and standards within a corporation. “Rationalization” refers to the purpose of film as a tool for improving organizational performance, from administration to design to marketing.18 In sum, Hediger and Vonderau write, the common trait of all the shapes and forms that the industrial film can assume lies in their organizational purpose. Not only have the countless numbers of industrial films in corporate archives all been commissioned (Auftraggeber) for a specific occasion (Anlass) and a specific audience (Adressat) [as Thomas Elsaesser argues in a different chapter of the same volume], they also serve, or have served, one or more of the three purposes of record, rhetoric, and rationalization. Most of these films may not be works of art on their own, but clearly they had a job to do.19 The three Rs have proven essential for framing my research about oil media and work within oil media archives. However, based on my studies of oil-sponsored prestige documentaries and the contemporary archives they constitute within BP’s organization and public relation efforts in particular, I have determined that at least two industrial film uses still remain unaccounted for: Reputation and Repertoire. “Reputation” means the use of film to popularize stories about the company for external as well as internal audiences, particularly as a way to counter political backlash to the extractive or otherwise destructive operations undertaken by the company. In short, film use for corporate public relations intended to influence public opinion. “Repertoire” builds upon this, and refers to the practice of film sponsorship (as well as other forms of cultural sponsorship) and promotion of that sponsorship to the public, for example through the establishment of an open-access online film collection such as the BPVL website (examined in detail below), as a means of projecting the idea of a company as a cultural agent. In sum, the sponsorship of film, in part, for the purpose of being recognized as contributing toward cultural development and the common good. The remainder of this chapter will examine in detail the BPVL website, as a key example of how oil film sponsorship and digital archiving continue to fulfill the purposes of reputation and repertoire until today. How and for whom oil companies archive media is uneven and inconsistent from company to company, and even within companies. While BP retains an accessible online video library, the Shell guards its film and video archive from public access.20 Exxon Mobil film archives (which include Standard Oil

Oil Media Archives 

21

and SACONY) are housed in the University of Texas, Austin. A list of general contents is available online, but a researcher cannot determine what exact materials are available to view without browsing the archive in person.21 Similarly, BP maintains its main archive at the University of Warwick, but controversially it is administered by the oil corporation and not the university. The British Film Institute holds numerous oil films and, in some cases, has cataloged detailed information about films for which there is no material trace of the film.22 And in other cases, it is not the oil corporations, but rather the original production companies that keep and occasionally digitize oil media.23 Still others can only be traced to the Prelinger Archives on the Internet Archive.24

Archiving Oil Media Since BP began sponsoring films in the 1920s, various institutions and organizations—including the Film Centre, the Petroleum Film Bureau, the British Film Institute, oil ministries in producing countries, and the oil company— have made efforts to store and preserve the oil company’s sponsored films (and related documentation). Thus, the apparent completeness of the British Petroleum Video and Film Library (BPVL) is misleading. The BPVL website provides an overview of the oil company’s film archiving efforts since 1992. That year, BP outsourced the archiving of hundreds of sponsored films to the British Film Institute National Archive and closed down the company’s Film Unit, which had overseen film commissions until that point.25 Since 2006, the BPVL has operated as a distinct organization apart from the BP Archive. The company initially conceived of the BPVL as a commercial venture. Recognizing its film collection as “a valuable asset,” it reclaimed many of its films from the BFI and consolidated many of the films into a single location operated by the BPVL in South London.26 I argue, here, that the film collection’s stated “value” to the company can be understood as twofold: a commercial value that translates the collection of audiovisual resources into a revenue stream through the practice of licensing clips for reuse by media production companies, and a cultural value that assumes the benefits of brand recognition and positive associations of cultural sponsorship through the mass circulation of BP’s sponsored films within the company and among the general public.27 In this section, I describe the presentation of the digital archive and consider how these complimentary dimensions of value have shaped BP’s investment in digitizing its film collection and creating an online oil media archive with open access.

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Since the launch of its digitized video library in September 2008, BPVL made its collection of sponsored films and cataloged footage searchable and available for preview on its online platform. According to the BPVL website, when it launched it began with more than 500 hours of digitized content and that has grown to over 1,700 hours today.28 The BPVL website directly draws the visitor into discovering content. The landing page minimizes text in favor of interactivity and dynamic imagery. It features a large search bar at the center, inviting the user to type in keywords that call up and browse a filtered list of film titles based upon their needs or curiosities. The home page’s open-ended design evokes a tantalizing potential for discovery. The white bar is set against wide-screen moving image montage that showcases BP’s global network of extractive energy infrastructure. The thirty-second video loop cuts together low angle and god’s-eye perspectives of a manufacturing plant, offshore platforms, an uninhabited refinery, overground pipelines, transatlantic tankers, gas pumps, and eventually a landscape of wind turbines (Figure 1.1). A distinctive neon green beam weaves in and out of the frame throughout the montage, implying the forward direction of the company from its past toward its future as an energy corporation that includes alternatives to fossil fuels. The animated beam echoes the bright greenish yellow tones of the corporate logo that the company hopes would evoke the possibility of green energy futures “beyond petroleum.”29 At the same time, the beam also reinforces the primacy of petroleum, appearing to invoke the actual movements of crude oil from pipeline to gas tank and simultaneously highlights edges of ecologically destructive infrastructures as they slice through various aquatic

FIGURE 1.1  Home landing page of the BP Video Library website. Screenshot taken by author on March 13, 2020.

Oil Media Archives 

23

and terrestrial landscapes. Life, meanwhile, in these environments is sparse and indicated in the faceless figures and silhouettes of oil workers. Below the main banner, links to textual content are made available to guide users beyond the search bar. “How to search for footage” makes clear that BP digitized its oil collection of sponsored films for two intended audiences: internal use by company employees and media production companies. Licensing footage to media production companies capitalizes on the inherent commercial value of the films. The page first instructs employees about how to interact with the online interface as a video clip library for illustrating PowerPoint presentations. Footage clips can be downloaded direct to your desktop for use in presentations, powerpoints etc. Click on “Add a clip.” Set your Mark In and Mark Out points and then Request Download. The clip can then be downloaded to your desktop.30 For filmmakers and other media content producers who want to reproduce footage at full resolution, the page then provides directions in four straightforward steps about how to license BPVL’s moving images. Indicating that the company “may request an outline treatment of the proposed production,” the fine print makes apparent that BP retains the right to exercise discretion based upon the desired use of the content maintaining explicit corporate oversight and implicit influence over the ways in which their images are (re)presented. Fees are not posted directly on the website, and interested parties are instructed to submit a request in order to obtain this information. Thus, website projects the appearance of an open-access resource and film archive (a public good) rather than a profit-driven venture (a private enterprise). In their introduction to Subterranean Estates: Lifeworlds of Oil and Gas, the editors Hannah Appel, Arthur Mason, and Michael Watts contend, “It should be no surprise that in an industry typified by concentrated economic and political power . . . secrecy, security, guardedness, corporate ventriloquism, and defensiveness are the hallmarks of the industry’s operations.”31 An oil corporation’s performance of transparency through digital media archiving and website building—exemplified by the oil archive that Barry describes and the oil media archive examined in his essay—is thus a recognizable effort on their part to affect public perceptions of the company and perhaps distinguish itself from the norms assumed in the industry. Laura Mulvey points out how the digital archiving of moving images fundamentally transforms their cultural currency, “bringing them out into the world, into a wider consumption that displaces inaccessibility and secrecy.”32 I argue that oil company’s decision to radically change how it archives and circulates its films indicates

24 PETROCINEMA

FIGURE 1.2 Liberate Tate’s art performance of “Human Cost” was staged in the Duveen Gallery, Tate Britain, in April 2011 (one year after the start of the BP Gulf of Mexico disaster) to shame the corporation, draw attention to the cultural establishment’s complicity, and demand the Tate to put an end to BP sponsorship. Photograph: Amy Scaife/Liberate Tate (http​​s:/​/w​​ww​.th​​eguar​​dian.​​com​/e​​nviro​​nment​​ /gall​​ery​/2​​016​/m​​ar​/19​​/libe​​rate-​​tates​​-six-​​year-​​campa​​ign​-t​​o​-end​​-bps-​​art​-g​​all​er​​y​-spo​​ nsors​​hip​-i​​n​-pic​​tures​). the value BP places on the cultural value of circulating its company-sponsored and ­sanctioned oil media. BPVL’s website gives public exposure to its historical collection of sponsored moving images as a cultural repository and also facilitates the recirculation of those images among audiences inside and outside of the company—thus, bolstering its reputation and rendering visible its repertoire as a cultural sponsor. When oil companies digitize and archive media it is foremost in the selfinterest of the corporation. Through its ongoing work, BPVL projects the oil company’s image as a harbinger of cultural innovation in film sponsorship

Oil Media Archives 

25

and online distribution. This approach mirrors the company’s contemporary investments in arts sponsorship and knowledge production broadly. A primary way BP and other major oil companies do this is by putting millions of dollars into partnerships with cultural powerhouses that include the Louvre, the British Museum, the National Portrait Gallery (UK), the Royal Opera House (UK), and the Royal Shakespeare Company (UK). These investments have received open criticism in recent years from activist organizations demanding corporate accountability and an end to fossil fuel extraction. Groups like Liberate Tate, Culture Unstained, and the Art Not Oil coalition have used hybrid tactics of public performance and advocacy to protest the quiet status quo of financial sponsorship that binds public cultural institutions to oil company profits. In the words of Danni, a member of Liberate Tate, cultural sponsorship by oil corporations “gives them a social license to operate, they become integrated in our society, and are known for doing good things” (Figure 1.2).33 

The Oil Media Archive and Its Limits In essence, the work of archiving oil media has rendered BP’s cinematic repertoire as an historical object that is available to be seen, recognized, and tapped into by knowledge producers. How can researchers interested in critical histories of oil culture navigate and make sense of an oil media archive like the BPVL website? Scholars in film and media studies, history, geography, urban planning, anthropology, and other academic disciplines will likely find the accessible online archive of films and related content on the BPVL website to be a rich resource. At face value, the open accessibility of the online archive can save researchers a great deal of time, money, and labor (grant-writing, arranging travel, etc.). In this section, I provide a close look at the website’s presentation of individual digitized films and the concept of the archive. However, as I argue further, it is also imperative to interrogate the limits and limitations of BP’s digital oil media archive. The page layout for individual film titles mirrors the slick interface of the website’s interactive and visually dynamic landing page, detailed above. Three key page elements achieve this: a media player, an interactive still image gallery, and a metadata rubric. Overall, visual elements are privileged over text using a top-to-bottom hierarchy (dictated by the automated encounter and effect of scrolling down the page). At the top, only the film title and production year frame the top of a large built-in media player, which allows any user immediate access to stream a low-resolution version of the selected film. The BPVL logo and web address appear permanently in the

26 PETROCINEMA

FIGURE 1.3  BP Video Library webpage featuring the Persian Story. Screenshot taken by author on March 13, 2020. top left corner of the video player, likely in a gesture to discourage digital piracy. Below the player, an interactive timeline of still images from the film is displayed to present an overview. Users can manipulate the length of the interval, between five and sixty seconds, in order to customize the preview to their needs and facilitate the identification of In and Out makers for clip selection (Figure 1.3). Textual information about the film is presented as “Metadata” in the third and final element at the bottom of the page. For intended users, the shotlist provided serves as a useful reference to guide clip selection in conjunction with the image gallery above. For academic researchers, this enhanced feature will jump out as a critical (though limited) resource for contextualization of the moving images presented. The Metadata section includes fields for the film title, synopsis, production company, release date, and original format; however, these fields are often left blank. Viewing and licensing restrictions are also indicated, and these fields make apparent that some films are not available for external audiences. The BPVL website also highlights thematic selections using a series pages listed at the bottom of the page under the heading “From the archives . . ..” This approach of course foregrounds the idea of coherence in the digital collection and does not address the question of whether films have been excluded

Oil Media Archives 

27

from the site, either due to company censorship or as a result of the complex ­history of oil company sponsorship over the past century. Furthermore, it renders the collection of digital films visible as an historical object—an archive— that presents the oil company in terms of its past and thus constructs a framework for interpreting the corporation in terms of its future, as an energy company. This is echoed in the video loop, described above, presented on the BPVL landing page, which starts with the image of an oil pipeline and ends with a landscape of wind turbines. In my own experience conducting research in BP’s oil media archives—first the BP Archive and later the BPVL and its website—the limits of the archive have proven frustrating. Yet the absence of information/documentation or the unavailability of a film print or digital copy has, ultimately, been a productive boundary, spurring new research questions and methods in the quest to understand the petrofilm as event. Thomas Elsaesser, in his essay “Archives and Archaeologies” in Films That Work, guided scholars of industrial nonfiction filmmaking to approach film as event as opposed to the traditional notion of film as text. Rethinking oil films, as he suggested, in terms “of an event scenario, in which the actual film is only one piece of the evidence and residue to be examined and analyzed,” avoids the privileging of well-archived films.34 This approach opens the researcher to consider, for example, the numerous oil industry films for which a rich documentary paper trail exists when even no print or trace of the film can be found. Persian Story, on the one hand, is a film as event that practically begs to be known. The 1952 Technicolor film portrays a misleading picture of life for Iranians in Abadan, an AIOC town in the shadow of a major refinery (once the largest in the world), as I have detailed elsewhere.35 BPVL makes the film available for viewing online and, beyond this, traces of its production history are also available to researchers. The BP Archive holds a substantial folder, including early exchanges between company officials covering details from film concept to postproduction, original treatments, and final scripts that laid out the making of this particular film in granular detail. However, based on my research experience in BP, the notable accessibility to details of the event of Persian Story via the archive is the exception and not the rule. For example, two dozen or more films sponsored by the Iraq Petroleum Company, which are central to my own research, constitute a major exclusion from the BPVL collection. This lacuna exists despite the fact that the BP Archive acquired paper and photographic archives associated with the former company (1925– 61).36 The majority of the films I write about have never been archived at all and this absence has compelled me to question face-value assumptions I and other researchers may have about the constitution of BP’s online archive and its implied completeness.

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Conclusion: Oil Histories and Energy Futures Oil media sometimes need to be chased down, unearthed, and even extracted from obscurity. Indeed, many of the moving images, still photography, artwork, and other cultural productions sponsored by oil companies—what I call oil media—have eluded archiving altogether. The BPVL website is an oil media archive that presents its digitized collection of sponsored films to multiples audiences and for multiple purposes. Oil corporations, like BP, assume the authority to determine what constitutes their public-facing archives—in other words which items are made visible, available or apparent, and which are decidedly not. As private corporations, they are not held publicly accountable to disclose the full contents of their holdings and make them available for general access. Nevertheless, the performance of corporate transparency hinges on the perception that open access to an archive necessarily constitutes a public good. In other words, in the case of BP, digital archiving of oil media serves to facilitate the promotion of the corporation’s cultural repertoire to a broad public audience. And yet, oil corporations cannot control how their digitized media are used once they are in the public domain. BP is keenly aware of this vulnerability. The BPVL website includes language that indicates awareness of the site’s exposure to digital piracy: Users are reminded that unlicensed publishing or distribution of content accessed through this portal via video sharing websites (including but not limited to: You Tube, Facebook, Flickr etc) is strictly prohibited.37 However, as this chapter has emphasized, the company is not merely concerned with the loss of revenue—based on the commercial value of BP’s films—that could result from unlicensed usage of their moving images. BP also recognizes the cultural value of its films collection and the work that film sponsorship does to augment its reputation. At the same time, numerous activist organizations have also capitalized on BP’s strategic cultural interventions in their campaigns against the corporation, deploying parody and remixing tactics to ridicule and counter-script BP’s self-promotion as a steward of the arts and the environment. Unintended users and their uses of oil media archives still then have the potential to subvert scripted corporate narrative. The makers of oil media are among the richest and most powerful corporations on the planet, the same ones whose actions (and inactions) have

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spawned and accelerated the catastrophic effects of climate change for our planet.38 It is imperative for scholars to continue writing critical media histories of oil and, in particular, oil companies.39 Further, we should remain attentive in the present to the ways that corporate media practices, including digital archiving and the production of archives, empower oil companies to distance their brand from the exploitative labor practices of neocolonial extraction and environmental and political consequences of fossil fuel dependence. Indeed, today’s major oil corporations are actively working to transform their image from fossil fuel companies to future-oriented energy companies that should assume leading roles in our planet’s transition from oil to alternative “greener” energy sources in a manner based on upholding the status quo of industrial capitalism.40 Thus, when an oil company produces an oil media archive as an historical object, we might consider how the corporation is effectively establishing a tangible record of its past that can be interpreted distinct from its future.41

Notes 1 https://www.bpvideolibrary.com/ (accessed on January 15, 2020). 2 Renée M. Sentilles, “Toiling in the Archives of Cyberspace,” in Antoinette Burton (ed.), Archive Stories: Facts, Fictions, and the Writing of History (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005), 136. 3 Ibid., 145. 4 Antoinette M. Burton, Archive Stories: Facts, Fictions, and the Writing of History (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), 7; Andrew Barry, “The Oil Archives,” in Hannah Appel, Arthur Mason and Michael Watts (eds.), Subterranean Estates: Life Worlds of Oil and Gas (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2015), 95–107. 5 BP is the first oil company I am aware of to digitize and make available a substantive collection of its film and video holdings and manage that in conjunction with a historical archive. 6 Mona Damluji, “The Image World of Middle Eastern Oil,” in Hannah Appel, Arthur Mason and Michael Watts (eds.), Subterranean Estates: Life Worlds of Oil and Gas (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2015), 147–64. 7 Burton, Archive Stories, 7. 8 Katayoun Shafiee, “Documenting Anglo-Iranian Oil at the BP Archive,” Jadaliyya, December 17, 2019 [Accessed on January 15, 2020], https://www. jadaliyya.com/Details/40354; Barry, “The Oil Archives.” 9 Ibid.

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10 See Timothy Mitchell, Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil (London: Verso, 2013); Ross Barrett, Daniel Worden, and Allan Stoekl, Oil Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014); Appel, Hannah, Arthur Mason, and Michael Watts, Subterranean Estates: Life Worlds of Oil And Gas (Ithaca: Cornell University Press2015); Stephanie LeMenager, Living Oil: Petroleum Culture in the American Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016); Sheena Wilson, Adam Carlson, and Imre Szeman, Petrocultures: Oil, Politics, Culture (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2017). 11 Mona Damluji, “The Oil City in Focus: The Cinematic Spaces of Abadan in the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company’s Persian Story,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 33, no. 1 (2013): 75–88. 12 Katayoun Shafiee, “Documenting Anglo-Iranian Oil at the BP Archive,” Jadaliyya (December 17, 2019). https://www​.jadaliyya​.com​/Details​/40354; emphasis added by author. 13 Barry, “The Oil Archives,” and also see Michael J. Watts, “Righteous Oil? Human Rights, the Oil Complex, and Corporate Social Responsibility,” Annual Review of Environment and Resources 30, no. 1 (2005): 373–407. Here Watts further exposed the strategic management of information as a fundamental characteristic of the contemporary networks of hybrid state-corporate-led petroleum extraction tied to geopolitical calculations and military-industrial motives, which he describes as the oil complex. 14 A troubling lack of transparency around the archive’s current operations is further reflected in the fact that the BP Archive does not have an official website, as Shaifee points out. Instead, only a short description is given on the company’s website, which directs researchers to e-mail a general address. Since 2015, students active in the global fossil-fuels divestment campaign have been calling on the university to close the archive. They contend that the company has blocked student access to company files dated 1976 and beyond. The public controversy prompted the university’s vice-chancellor to call for enhanced student access to the archive; yet, the archive’s policies remain unchanged. 15 Barry, “The Oil Archives,” 98. 16 Ibid., 101. 17 Vinzenz Hediger, and Patrick Vonderau, Films That Work: Industrial Film and the Productivity of Media (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2009), 35. 18 Ibid., 40. 19 Ibid., 46. 20 http:​/​/buf​​vc​.ac​​.uk​/a​​rchiv​​es​/in​​dex​.p​​hp​/co​​l​lect​​ion​/4​​50; According to Shell website, “Much of Shell’s 80-year archive has since been preserved on digital video”; however, in my experience access to the film archive (digital or otherwise) is highly restricted. https​:/​/ww​​w​.she​​ll​.co​​m​/ins​​ide​-e​​nergy​​/shel​​ls​-pi​​ oneer​​i​ng​-f​​i lms.​​html.​

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21 https​:/​/le​​gacy.​​lib​.u​​texas​​.edu/​​taro/​​utcah​​/0035​​2​/cah​​-​0035​​2​.htm​​l; boxes are given general labels like “Films 1953–1984” but it is not clear whether these contain films that are viewable or other documents related to the film paper trail (planning, production, publicity, etc.). 22 According to BPVL, “In 1992, BP outsourced its archive and closed down the Film Unit which had commissioned all the centrally films produced until then. Hundreds of films were donated to the British Film Institute. The BFI National Archive continues to preserve many of BP’s best-known films.” 23 https​:/​/ww​​w​.you​​tube.​​com​/w​​atch?​​v​=xmO​​​6wgpw​​8vc. 24 https​:/​/ar​​chive​​.org/​​detai​​ls​/pr​​eling​​er​?an​​d​%5B%​​5​D​=oi​​l​&sin​=. 25 https​:/​/ww​​w​.bpv​​ideol​​ibrar​​y​.com​​/site​​​/inde​​x. 26 https://urlproxy.sunet.se/canit/urlproxy.php?_q=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cuYn

B2aWRlb2xpYnJhcnkuY29tL2FfaGlzdG9yeV9vZl9maWxtX2luX2Jw&_ s=ZGVmYXVsdA%3D%3D&_c=9d8e57f6&_r=c3Utc2U%3D 27 “Energy corporations understand the power of images to distil ideas and create impressions with emotional power.” Petrocultures Research Group (2016). After Oil, 47. 28 https://www.jadaliyya.com/Details/40354. 29 See Peter Hitchcock, “Everything’s Gone Green: The Environment of BP’s Narrative,” Imaginations 3 no. 2 (2012): sighting oil. 30 https://www.bpvideolibrary.com/how_to_search_for_footage.​ 31 Hannah Appel, Arthur Mason, and Michael Watts, “Introduction: Oil Talk,” Subterranean Estates: Life Worlds of Oil and Gas (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2015), 6. 32 Laura Mulvey, “Dislocations: Some Reflections on the Colonial Compilation Film,” in Lee Grieveson and Colin MacCabe (eds.), Film and the End of Empire (London: BFI, 2011), 261. 33 “BP Protest: ‘Tate Should Come Clean About Dirty Oil Money,’” April 20, 2011 (Accessed January 15, 2020), https​:/​/ww​​w​.cha​​nnel4​​.com/​​news/​​bp​-pr​​otest​​ -tate​​-shou​​ld​-co​​me​-cl​​ean​-a​​bout​-​​dirty​​-oil-​​money​ 34 Thomas Elssaesser, “Archives and Archaeologies,” in Hediger and Vonderau (eds.), Films That Work: Industrial Film and the Productivity of Media, 32. 35 Damluji. “The Oil City in Focus,” 75–88. 36 According to the description on the University of Warwick blog, “The BP Archive Is the Archive Relating to BP plc (incorporated as Anglo-Persian Oil Co Ltd in 1909). It holds a number of heritage companies including Castrol Limited and the Burmah Oil Company Limited. It is also holds the archives of several major jointly owned subsidiaries: Kuwait Oil Co Ltd; Iraq Petroleum Co Ltd; and Shell-Mex & B.P. Ltd.” https​:/​/bl​​ogs​.w​​arwic​​k​.ac.​​uk​/bp​​archi​​​ve​/ about/.​ 37 https://www.bpvideolibrary.com/how_to_search_for_footage.

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38 Moreover, as Nadia Bozak made plain in The Cinematic Footprint, cinema itself “is intricately woven into industrial culture and the energy economy that sustains it.” Nadia Bozak, The Cinematic Footprint Lights, Camera, Natural Resources (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2012), 1. 39 Wilson et al., Petrocultures, 12. The editors argue, “Extractivist, capitalist production has resulted in what is now being referred to as the Anthropocene: human-induced climate change on such a scale and to such a degree that it can now be mapped within geological time. Of course, this geological term redistributes responsibility for the negative impacts on our planetary ecosystem to all ‘humans,’ when these outcomes have largely been caused by populations in the global West, and by those with the greatest access to power—fossil fuels and capital—within those zones. To successfully undertake an energy transition in this century, it is essential to unravel these logics and our attachments to them in order to better understand the material and immaterial infrastructures and superstructures that shape our daily lived realities and govern our choices and mobilities within existing social, economic, and political networks.” 40 See After Oil for an astute analyses of various transition scenarios, including transition “without loss” led by corporations. 41 I am grateful to the editors of this volume, Marina Dahlquist and Patrick Vonderau, as well as Ross Melnick and Jia Ching Chen for their insightful contributions to my thinking and writing about oil media archives in this chapter.

2 “All the Earmarks of Propaganda” Teapot Dome, The World Struggle for Oil, and Defining Corporate Rhetoric Jeremy Groskopf

The United States Government . . . has made extensive use of films, nearly all of its departments having utilized them in educational and industrial work. . . . The oil industry has been particularly responsive, moved by a desire to have the public fully understand its problems and processes. EVENING STAR (PEEKSKILL, NY, JANUARY 5, 1927)1

O

ver the course of the early 1920s, the United States Bureau of Mines vastly increased its acquisition and circulation of industrial films. Morton F. Leopold, head of film production for both the commerce and interior departments, advised, supervised, and acquired hundreds of films paid for by private businesses, and circulated them to nontheatrical screenings (predominantly in educational venues, such as MIT and the Field Museum of Chicago) for nothing

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but the cost of shipping.2 As is clear from the epigraph, the oil industry was “particularly responsive,” but the stated reason for this responsiveness (“to have the public fully understand its problems”) was remarkably disingenuous. In the early twentieth century, the American oil industry faced numerous crises. From the 1911 Standard Oil monopoly case to the Teapot Dome scandal of the 1920s, the ethics of the oil industry were a common topic of conversation. The “problems” that Bureau circulated oil films addressed, however, were related solely to the physical toil of draining oil from the ground and the complexity of refining. Thus, the films were not designed to foster “full understanding”; they were rhetorical constructs—institutional advertisements—designed to increase understanding in one area (the complexity of the task) while whitewashing a secondary problem (ethical lapses). This dual intent, left intentionally unmentioned in the boilerplate of the time, raises important issues for the study of American industrial films in general, and oil films in particular. Take, for example, Thomas Elsaesser’s conceptual schema of the “three As” of industrial films: the Auftraggeber (“who commissioned the film”), Anlass (“what was the occasion for which it was made”), and Adressat (“to what use was it put or to whom was it addressed”).3 What do we do with a film that has one addressee but two purposes—to educate and to advertise? To both provide accurate data and ideologically proselytize? For early industrial film, designed for the purpose of “dramatizing a business,” this is a common problem. See, for example, the following description of an institutional advertisement for telephones: First a home is shown. A woman, alone, late at night. A burglar enters. There is no telephone. He binds and gags the woman, fills his sack with silver, and departs. Emboldened by success, he enters a home further down the street. But there is a telephone there, and the occupant quickly calls into the receiver, and the play ends in a tableau, with the burglar in the hands of the police.4 One can imagine this parable of increased safety bolstered even further with data about the number of burglaries thwarted by telephone. But there is no amount of data that could be included that would change the fundamental goal of the piece: raising the perceived value of the product in the public mind. The educational content was the foot in the door, and the advertising content was the reason for entry. Neither was more or less important than the other; from the company’s perspective, if the educational content didn’t work then the advertising was useless, and vice versa. This chapter takes up the question of the double edge of the industrial film with a provocative case study: the Sinclair Oil mega-educational The World

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Struggle for Oil (1923)—a seven-reel, feature-length opus, complete with period costume scenes and historical reconstructions. The film is instructive for the way in which it adopts this double edge—imparting educational content in a hagiographic frame by describing the “problems and processes” of oil in a manner that idealizes the behavior of the men and machines, which provide this modern necessity. The film is even more important, however, for its specific historical trajectory. The World Struggle for Oil was an educational film designed to boost the Sinclair brand at the exact moment when Sinclair was caught in an act of outright bribery of a government official—the signature event in what is generically known as the Teapot Dome scandal (though it actually involved multiple oil fields and oil companies). Though such PR-oriented films were not out of the ordinary, the timing and rhetorical sleight of hand of the film did not go unnoticed. It resulted in significant hand-wringing in certain quarters of the government, and some shifts in government film practice. Although no one was imprisoned, fired, or even fined for the making or circulation of the film, The World Struggle for Oil delayed the distribution of other oil films and sparked debate over how best to delimit the government circulation of such films. It was, thus, a key moment in the establishment of the limits of corporate rhetoric in government venues.

Of Oil, the Interior, and Teapot Dome In the years immediately following the First World War, American culture had fantasized its way into an oil crisis. After the enormous importance of American oil to the winning of the war, and the rise of the personal automobile, panic rapidly set in that oil demands would soon exceed supply. Some particularly pessimistic forecasts predicted the end of American oil reserves in as little as a decade. Thus, the maintenance of a strategic oil reserve had become a key element of national policy. Though the panic was short-lived, in the near term it created a rush to stabilize the naval reserves, leading to debates about whether such stability was best achieved by restricting all access to government-held fields or by trading access for barrels of refined oil and storage spaces.5 This decision fell to Albert B. Fall, recently appointed head of the Department of the Interior by President Warren G. Harding.6 The Harding administration was notoriously scandal-plagued. His appointees to the director of the Veterans Bureau (Charles R. Forbes), attorney general (Harry M. Daugherty), and secretary of the interior (Albert B. Fall) were all tried for illegal behavior by the end of the 1920s with two (Forbes and Fall) serving time in prison.

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The most public and still best known of these corruption cases was that of Fall. As secretary of the interior, Fall accepted $300,000 worth of bribes (the equivalent of roughly $4.5 million in 2019), from Harry Sinclair, of Mammoth Oil, and E. L. Doheny, of Pan-American Petroleum. These bribes secured the leasing rights to the government-held oil fields at Teapot Dome, Wyoming, and Elk Hills, California, respectively.7 In March of 1923, deeply frustrated by the persistent opposition of conservationists to his agenda of exploiting western lands, Fall resigned as secretary of the interior. Although the Teapot Dome investigation would not reach fever pitch until the following year, the leases were already contested and under investigation prior to his departure.8 Harding thus appointed postmaster-general Hubert Work (a close compatriot of Will Hays, head of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America) to the position, in an attempt to improve the department’s public reputation. Work’s immediate policy positions were oriented toward PR. Although he appeared unconcerned by Fall’s actions—at one point calling the investigation an “annoyance” largely exacerbated by Democrats “for want of a campaign issue”—Work directly countered much of Fall’s approach to the job by publicly embracing conservationism, inaugurating an open door policy, and encouraging his employees to write more “considerate and intelligent” responses to inquiries.9 In one key way, however, Work not only retained but also magnified an operational practice of Albert Fall. Work’s sense of “transparency” included not only an “open door” but also an ability of the public to “look in” and watch the department as it functioned. Work’s method of choice for this element of transparency was film, as he “almost doubled” the Department of the Interior’s film output in his first year on the job, and claimed, “[t]he American people would rather see [information] in a picture than read it on a [dry and tiresome] printed page.”10 The Department of the Interior had been making and circulating educational films for years, under the supervision of Morton F. Leopold.11 Though Leopold too had been accused of taking bribes (a charge of which he was cleared), he was not stained by association with Fall.12 Leopold continued, over the early 1920s, to refine his ideas about a zero-cost film library for the US government, where private businesses paid for the films, updates were routinely shot and inserted, and the finished products were circulated free of charge to all interested parties both foreign and domestic.13 As Work and Leopold ramped up operations, Teapot Dome became a seemingly endless source of negative press. The congressional investigation began in earnest in late 1923.14 Public notoriety reached its peak in early 1924, when Fall refused to answer any further questions on the grounds of selfincrimination, and Congress passed a joint resolution to cancel the leases at Teapot Dome and Elk Hills.15 In short, although the leases were signed in April

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1922, the full fury of the scandal did not break until the first quarter of 1924. It would remain front-page news across the country throughout the year, as corruption in general—and Teapot Dome in particular—became a major campaign issue for both parties. Beginning in April, for example, the official investigation into Teapot Dome took on the tone of broader malfeasance. Some politicians were convinced that a large-scale “oil conspiracy” was the lynchpin of the nomination of Warren G. Harding; Will Hays, then chairman of the Republican National Committee, was in fact considered the likely contact point between the Republican Party and the oil industry, which purportedly paid off the party’s vast campaign debts.16

Industrial/Educational Films Inside and Outside of the Government The notion of the superiority of motion pictures to print, which Hubert Work had begun to voice in 1923, was increasingly common at the time. Although direct advertising in American theaters continued its relentless slide into disfavor over the 1910s,17 indirect advertising through “industrial” and “educational” pictures was in a growth phase. Over the course of the 1910s, as various formats developed, a clear sense of the value of an “educational” film for advertising purposes had arisen. Advertisers were commissioning short protodocumentaries of their manufacturing plants and products, and using the finished films in sales lectures describing the quality of their goods.18 By the following year, advertising theorists were already describing motion pictures as the perfection of pictorial advertising; advertising journalist Joseph B. Baker asserted that motion picture advertising created “subconscious impression[s that] ripen into conscious volition,” practically compelling a purchase through brand imagery resting “in the background of the mind.”19 The US government was an early adopter of the form, with the Department of Agriculture, the National Park Service, and others recording and circulating images of their work as early as 1908.20 Such films, deemed educational in their public descriptions, were also a public relations move designed to “sell” the public on the value of the government branches responsible for their production. In short, even in government-funded films, the intention of a film was doubleedged. As the film and consumer products industries continued to develop the sense of the value of seeing products and production in lifelike motion (“seeing is believing”), the rise of a postwar theory of the power of film to boost international trade became a powerful motivator for the creation of more and

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more industrial films.21 The Bureau of Commercial Economics (a privately funded group) began circulating such films heavily both within the United States and overseas for reasons as diverse as Americanization, safety preparedness, and boosting international circulation of American goods.22 Alongside continued efforts to circulate industrial films as “educational” reels in mainstream theaters, an entire nontheatrical circuit was slowly assembled to provide regular screenings across the country. By this time, educational advertising films were typically demonstration films, in which “[n]o great prominence is made of our [brand] name; it is on the side of the tractor . . . and mentioned in the title of the film.”23 In short, educationals were double-edged documentary puff pieces, in which information appeared to outweigh the advertising that was only apparent in product placement and/or sponsorship. In these postwar years, through a series of otherwise unrelated shorts and features, the oil industry waged a haphazard institutional advertising campaign for the value of oil—fueling the sense of its centrality to modern life, celebrating the successes of modern drilling and refining, and painting oil companies as our faithful shepherds into an oil-soaked future. The Standard Oil Company was the pacesetter. From 1916 to 1918, the Camel Film Company produced a series of advertising cartoons and live action shorts for Standard Oil’s Perfection oil-burning stove.24 In 1919, the Rothacker Film Manufacturing Company produced Standard’s magnum opus: a twelve-reel “comprehensive pictorial record” of all of the elements that go into the production of oil and oil products.25 Three one-reel educationals on oil drilling also found their way into news pictorial series in 1921, and may have been directly funded by the oil industry: Liquid Gold in Texas (Kineto Company of America), The Oil Industry (Harcol Film Company), and Mexican Oil Fields (Burton Holmes/Famous Players-Lasky).26 Leopold too was sold on the theories of the postwar educational boom; it is the origin point of his notion of privately funded government cinema, which he would develop and execute at the Department of the Interior during his thirty-year career. For Leopold, the primary use value of film was as an avenue to truth; in an expansion of the concept that “seeing is believing,” Leopold argued that “the realistic medium of the motion picture” could help to counter misconceptions about American industry, private business, and the quality of products. As a primarily image-based medium—a purportedly “universal language”—film was also relatively easy to move across international lines. In addition, the Bureau could offer the opportunity to regularly reedit and update the films, while also trading on the perception of government honesty (the viewer “can be assured that every scene . . . has been . . . reviewed by . . . government representatives and therefore are true to facts to the smallest detail”).27 Surprisingly, although the Bureau of Commercial Economics was

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already well aware of the legal problems in the government circulation of films featuring brand names,28 Leopold and the Bureau of Mines were (initially) unconcerned. Indeed, Leopold’s early writing on the subject openly stated that the films would feature both the “plants and products” of the companies paying for them to be made. Two surviving films—The Story of Petroleum and The World Struggle for Oil—are known to feature significant brand visibility. It is no wonder, then, that many of the companies cooperating with the Bureau “considered the investment a most paying one.”29 An early and boisterous adopter of Leopold’s method was the Sinclair Consolidated Oil Corporation. Their first film with the Bureau of Mines was the four-reel Story of Petroleum (1921), which used the construction of a well as an introduction to multiple reels on the construction and maintenance of pipelines. Their second film was the four-reel Mexico and Its Oil (1921): a document of the construction of an oil well humanized by the inclusion of Mexican cultural practices.30 Sometime in late 1922 or early 1923, Sinclair’s third coproduction with the Bureau of Mines—The World Struggle for Oil—began filming.31 In brief, The World Struggle for Oil recounts a mythic history of the growth of both human reliance on and production of oil—or, in the parlance of the time, “all the romance of oil.”32 The full narrative arc of the complete seven-reel version takes the viewer through millennia of human ingenuity and endeavor to the incomprehensibly vast machinery of a modern industry. The film uses various tactics to build a list of reasons to love the oil industry, before descending into a flood of Sinclair branding. The full film separates into three clear sections: preindustrial, early industrial, and Sinclair branding. The first section consists of the first two reels plus some footage integrated into reel three. Deftly interweaving both cultural and class power and mobility, these two reels are an act of overt mythmaking. Christian elements ranging from Noah’s Ark (smeared with pitch), to Moses’s basket (also smeared with pitch) to the defense of Babylon (using flaming pitch) trace a line of mystical power for raw oil. Early commercial value is likewise stressed through images of oil trading in ancient Egypt and colonial America. The two rhetorical lines blur together through the hagiography of the Drake oil well in reel two. Although the Drake footage introduces the viewer to details of drilling technology, the imagery borders on divine intervention. Slow tilts up the wooden structure give way to an Eisensteinian montage of the poor locals whose lives will be radically improved by the success of the well. Although Drake himself was not a wealthy man either before or after the digging of the well, the figure of Drake, in top hat and tails, carries the connotation of a benefactor: oil wells appear as a gift given to us by hardworking Americans at the behest of an idealized entrepreneur.

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The second section is the longest, consisting of reel four and the bulk of reels three and five. In this section, the pace picks up considerably, as does the educational content, as the viewer is taken through a whirlwind of industrialization. Over the course of this section, a rising focus on large-scale machinery predominates, as huge factories—full to bursting with vast numbers of identical machines—fill the screen. In this section, we also see examples of the then common rhetorical use of smoke “not for the purpose of obscuring the sky, but [a]s one of the insignia of industrious effort to supply consumable goods for the use, comfort and enjoyment of mankind.”33 Interleaved throughout the educational content of this section are various moments of advertising rhetoric about the human benefits of modern oil, ranging from the horrors of the First World War to the silliness of a mother using an oil lamp to keep two youths from sexually misbehaving after sunset. The final section is comprised of the remaining film, plus a single shot in reel five. In this section, the educational material becomes merely a pretext for almost inconceivable amounts of branding. After a seemingly hesitant image of Sinclair Opaline Motor Oil containers near the end of reel five, reel six is an avalanche—ten minutes of excuses to integrate the Sinclair name as frequently as possible into depictions of modern life. Among numerous items we see gas stations, stoves, kerosene lamps, and loaded trains (billowing “industrious” black smoke, of course), along with a plague of automobiles. Roughly four minutes into reel six, Sinclair practically taunts the audience by including Teapot Dome in an unlabeled map of US drilling locations. Throughout, we see estimates of global production and consumption of oil, clunky metaphors for human reliance upon it (enough tank cars to circle the equator nine times!), and a clear implication that more drilling is needed in order to remain ahead of everincreasing demand. Bafflingly, a baby is shown oiling a sewing machine in reel six, seeming to indicate that, by this point, the film has infantilized the general public. After more than an hour idealizing its products (through biblical imagery) and itself (through the image of Drake and enormous machines), the conclusion is difficult to interpret as anything less than a demand that the viewer be grateful to the oil industry (and Sinclair in particular) for making modern life possible. Although this breakdown accurately describes The World Struggle for Oil as circulated by the Bureau of Mines, the film existed in at least two other versions—a four- and a five-reel version—both created for mainstream theatrical distribution. It is possible that each abbreviated version simply omitted full reels. In April of 1924, the four-reel version was screened at New York’s Cameo theater; this version contained footage from reels one, three, five, and six.34 A few months later, Selznick was circulating a five-reel (4,410 feet) version of indeterminate content.35 The release strategies for these versions will be discussed below.

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Production and Release Controversy Over The World Struggle for Oil In this milieu, it may seem unlikely that a congress and public focused on Teapot Dome would overlook a filmic love letter to the oil industry, produced by a partnership of the Bureau of Mines and Sinclair Oil, and released in June 1923. However, for nearly a year that is exactly what happened. The World Struggle for Oil is, thus, an example of exactly how little attention both the public and the federal government gave to nontheatrical educational films in the early 1920s. The Bureau began circulating the film immediately—as evidenced by an October screening at an oil convention in 192336—but it was ignored almost entirely by the film trades, the popular press, the public, and the rest of the US government. No one seemed troubled by it in the slightest, or to even be aware of its existence. In the second quarter of 1924, however, an attempt to exhibit the film theatrically, independent of the Bureau of Mines, pushed the film into the growing controversy by using Teapot Dome as a marketing tactic. During the first week of April, New York City’s Broadway exhibitors were offered $5,000 to play a four-reel (forty-eight-minute) “semi-educational” version of the film. (The Bureau continued to circulate its own copies simultaneously; the film screened at MIT in early May.37) Variety declared that the sales pitch for the film had “all the earmarks of propaganda on behalf of the Sinclair Oil interests”; exhibitors, meanwhile, largely declined the offer on the grounds that they were “not anxious to become involved in the present investigation at Washington.” In a fascinatingly blatant act of “poking the bear,” the film was marketed, in the Exhibitor’s Trade Review, specifically as an opportunity to profit from “the Teapot Dome scandal ha[ving] brought the oil question before the public.”38 Despite the hesitation of most in the film field, the gamble appears to have paid off handsomely. Two weeks later, the Cameo Theater played the film for a full week—beginning April 20.39 By early June, a deal had been struck with Selco Pictures (a Selznick subsidiary) for national distribution.40 Selznick advertised the film heavily through August and September, maintaining the ”scandal marketing” tactic through the inclusion of implicit references to Teapot Dome in multiple ads. In one, the copy read: “Millions are reading of the World Struggle for Oil in the Daily Papers of Every City; Millions will be made with the World Struggle for Oil by Exhibitors who book this extraordinary feature . . . and play it now while interest in oil is at fever heat.”41 A second ad compared the sales power of controversy to the drawing power of real-world dramatic events, declaring: “Famous has its Covered Wagon, First National has its Sea Hawk, Fox has its Iron Horse, but Selznick has the only picture on a subject the entire country has gone wild over—OIL; (On the front page of every paper).”42

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Perhaps inevitably, the congressional investigation into Teapot Dome took notice of the Bureau’s ties to the film—specifically questioning who else, aside from Selznick and exhibitors, stood to benefit from the film’s circulation. On October 3, the Democratic National Committee (DNC) released a statement declaring the film to be indirect “propaganda for the oil business” designed to foster goodwill with the public and thus “offset some of the odium which has attached itself to the business” during the Teapot Dome investigation. Although the statement conceded that “[t]here is no direct defense of any of the recently exposed practices of Sinclair and Doheny,” the DNC took issue with the film’s heroic depiction of the “bold captains of [the oil] industry” as “patriotic philanthropists, who should have the sincere gratitude of the people” for succeeding in the “heroic struggle” to provide for the modern oil needs of humanity.43 As is clear from the above description of the film’s contents, all of the interpretations offered by the DNC are manifestly true, and the “odium” claim, though perhaps too stridently conspiratorial, is plausible. In a time when ethics in the oil industry were hotly contested, the claptrap about the rewards of hard work, communal benefits, and the ever-improving quality of the product, combined with the imagery of gleaming machines and happy babies, gives the impression that oil is good, more oil is necessary, and we should all get on board the oil love train. The film’s cohesive vision of the uniform benefits of oil to humanity may have been an act of predictably slanted institutional memory, but it was also a calculated attempt to encourage this view of the oil industry in other viewers. As an “education,” the film’s positive portrayal of oil men could not help but counter what often appeared to the masses to be politicized assertions of unethical behavior. In a seemingly damning revelation, the Democratic statement revealed that “official records . . . show that . . . the manufacture of the film was started under Secretary [Albert B.] Fall.”44 The obvious conclusion—at least to the authors of the statement—was that the film was a relic of Secretary Fall’s problematic relationship with Sinclair Oil, and was being circulated by his successor, Hubert Work, with the direct intention of blunting public hostility. In tune with the thinking at the height of Teapot Dome—that it was part of a larger conspiracy—the statement even implies that Selznick may have been paid to circulate the film, and that exhibitors showing the film were likewise being paid to screen it. Regardless of the veracity of many of these assertions, the takeaway from the statement seems unassailable: The film contains the official seal of the Bureau of Mines, showing it has been approved by the department. This seal is displayed as the picture is

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run, on every occasion where shown, as also is the fact that the picture was made by the Sinclair Oil Corporation, thus announcing to every spectator that the Sinclair Company is on intimate terms with the Bureau of Mines—the very governmental office having jurisdiction over oil matters. This display also advises the public, indirectly, that Harry Sinclair not only was an intimate of an indicted Secretary of the Interior but has sufficient standing with the present Administration of the Interior Department to induce it to exploit his oil business.45 In short, the film’s simultaneous status as educational film and advertising film rendered it deeply problematic. Even if the film was nothing more than a relic of a former conflict of interest, the continued screening of the Sinclair logo under the seal of the Bureau of Mines was a constant insinuation that the problem persisted. How could the public trust the Department of the Interior if it continued to circulate evidence of its own misbehavior—especially when that evidence seemed intentionally to paint the misbehavior in a positive light? By December, concerns about the film entered the legal wrangling in the House of Representatives, as Texas Democrat Thomas L. Blanton initiated a brief but testy exchange on the possibility that the Bureau of Mines was using public funds for advertising, which “may accrue to the benefit of individuals and corporations.” Blanton proposed an amendment to the financial rules enjoining the Bureau from spending any public dollars on motion pictures that advertised the goods of private businesses. By calling attention to the appearance, in a 1924 Bureau catalog, of multiple Sinclair-affiliated films, it is clear that Teapot Dome and The World Struggle for Oil were the source of his concern. Michigan Republican Louis C. Cramton and Arkansas Democrat Otis Wingo—likewise reliant upon the Bureau catalog—countered that any such stipulation might negatively impact the Bureau’s work in circulating workplace safety films; Crampton and Wingo thus asserted that the best course of action was to take the Bureau at its word and presume that all films were funded without tax dollars.46 Though the amendment was defeated in a snap vote, and no one in the room had any more information than what was available in the catalog, Blanton was technically correct. In 1923, H. Foster Bain, director of the Bureau of Mines, admitted that the Bureau was paying employees to advise and supervise film productions, though this cost amounted to “less than 1%” of the total cost of the Bureau’s film library; at $500,000 estimated value, then, the Bureau had used $5,000 worth of tax dollars—the equivalent of about $75,000 in 2017.47 The amount was negligible, but nonetheless technically a breach of government ethics. In the wake of this boisterous questioning of what was supposed to be a source of positive PR, the Department of the Interior rapidly became skittish

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about further film activities. It is telling that the Annual Report of the Director of the Bureau of Mines made no mention of motion picture work in 1925 (which covered the fiscal year from July 1924 to June 1925—during which time the Bureau circulated films heavily). Motion pictures were also absent from the 1926 report. In the 1924 and 1927–31 reports, film receives nearly a full page.48 The Bureau was not simply silent about its film activities, however. By March of 1925, it put a temporary halt on film production with “no definite intention of resuming the work.” Although “officials of the Interior Department” declared that the controversy over The World Struggle for Oil was immaterial to this decision, all contextual evidence is to the contrary. Even the 1920s trade press, when reporting the change, immediately countered the official narrative, pointing out that “the tendency recently has been to avoid all activities which may open the way for charges of undue intimacy with oil interests.”49 The stoppage and silence appear, in hindsight, to have been calculated strategies to keep the controversy from spreading to other films that were likely to draw unwelcome attention. In December of 1925, nine months after the announcement of the hiatus, the Bureau of Mines released Through Oil Lands of Europe and Africa—a nine-reel combination of oil field footage and cultural tourism, produced in association with E. L. Doheny’s Pan-American Petroleum (the company that had held the contested Elk Hills lease).50 The film had been in production “during the last six months of the year 1924”— the very moment when the spotlight turned so angrily on The World Struggle for Oil.51 In short, the release of Through Oil Lands of Europe and Africa was delayed by nearly a full year, providing twelve months’ worth of distance from the height of the controversy. The gambit—if such it was—appears to have worked. No controversy arose over the Doheny-related film, and the Bureau continued to produce and release films regularly thereafter.52 Longer-term effects are also apparent. Morton F. Leopold’s approach to brand imagery shifted from welcoming to forbidding over the course of the latter 1920s. A 1922 article, signed by Leopold himself, indicates that the overt inclusion of trade names was perfectly acceptable as long as the film itself was edifying.53 Indeed, the description of brand imagery in this article reads like a sales pitch, indicating that branding may have been a key part of his early success in finding companies to fully fund these films. By the early 1930s however (and probably much earlier), Leopold began to refuse all on-screen branding outside of the titles on reel one. By 1933, The World Struggle for Oil was reedited as a three-reel film called The Evolution of the Oil Industry.54 In this truncated version of the film, all overt Sinclair trade imagery was removed.55 In the two extant versions of The Evolution

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of the Oil Industry, the only visible trademark is a Caterpillar logo on an operating tractor—a company unaffiliated with the production and circulation of the film. By 1942, Leopold was so reluctant to include brand images that the cost of production for a new film was significantly increased by repainting “several hundred tank cars . . . so that no trade name would appear upon them.”56 In other words, the interleaving of educational and institutional advertising was allowed to continue unquestioned, as all blame was placed squarely on brand visibility. The World Struggle for Oil was, then, retroactively determined to only have been problematic because of the obviousness of Sinclair’s input.

Conclusion The World Struggle for Oil, though its importance was minimized in the official history of the Department of the Interior, was a key film in the developing relationship between private funding and public circulation for government film in the United States. The interaction of the Bureau of Mines and the Sinclair Oil Company, at the exact moment that the relationship between the two was being questioned, resulted in the unexpected intrusion of land-leasing ethics into motion picture policy. Film production under Morton F. Leopold—which would continue until his death in 195157—was fundamentally altered by the expanding fumes around Teapot Dome. But this alteration was little more than obfuscation, as it served only to conceal the source of advertising rhetoric by hiding brand names. The film is thus an instructive case study in the complex interplay of public notoriety, government oversight, and marketing rhetoric. There is no evidence that even the fury of Teapot Dome was enough, on its own, to call attention to a blatantly problematic film being circulated by the Department of the Interior. However, the desire to push the film into mainstream theaters—whether prompted by a desire for profit (selling the film to a mainstream distributor) or greater influence (many more people went to theaters than nontheatrical shows)—called dangerous attention to the film, and resulted in large-scale questioning of the ethics of the motion picture arm of the department. The dual intention of the film as both education and advertising—which may have gone largely unnoticed in the absence of the controversy as a marketing hook—became the film’s key feature. Leopold’s response was to more strongly delimit what a film circulated by the government could be allowed to do. Although advertising was by no means stripped from government

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­ lmmaking in the wake of the controversy, the definition of acceptable and fi unacceptable advertising was tightened, removing direct branding from the list of suitable behaviors. After The World Struggle for Oil, institutional advertising continued unabated in government film; The Evolution of the Oil Industry has, after all, the exact same “gratitude to the oil industry” message. The “missionary” approach of the films funded by American Petroleum Institute from the late 1920s onward (see Chapter 6 of this volume) provides further evidence of the retention of institutional advertising in these films. Likewise, sponsorship remained low-key but present—the leader and trailer footage of any given film would identify the company that had paid for the production of the film. However, images of trademarks were redefined as “direct advertising”—a too clear solicitation of business from private interests—and banished.

Notes 1 “How a President Started a World Film Exchange,” Peekskill Evening Star, January 5, 1927: 5. 2 “World Struggle for Oil Shown in Movies,” The Tech, May 7, 1924: 1. “News and Notes,” Educational Screen (December 1927): 467. 3 Thomas Elsaesser, “Archives and Archaeologies: The Place of Non-fiction Film in Contemporary Media,” in Vinzenz Hediger and Patrick Vonderau (eds.), Films That Work: Industrial Film and the Productivity of Media (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2009), 23. 4 James H. Collins, “Advertising via the Moving Picture,” Printers’ Ink 70, no. 8 (February 23, 1910): 24–6, 28. 5 David H. Stratton, Tempest over Teapot Dome: The Story of Albert B. Fall (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1998), 229–30, 260. 6 Ibid., 201–2. 7 J. Leonard Bates, “The Teapot Dome Scandal and the Election of 1924,” American Historical Review 60, no. 2 (January 1955): 304. See also: Statton, Tempest over Teapot Dome, 243. 8 Stratton, Tempest over Teapot Dome, 257. 9 Eugene P. Trani, “Hubert Work and the Department of the Interior, 1923-28,” Pacific Northwest Quarterly 61, no. 1 (January 1970): 31–4. C. H. Moore, “Future of the Screen in Education and Industrials,” Reel and Slide 2, no. 8 (August 1919): 9–10. 10 “Governmental Dep’ts Advertising Activities Through Motion Pictures,” Variety, July 9, 1924: 22, 29. 11 “Government Director at Rothacker Plant,” Motion Picture News, March 19, 1921: 2077. “Manufacturers Hear About Industrials; Cohen Claims Circulation of 2,250,000,” Moving Picture World, April 22, 1922: 833.

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12 “No Basis for ‘Favors’ Charge with Official Dept. Pictures,” Variety, November 29, 1923: 20. Leopold, in fact, would remain the central figure in government film production until his death in the early 1950s. “Passing of Morton F. Leopold Ends 30 Years of Film Activity,” Business Screen 12, no. 8 (December 1951): 16. 13 Arthur Edwin Krows, “Motion Pictures – Not for Theatres,” Educational Screen (January 1942): 15–16. 14 Robert A. Waller, “Business and the Initiation of the Teapot Dome Investigation,” Business History Review 36, no. 3 (Autumn 1962): 348. 15 “Joint Resolution of Congress Respecting Prosecution for Cancellation of Oil, February 8, 1924,” in Erik Bruun and Jay Crosby (eds.), Our Nation’s Archive: The History of the United States in Documents (New York: Tess Press, 2009), 567–8. 16 Bates, “The Teapot Dome Scandal and the Election of 1924,” 304, 319. This conspiracy was still being investigated as late as 1928, when Will Hays was finally subpoenaed to testify. “Hays Before Senate Committee in March,” Variety, February 15, 1928: 5. 17 Through a combination of theatrical beautification, technical problems, legal restraint, and simple hostility (from exhibitors, spectators, and trade commentators alike), all approaches to direct advertising in the American cinema were slowly pushed into a position of disfavor. By the early 1920s, direct advertising was typically only used as a “chasers” in lower-class neighborhood theaters in the United States. See: Jeremy Groskopf, Profit Margins: The American Silent Cinema and the Marginalization of Advertising (Indiana University Press, forthcoming). 18 Collins, “Advertising via the Moving Picture,” 26. 19 Joseph B. Baker, “Examples of Motion Picture Advertising,” Motography 5, no. 6 (June 1911): 133. 20 Krows, “Motion Pictures—Not for Theatres,” 14–17. 21 Seeing is believing (among many other examples): Edwin L. Barker, “Picture and Lecture Publicity,” Advertising & Selling, March 1913: 56; and “The Cinema as a Medium for Making Sales,” Simmons’ Spice Mill, April 1919: 468, 470. International: Horace G. Plimpton, “The Commercial Motion Picture in South America,” American Industries 18, no. 8 (March 1918): 16–17; “Using the Film in Export Advertising,” Advertising & Selling 29, no. 48 (May 22, 1920): 27; and “U.S. Uses Films to Stimulate Trade,” Film Daily, October 20, 1922: 6. 22 Publicity with Motion Pictures (Washington, DC: Bureau of Commercial Economics, 1920). My thanks to Dr. Kathy Fuller-Seeley for access to a personal copy. 23 Harlow P. Roberts, “How Our Company Uses Motion Pictures,” Moving Picture Age (March 1921): 17–18. 24 N. H. Reed, “Standard Oil Screens Cartoons as Selling Medium for Stoves,” Reel and Slide 1, no. 2 (April 1918): 31. “The Other Fellow’s Idea,” Reel and Slide 1, no. 3 (May/June 1918): 33.

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25 W. L. Stranker, “Story of Oil Told by Twelve Reels of Moving Pictures,” Reel and Slide 2, no. 7 (July 1919): 17–18. 26 Liquid Gold, “The Film Field,” Visual Education 2, no. 3 (March 1921): 38; and “Some Short Reels,” Wid’s Daily 15, no. 35 (February 6, 1921): 23. Oil Industry: “The Film Field,” Visual Education 2, no. 5 (May 1921): 34. Mexican: “Paramount Film Shows Oil Fields,” Moving Picture World, October 22, 1921: 942; and “Approved Films and Their Sources,” Moving Picture Age 4, no. 12 (December 1921): 23. 27 Morton F. Leopold, “Lining Up Our Silent Salesmen,” American Industries, April 1922: 17–20. 28 “It has been decided that a government cannot display any films containing a trade mark or a trade name, otherwise it would be possible for one institution to secure publicity at the expense of its competitor.” Publicity with Motion Pictures, unpaginated. 29 Morton F. Leopold, “Lining Up Our Silent Salesmen,” American Industries, April 1922: 20. 30 “Industrial Film Notes,” Educational Film Magazine, March 1921: 25; “Three New Mines Bureau Subjects,” Educational Film Magazine 7, no. 1 (January 1922): 17. For the length of the Mexico film, see: “Government Films,” Film Daily, January 20, 1923: 3; and “Film Service,” Visual Education, December 1924: 458. A group of former Selznick employees were hired by Sinclair to make a film as well; the title is unknown, but it was finished by the middle of 1922. “Tec-Art Studios, Inc., Formed,” Film Daily 20, no. 67 (June 7, 1922): 1. 31 The film was finished in June of 1923. See: “Says Sinclair Film Has Federal Aid,” New York Times, October 4, 1924: 2; and “Eighty Industrial Pictures Available from U.S.,” Motion Picture News, July 7, 1923: 48. 32 “Newspaper Opinions on New Pictures,” Motion Picture News, October 30, 1926: 1706. 33 “Utilizing the ‘Movies’ in Industrial Betterment,” Industry, November 1, 1921: 11. 34 4 reel: “$5,000 As Bonus to Show Oil Film,” Variety, April 9, 1924: 15. 48 min: Fred., “The World Struggle for Oil,” Variety, April 23, 1924: 20. 35 “Current and Advance Film Releases,” Moving Picture World, October 11, 1924: 526. Two years later, Pathe also circulated a five-reel version of the film, seeming to indicate that there was one five-reel cut considered acceptable for mainstream exhibitors. “Pathe Acquires Unique Film, ‘World Struggle for Oil,’” Motion Picture News, October 23, 1926: 1581. 36 “‘The World’s Struggle for Oil, History of Oil,’” Bolivar Breeze (Bolivar, NY), October 11, 1923: 1. 37 “World Struggle for Oil Shown in Movies,” The Tech, May 7, 1924: 1. 38 “The World Struggle for Oil,” Exhibitors’ Trade Review, May 3, 1924: 35. 39 It is worth noting that the results of the Cameo screening were not particularly positive. Two different accounts in Variety claim that theatrical

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revenue for the week was low. The later (likely more accurate) account claims that the theater only made $3,400 for the week. The earlier account claims the theater made $3,230 even after the promised money (here declared to be $6,000) was spent on advertising. Although a direct comparison with other Broadway theaters would be unreasonable, as the Cameo was the smallest on the strip, these numbers are lower than previous films earned at the same theater; for example, the tallies at the Cameo for two earlier weeks in April were $4,310 and $3,743. “Broadway’s Big Box Office Week Rolls Up Grosses of $238,000,” Variety, April 30, 1924: 16; “‘Girl Shy’ Breaks Record and Gets Third Week Holdover at Strand,” Variety, May 7, 1924: 20, 34. Earlier takes: “Two Pictures in Big B’Way Houses Probably Holding over Next Week,” Variety, April 2, 1924: 21; and “Huge Drops in Grosses Last Week All Along Pictures Main Stem,” Variety, April 16, 1924: 21. 40 “Selznick Gets Oil Film,” Film Daily, June 5, 1924: 5. 41 Display Ad, Film Daily, September 4, 1924: 2. 42 Display Ad, Film Daily, September 22, 1924: 4. 43 “Says Sinclair Film Has Federal Aid,” 2. 44 Ibid. 45 Ibid. 46 Congressional Record: Proceedings and Debates of the Second Session of the Sixty-Eighth Congress, Volume LXVI – Part 1 (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1925): 232–4. For a short summary, see: “In Congress,” Film Daily, December 14, 1924: 10. 47 Thirteenth Annual Report by the Director of the Bureau of Mines to the Secretary of the Interior (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1923), 4. 48 See, for example: Fourteenth Annual Report by the Director of the Bureau of Mines to the Secretary of the Interior (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1924), 57; and Seventeenth Annual Report by the Director of the Bureau of Mines to the Secretary of the Interior (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1927), 47. 49 “Bureau of Mines Halts Production,” Educational Screen 4, no. 3 (March 1925): 128. 50 “New Government Oil Film,” Film Daily, December 14, 1925: 2. “Recent Productions,” Educational Screen (December 1925): 632. 51 W. J. Archer, “Through Oil Lands of Europe and Africa,” Educational Screen (May 1926): 299–304. 52 “Government Films,” 3; “3,000,000 Persons Saw Gov’t Bu. Films in Year,” Film Daily, July 21, 1933: 7. 53 Leopold, “Lining Up Our Silent Salesmen.” 54 “History of Oil in Film,” Film Daily, February 14, 1933: 4. Continuing popularity: “Bureau of Mines Films Shown 102,462 Times,” Motion Picture Herald, April 9, 1938: 36.

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55 The oldest surviving copy appears to be from the early 1940s, as it includes a voice-over and the first sound version was not announced until 1941. However, much of the footage is from the original 1923 release. Considering that The Evolution of the Oil Industry was always three reels, it is likely that the removal of trademarks occurred immediately. First known sound version: “Department of Interior Releasing Petroleum Film,” Motion Picture Herald, November 1, 1941: 49. 56 Krows, “Motion Pictures – Not for Theatres,” 15. 57 “Passing of Morton F. Leopold Ends 30 Years of Film Activity,” 16.

3 Shell-BP: A Dialogue Patrick Russell and Steven Foxon

Serious surveys . . . far removed from the garage forecourt and the oil-fired boiler. So far, in fact, that we are apt to forget where the money comes from for films like these. —KEN MYER1

We told ourselves that we made them with the greatest sincerity . . . even that they were sponsored with the greatest sincerity. But the question is: were they? —DEREK WILLIAMS2

O

ur subjects here are the Anglo-Dutch company Royal Dutch Shell, better known simply as Shell, and the firm originally called the Anglo-Persian then the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, and finally British Petroleum, better known simply as BP. Shell and BP were—and still are—among the oil giants of our world. Household names in many territories across the globe, they have for generations been fierce competitors—and yet, at times, stealthy collaborators. Never less than sharply aware of one other, both were also among the more globally significant exponents of the industrial filmmaking tradition, their contribution to it marked by that same combination: consortium in certain spheres, competition in many more, and ongoing mutual cognizance. The cinema of one is, in some ways, in dialogue with the cinema of the other. We have therefore chosen the dialogue, rather than the essay, form as the best one with which to explore their cinematic stories comparatively: what follows is an imagined conversation between these two organizations.

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While referencing their earlier and later audiovisual work, their dialogue focuses on their postwar filmmaking. The period marked at its start by the end of the Second World War and at its end by the economic crises of the 1970s, followed by the economic reinvention of the 1980s, represented something of a golden age for both companies’ filmmaking—and, indeed, for a certain model for sponsored filmmaking in general. “Documentary” film now increasingly embedded itself into the culture of large organizations and into their presentation of themselves both to their own staff and to a wider public, nationally and internationally. Film increasingly adapted itself to the increasingly subtle needs of industry, its staff communication and public relations, brand awareness, and discreet product promotion. The information feeding this dialogue is sourced from archival work with, and study of, the films themselves—which are preserved across the collections of the BFI National Archive and of Shell and BP themselves—together with interviews with practitioners and the authors’ study of a range of primary and secondary sources.3

Prologue: Hidden Power4 In which our heroes meet and compare their screen work and their screen personae. Shell: Our films policy had over-arching objectives similar to yours. BP: Similar but not identical. There were differences between our organizations, their business situations and geopolitics. Through film and on film, we presented rather different faces to the world: contrasting selfportraits in oil. Shell: A project we commenced much sooner, investing serious resources, and thought, into the medium years before you . . . BP: . . . leaving us playing catch-up. Our films program took shape in the shadow of and in reaction to yours. But we ascended to comparable heights. We two became, so any informed observer would concede, first among equals, equal first. Shell: The pre-eminent UK players among those many sponsors fueling the industrial films boom running through the 1950s, 1960s, and into the 1970s, the High Renaissance of industrially sponsored filmmaking. BP: Renaissance: a fanciful analogy?

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Shell: Fanciful certainly—but not facetious. In the long view of cultural history, the Renaissance being merely the most prestigious example, the artefacts of visual media have typically been products of patronage. BP: They were commissioned and paid for—sponsored—by church . . . state . . . aristocracy . . . Shell: . . . and trade. For practitioners, corporate patronage was the source of their livelihood and the foundation for their craftsmanship. For their patrons, creative practice generated visual content serving to project their corporate image. Often to protect it. BP: Sometimes to change it. In our own day, film for some industries was narrowly utilitarian, fashioned for exact ephemeral ends. We weren’t total exceptions to that . . . Shell: Nor we, having likewise commissioned our share of precision-tooled films. But at its heart, Shell’s strategy for film was just that: a strategy, not a mere systems tool. BP: Even your more ephemeral films shared high production values, and a house style. Shell: They did. But we sponsored many others whose style and production values were themselves partly the point. Viewers impressed, educated or entertained by them would, we hoped, infer something of the character of their patron from their quality as minor works of art. Their subject matter, tone, form . . . BP: Their aesthetic. Shell: The Shell aesthetic. So much the better if audiences appreciated each as forming part of a stream of similarly good ones. Hence a unique brand image, sitting within the bigger brand of Shell per se . . . BP: (but perhaps also slightly apart from it?) Shell: . . . attached itself to our film production arm: the renowned Shell Film Unit. BP: A difference between us. Here, filmmaking was all outsourced to external production companies. Shell: Our Unit’s origins were bound up with the so-called British documentary movement . . . BP: . . . while our filmmakers lay more in line of descent from more commercial counterparts. But we too came to embrace a strategic approach

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to moving image, putting our name to a corpus becoming more than the sum of its parts. Films which, if always somehow connected to our core business, could be relied upon for informational, entertainment or artistic value. Shell: Our film sponsorship reflected a mid-century conception of public relations: enlightened self-interest . . . BP: . . . prompting classy content commissioning. Evidence, by association, of good taste, public service, engagement with life beyond boardroom, salesroom . . . Shell: . . . platform, pipeline and pump. The Shell film brand was built not on those movies—we both made plenty—showing us searching and drilling for, pipelining, shipping, refining, distributing, marketing and selling oil, or detailing its many onward uses. No, our signature content was films presenting more general treatments of science and technology in austerely beautiful, beautifully clear style. BP: At BP we emulated your polished professionalism, but applied it to films of a different character. Our film brand was based on oil search storytelling, and several spin-off types: well-made travelogues, human interest, even novelty filmmaking. Shell: But the patterns shifted as our industry explored new territories and penetrated new markets . . . BP: . . . as economic conditions, corporate priorities and public perceptions changed, and dynamics altered within and between our two organizations. Shell: But we’re getting ahead of ourselves . . .

Act One: Distant Neighbors5 In which our heroes, informed by their prewar origins, enter the postwar world, tentative beginnings leading to strutting success come the late 1950s. “The aesthetics of clarity”; “the region where art and technology meet and interpenetrate,” “a film machine . . . so consistent in style and interest as to present . . . a great and progressive industrial undertaking with a vast fund of knowledge and skills.” —ARTHUR ELTON6

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The functions of the oil industry . . . [give] the visual side of public relations a wide canvas . . . [and ] provide dramatic—sometimes even spectacular— subjects which rarely occur in other industries . . . Anglo-Iranian does not make direct advertising films . . . it does make films which can be used as aids to marketing . . . providing the right climate for sales . . . films can evoke feelings . . . make people feel well disposed . . . Films also have the power of staying in people’s minds . . . an audience in a darkened cinema must look at the screen—or shut its eyes. —RONALD TRITTON7

BP: Our dabblings in celluloid date at least to the mid-1920s . . . Shell: Likewise. But the British oil-on-film story really starts in 1933–4, when we opened the Shell Film Unit: recommended by John Grierson, advised by his consultancy Film Centre, staffed by his protégés. BP: For some fifteen years thereafter, the story is largely yours . . . Dialogue doesn’t really begin until, postwar, the West’s exhausted economies began recovering . . . Shell: . . . pregnant with possibilities for petroleum. The wartime state had consolidated industries under common national purpose: ours no exception. BP: Indeed. Government managed us through its Petroleum Board, on which we both sat: separate companies, bound by patriotic purpose. Shell: A smaller industry rallied beneath the single flag of wartime service was documentary-making, our Film Unit no exception. Its wartime films were for the Ministry of Information (MOI) and Royal Navy, our exacting technical standards well serving an instructional focus. For documentary, the early postwar years were transitional ones. BP: While the oil industry reverted to peacetime in stages: the Petroleum Board abolished in 1945 and petrol rationing in 1950, branded petrol returning to pumps in 1952. . . . In parallel we both refreshed our relationship with film. Shell: Here’s where we speak of consortia: since 1932, we’d shared our marketing operation, the company Shell-Mex and BP, which across the postwar period independently sponsored its own consumer-facing films, rarely using either our Unit . . . BP: . . . or our regular producers. But their distribution library carried both Shell and BP films alongside its own product. Ditto the Petroleum Films

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Bureau (PFB), the prime UK distribution arm for both our catalogues. The PFB also sponsored some films of its own on consumer use of oil products. Shell: The point being, we could both largely leave hard-sell domestic salesmanship to these outfits. Those making film policy at our parent groups could freely concentrate on loftier filmmaking for both domestic and overseas audiences. BP: But starting from very different positions. Shell: Right. We considered ourselves a progressive dual-listed business, created in 1907 from a merger of Dutch oil and British shipping companies, now present in numerous territories but with particularly pronounced downstream strengths: refining crude oil and distributing its products. Our interwar history of cutting-edge public relations having embraced multiple media, including film (as well as having our film unit, we initially dominated the PFB and Shell-Mex and BP), our upmarket image bestowed competitive advantage in the battle for hearts and minds. BP: We were more old-fashioned, born of an adventurous 1901 oil strike in Persia, our strengths heavily upstream, producing crude. The UK government incidentally owned about half our shares. And our world was centered on Iran. Shell: The clue’s in the name: Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. And in Britain and the West? BP: Our image was weaker. We remained relative strangers to public relations, grudgingly recognizing that now had to change. Shell: At our end, Arthur Elton, card-carrying Griersonian, prewar Shell producer, wartime MOI exec, returned to Film Centre, resuming his position as our films adviser and began fully firing up our Film Unit for postwar business. BP: At ours, Anglo-Iranian started seriously investing in PR functions for the first time, appointing Ronald Tritton to head what we called our Information Department. Our film godfather, as Elton was yours. Shell: Initiative-taking individuals. They, more than any, molded the face with which, on film, two large, growing corporations faced Britain and the world. BP: Individuals with very different personalities themselves. Shell: Very. Elton was a cerebral fellow, steeped in science and engineering history, feeling himself part of a cultural tradition rooted in the Industrial Revolution: the visual interpretation of industry and technology, filtered

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through interwar filmmaking, and media theories, learned at Grierson’s feet. Arthur, rationalist and consultant . . . BP:  . . . versus Ronnie, empiricist and company man. Tritton having fallen into the prewar communications industry and worked his way up, his philosophy of public relations, and film’s place within them, was the product of practice. Having handled Savoy Hotels group publicity in the 1930s, as head of publicity for the War Office he was instrumental in setting up the Army’s wartime film unit. Just before joining us he’d headed the films division of the Central Office of Information. Shell: The COI, peacetime successor to the MOI from which Elton was departing. Incidentally, Tritton was briefly answerable at the COI to none other than Grierson himself.8 Anyhow, Film Centre now actively renewed our prewar reputation for scientific film, marked by the exceptionally successful How an Aeroplane Flies series (1947), the later High Speed Flight sequence (1957) and many more films on physics, like Atomisation (1948), Schlieren (1958) and Frontiers of Friction (1962), or mechanics, from Cornish Beam Engine (1948) to The Forming of Metals (1957). Denis Segaller and Peter de Normanville are two examples of directors who excelled at such filmmaking. BP: Now, if Elton, like Grierson, was a PR-savvy film-man, Tritton was more the reverse: a generalist originally, returning now to multimedia public relations, but with specialist film experience acquired en route. Shell: A factor in his appointment? BP: Possibly. Certainly he’d clocked Shell’s pre-eminence in industrial film, a spur to hastening our engagement with it. Stepping gingerly into the cinematic arena as we were, he knew a film unit was unrealistic, and having developed some personal skepticism of much of Grierson’s “movement” started courting those he judged the more pragmatic COI-commissioned producers, including Britain’s leading animators Halas and Batchelor, agile documentary firm World Wide Pictures, the sponsored-doc unit of newsreel company British Pathé and, crucial to our story, producers based at Merton Park Studios, Wimbledon . . . Shell:  . . . of tennis fame, far from the Central London haunts of the “documentary boys.” BP: Far from. Companies that had clubbed together, as the Film Producers Guild. Shell: A name evoking craftsmens’ confederations of yore?

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BP: Maybe . . . In fact it was structured to separate the artisans from the suits: a vertically integrated company whose member units, like Greenpark Productions, Verity Films and Larkins Studio, retained discrete staff, clientele and creative profile, sharing facilities, top management and total ownership by City investors. Though taking government commissions from Tritton (and Grierson) they foresaw in private industry, whose sponsorship they proactively courted, more lucrative postwar potential. Shell: Oil potentially the most lucrative of all. BP: Quite. We became their top-drawer client over nearly a quarter of a century. Tritton and successors learned to commission different members for different film types, favoring the Guild’s most “arty” unit Greenpark for many of our “big” films. For now, mindful of our conservatism, Tritton and Greenpark took a gentle first step, magazine series Oil Review. The cinemagazine was a now familiar means of disseminating company information and identity, externally and to shareholders and staff (particularly when internationally dispersed). Shell: Witness Shell Cinemagazine, which our Unit started back in 1938, running to 1952. BP: A low-risk way to warm us to film, justifying dispatching crews in various directions, ours ran just from 1950 to 1953, by when Tritton had enjoyed three bigger successes. Pathé’s Oil for the Twentieth Century (1951) was a splendidly assured documentary marking fifty years of Anglo-Iranian; Rig 20 (1952) was edited at Verity from footage taken by an Oil Review cameraman arriving in time to photograph the spectacle of oilmen fighting an Iranian well-fire; Persian Story (1952) was shot at our epicenter Abadan, home to the world’s largest refinery, just before Iran’s new government nationalized it and expelled us. Today it is the best known of the three, having attracted keen ideological critiques.9 Stylistically, it is quintessential Greenpark Productions: all literate commentary, romantic frame compositions, “exotic” locale. Shell: A trilogy unveiling an identity very different from ours at the time. BP: Very. Tritton looked to film to paint a human face, contrasting with your Unit’s colder persona inferentially reinforcing your reputation as expert technologist. Not sciences, he determined, but people and places, often far-distant, would star in our films. Though their subjects were often suggested directly by our extraction and refining activities, they would be rendered in varied styles, each project having been produced by different companies.

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Shell: A contrast with the rigors of our films. Elton also proffered his “First Law of Industrial Sponsorship”: “The impact of a sponsored film upon its audience will be in inverse ratio to the number of times the sponsor insists on having his name mentioned.” A law we upheld—allowing Shell’s emblem and name only on front and end credits. BP: Downplayed corporate identity aiding your films’ credibility . . . We were less concerned with branding subtleties, not worrying about logos entering the picture. Different though they were, however, both our styles fell within a certain range. Whether Greenpark lyricism . . . Shell: . . . or Shell Film Unit finesse . . . BP: . . . their commentaries are erudite, their music (by reputable composers like Elisabeth Lutyens, Malcolm Arnold and the super-prolific, versatile Edward Williams) rich and sensitive to high pictorial values, centered on fine, strong composition, usually shot silent. The honed, harmonious classicism of a tradition in maturity, a “small ‘c’ conservative” aesthetic, well-suiting the era’s prevailing values. Appealing to educated viewers, neither philistines nor sophisticates: middle-aged, middle-class . . . Shell: . . . middlebrow. BP: The prevalence of “Voice-of-God” single-voice commentary was, it’s true, partly a matter of middlebrow aesthetics, but abetted by the ease of its translation for non-Anglophone audiences, even perhaps making films appear overseas as if the work of our local subsidiaries rather than London head office. Shell: Yes, here we re-recorded commentaries into some thirty languages. While you were building your filmmaking foundations, we were spreading our wings fully to embrace our multinational presence . . . and appease political concerns overseas. We established satellite film units worldwide. Shooting and cutting took place in the country concerned while all laboratory processing was in London. Each unit was managed by personnel from Film Centre’s London staff list, training nationals for eventual handover. BP: A form of liberal imperialism, perhaps, anyway a useful tool in the wider publicity strategy. Shell: Yes. A pilot unit was trialled in Venezuela in 1948, surviving a revolution to become a permanent feature in 1952 with Lionel Cole in charge. Subsequently numerous postwar British documentary greats were dispatched to establish similar units across Shell’s worldscape. Edgar Anstey and Francis Gysin had also been out in Venezuela. JB Holmes established

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a unit in Egypt, John Heyer in Australia, Douglas Gordon in Nigeria. Cole moved to South East Asia to set up another unit, Rod Baxter established ones in Indonesia then Mexico, Jerry Armstrong opened shop in Kuwait, George Seager in Beirut, John Shearman a unit first in Iraq then in Iran. BP: Locally produced films serving local purposes . . . creating good will, no doubt. Shell: That was our intention, anyway: enabling host nations to see and judge oil industry activities on our terms, while demonstrating our own desire for our presence to be accepted, valued. BP: Once again, sometimes in consortium, as in Nigeria and in Baghdad, where Film Centre’s unit was attached to the Iraq Petroleum Company, an alliance of Western firms including us. On our own watch, BP overseas affiliates sponsored films from time to time, but—surprise, surprise—on a lesser scale and through external production companies. While you maximized scale and reach, we concentrated our efforts on perfecting quality, and thematic and stylistic variety. Shell: Variety, yes. Though Film Centre safeguarded stylistic consistency, our films fell into several subject groups, furnishing a catalogue as diverse as our presence was wide. Many topics have links to or origins in our industry. Take the petrol-driven world of motorsports. With his string of films like Grand Prix (1949) and Le Mans (1952), and a six-part history of the sport he compiled under the Shell logo, our director Bill Mason became synonymous with the genre. BP: Though we weren’t afraid to copy him, turning out our own sequence of motorsport films such as Tribute to Fangio (1954) and Tribute to Stirling Moss (1961) by Guild member RHR Productions. Again, note emphasis on people ... Shell: But Shell’s film boundaries would be more radically extended in response to our recognition of a need to associate ourselves not only with scientific advances, but also their societal application, notably to the developing world’s aspirations and disadvantages, in agriculture, nutrition and health. BP: An enlightened strategy . . . Shell: Yes, with a secret weapon in our talent arsenal. During 1948, Stuart Legg had returned to Film Centre in London after nine years as Grierson’s right-hand man at the National Film Board of Canada. Having then partnered

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FIGURE 3.1  Innovative and ominous close cinematography from The Rival World (1955), the Shell Film Unit’s first “blockbuster” production. Elton supervising many Shell productions, he now broke loose with his own distinct film cycle. Where Elton had led on technology, Legg now led on issues: a veteran of British and Canadian social documentary, now given a global canvas. In 1955, Legg produced our first color live-action film, The Rival World, co-sponsored by Shell Chemicals. (It’s an important point that sponsorship of oil films, while routed through public relations departments, could come from different parts of the business . . . (Figure 3.1)  BP: . . . important, too, that for us both the postwar move into petrochemicals was a key plank of diversification.) Shell: Directed by the great Dutch filmmaker Bert Haanstra, though commissioned from our UK rather than Netherlands offices, its subject was insects as carriers of tropical disease and predators of global food crops. Rooted in biology rather than physics, it placed our expertise filming natural phenomena within a dramatic tour de force, culminating in a spectacularly gruesome locust-spraying sequence . . . BP: . . . using Shell chemicals. Shell: Yes, but Haanstra follows the no-logo policy. Multi-award-winning, very popular, it proved arguably the industrial film’s first globalized blockbuster and for us initiated a strand of films, often to be made in direct collaboration with UN agencies. From Michael Clarke’s Unseen Enemies (1959), shining further light on insect-borne disease, to Legg’s own Food or

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Famine (1962), claimed in our publicity materials to have been acclaimed by an unnamed international agency head as “the greatest practical act of charity in a decade.” And from the biggest global success by any of our non-London Units, the South East Asia Unit’s Mekong (1964) by Cole and John Armstrong, a lyrical study of the river, countries it flows through and the strategy for its proposed development, through The Land Must Provide (1968), on fertilizer introduction to Guatemala, Nigeria and Turkey, to Threat in the Water (1968), about bilharzia. BP: But back to 1955. We both posted record profits that year, and it saw our own first color production (in live action, that is, Halas and Batchelor, and Larkins, the Guild animation unit, having made several color cartoons for us). Less of a smash than yours, it was still our own biggest hit yet. The New Explorers, directed by James Hill at World Wide Pictures, again reflects corporate reprioritization. Stung by our brush with Iranian nationalism we had regrouped, renaming ourselves British Petroleum and seeking diversified supplies, supplementing existing reserves by exploring unproven fields elsewhere. Hill’s film reinforced our reputation as upstream prospector but painted it onto a wider-then-ever canvas. With sequences in Abu Dhabi, Canada, Zanzibar, Papua, Trinidad and Sicily it has none of Rival World’s highmindedness. An adventure film, essentially. Shell: Hill later made feature films, didn’t he? BP: Right, like Born Free (1965). For us, he followed New Explorers with A Walk in the Forest and Skyhook (both 1958), tracking further exploits in Papua New Guinea, prospected with limited success. In contrasting register, we gained respectability from a different kind of adventure: World Wide’s Foothold on Antarctica (1956), a melancholic exploration film by promising young director Derek Williams, and its sequel, Antarctic Crossing (1958) directed by George Lowe: official film records of Commonwealth Antarctic expeditions for which we provided supplies. Shell: Skyhook also invokes oil’s connection to aviation. Another of our varied subjects . . . BP: The one that started you off . . . Shell: Yes, our first film was Airport (1934). We’ve mentioned the science of thrust, drag and lift with How an Aeroplane Flies, and of the speed of sound in High Speed Flight, both heavily used to train airports and air-forces worldwide. But Legg’s production in association with the International Air Traffic Association Song of the Clouds (1957) was really our postwar Airport. Directed by John Armstrong, it stressed the sky’s

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trans-nationalism: airport activities spanning continents, and countries cooperating to ensure safety and comfort. Impressive camerawork and charged editing express the cosmopolitan romance and excitement of the dawning age of international air travel. BP: In 1959 we found our full answer to Rival World in Giuseppina, again by Hill, now running his own outfit James Hill Productions. Its core function was to introduce BP to the Italian market: aligning incoming company with resident population, analogous to the rationale for your overseas units but with no documentary pretension to scientific advancement or global problem-solving. An appealing, in every sense sunny, fictional story of a young girl and her family at their rural BP petrol station, it proved a huge novelty hit outside Italy—and won an Oscar. You may have held the crown as most respectable of corporate filmmakers, but we’d carved a competitive niche . . . (Figure 3.2).

FIGURE 3.2  UK cinema lobby card for BP’s leisurely Oscar-winning short Giuseppina (1959).

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Shell:  . . . as Western economies boomed, and petroleum’s place within them increasingly towered. The term “prestige film” was becoming common currency in the business, indicating the broadest of industrial films, transcending instant utility. Often the glossiest, usually the most expensive, bolstering both their patrons’ and their producers’ prestige. BP: And the most prestigious of patrons? BP . . . Shell: . . . and Shell!

Act Two: Cast in a New Mold In which our heroes ride the crest of the wave through the 1960s to choppier waters at decade’s end. Transition then decline play across the 1970s and early 1980s. We simply asked for a budget for the year and just put down a number of proposals with a budget at the bottom . . . we didn’t have to have great consultations with all the departments in the company to say would it be alright if we did this and so we were frightfully independent-minded about what we did—and happily we had the support of the Chairman. —ROLY STAFFORD10

Earnestness is the keynote of recent documentaries from the oil companies and indeed one sympathises with an industry which has made rich profits from supplying the essential commodity of this petrol-activated twentieth century, has tried in modest fashion to play the patron’s role and yet now faces the awful rise of the environmental movement with its inevitable attack on the emission of sulphur by oil-burning industry, choking exhaust fumes, and the destruction of our towns by the passing through of a million motor vehicles . . . At least there is realisation by the oil companies of the problem as their short films show. —KEN GAY11

BP: Tritton having managed film alongside other PR, its scale now required a full-time films officer. We appointed Dudley Knott to this role in 1960 and he oversaw effective consolidation of Tritton’s policies. Hill followed Giuseppina with the still more whimsical The Home-Made Car (1963). Greenpark more directly mimicked it in Mikhali (1960), story of a Greek

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BP agent and his family, while the variety of expressions of the “places” theme is further illustrated by World Wide’s thoughtful documentary The Pitcairn People (1962) and The Cattle Carters (1962), co-commissioned by British and Australian BP and (being a light-hearted fiction film) an uneasy fit for Greenpark and Derek Williams. The same team’s North Slope—Alaska (1964), however, was a superbly atmospheric oil search film achieving extensive cinema distribution. Shell: Conversely, a key appointment here was at the level above, Shell’s Public Affairs Communications Division now being headed by John Drummond, a former theatre critic and aviation journalist particularly respected by filmmakers. Fresh creative talent was injected into the Unit and sponsorship policy broadened the number and range of subjects. For example, a less ascetic, more atmospheric style was evident in our loose Chemicals from Petroleum series: Cast in a New Mould (1964), featuring sculptor Geoffrey Clarke, Crown of Glass (1967) about Liverpool’s new Catholic Cathedral (which used Shell-derived resins . . .) and the self-explanatory Paint (1967). BP: All foregrounding oil’s application to craft, relegating science to the background: diverting films with painterly visuals. Almost a BP approach. . . Shell: All directed by Michael Heckford. Incidentally, this trilogy enjoyed further life when the BBC began televising high quality color documentaries, many of them top-notch industrial films from several sponsors, for purposes of engineers testing color, so-called “Trade Test” broadcasts, many acquiring a cult following. And of all these films, Paint topped the charts at 300 broadcasts in total, with Prospect for Plastics and Crown of Glass the next two most frequently screened of UK productions. BP: While the second most trade-tested film after Paint was one sponsored by our down-under affiliate, BP Australia: The Small Propeller (1967). Of our “London” films, Hill’s crowd-pleasers Giuseppina and The Home-Made Car gained a new lease of life at 185 and 171 broadcasts respectively. But we digress . . . Having re-posted Knott to New York, in 1964 we replaced him with Roly Stafford, joining us from Greenpark. Shell: Poacher-turned-gamekeeper? BP: Yes. If in the form of Drummond, your films program was being modified under the influence of a film-engaged public relations exec, sort of the Tritton model, then simultaneously . . . Shell: . . . yours was being pushed forward by a filmmaker-turned-policymaker. More like the Elton story.

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BP: Moreover, when Stafford moved up from our films department a decade later, it was to head BP Press and Public Affairs: surely the highest ranking position in a global corporate hierarchy to which anyone who’d started out as a film cameraman ever ascended. Poaching him from Greenpark was a masterstroke appointment, if we say so ourselves, Stafford proving one of the great sponsors of the industrial films renaissance (and one of the last). Discreetly modernizing the Tritton-Knott template, he sought out younger production companies like Anthony Gilkison Associates (e.g., Rig Move, 1965), Samaritan Films/Balfour Films (e.g., Oscar-nominated Williams travelogue Turkey—The Bridge, 1966, and the very popular instructive novelty Oil in Your Engine, 1975) and the Rank Organisation Short Films Group (Cantagallo, 1960), and added a newly stylish note to commissions even from former Guild associates—like Verity’s Divertimento (1968), setting imagery of oil, filmed through our research center’s microscopes, to a Malcolm Arnold ensemble score. Oil as beautiful abstract art. Shell:  Diverting indeed. Whereas, three mid-decade films point, in different ways, to a refocused Shell Film Unit. Shellarama was launched in October 1965, in Cinerama theatres in Britain and Ireland then released to cinemas in twenty countries, reputedly reaching over twenty million people in twelve months. Encapsulating pictorially, without commentary, the flow of oil from earliest stages of exploration in Nigerian swamps through use of refined products in consumerist Western cities, this is full-on celebratory brandshowmanship. A far cry from the discretion with which we’d made our name. But the central film of the decade for us is really the same year’s The Underwater Search. Quintessentially polished Shell cinema on the surface, a characteristically bravura epic on the part of John Armstrong, examined more closely it has a harder core. It was commissioned and heavily used to convince multiple governments of Shell’s prime expertise to win the war on the right to drill. BP: A hard-sell ambassador . . . Shell: A strategic systems tool. Conversely, the more thoughtful Legg strand continued even as he himself stepped back from Shell production to Film Centre board-membership. But it took a new direction, first steps in a peculiar, significant trend in industrial filmmaking: its environmentalist turn. BP: An eminently debatable one, reflecting wider, gradual cultural change, most famously marked by Rachael Carson’s book Silent Spring (1961). Shell: Shell started this trend with our third major mid-sixties film, instigated from the Group’s Hague manufacturing division. Directed by Alan Pendry and photographed by Wolfgang Suschitsky, with pioneering micro-

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cinematography (shades of Rival World) by Alan Fabian, The River Must Live (1966) was a biology film dispassionately regarding European rivers, not as sweet-smelling gently-flowing streams but as polluted waste-waters. Its argument for more effective waste disposal and treatment was addressed to Western Europe, but won worldwide distribution second only to Rival World. Success breeds success: following its North American impact, the same production team was invited to produce a film on air pollution for Shell Oil in the United States. Air is for Breathing was timed for release coinciding with Congress passing the 1970 Clean Air Act. It caused considerable nervousness on the part of regional and local managers unused to Shell’s European, apparently open, approach to public affairs, so was submitted to elaborate audience reaction sampling, which proved positive. BP: But tables were turning . . . By the late 1960s, those on the industrial film scene were starting to feel that Shell’s cinematic supremacy was in doubt. Now, 1970 saw the most dramatic shift in our cinemas’ positioning. Sensitive to a tide of environmental stories in mainstream media, attentive to Shell’s recent direction, and to mark European Conservation Year, Stafford commissioned his own pollution film, navigating not mere nervousness internally but some active opposition. Perceptively pre-empting an entirely new order of PR challenges, The Shadow of Progress was to be a wider, deeper contemplation of the relationship between humanity and the environment. A bold brand refresh by BP Films (Figure 3.3).

FIGURE 3.3  Fragile nature, encroaching industry: a typically strong composition from The Shadow of Progress (1970), BP’s eminently debatable intervention into the emerging environmental debate.

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Shell: Knowingly parking your tanks on our lawn! Far from Giuseppina’s daydreams, or the rapacious derring-do of New Explorers and Skyhook, with its denuded rainforests, here was grandiloquent multi-continental filmmaking showcasing stately science, global concern . . . BP: Shell-like . . . but wrapped in Derek Williams’ haunting Greenpark style, perfected here to a sort of majestic melancholy, painting the conservationist theme onto a larger canvas than any previous film, industrial or otherwise. Shadow of Progress should stand as a key text in the story of sponsored film, on account both of quality and complexity, its strengths and weaknesses both inextricably intertwined as products of corporate investment. Magisterial analysis of problems and their ultimate, but ambiguously expressed, causes, it is weaker on their proximate causes or on really convincing solutions.12 Shell: Artistic and artful, subtle corporate evasion and powerfully cinematic environmentalist statement. BP: And a smash! Generating substantial publicity, many awards and, so we claimed, fifty million views in cinemas, on TV or nontheatrically worldwide. Shell: The Rival World of its day . . . they’d make a fascinating double-bill. The 1955 film extolling humankind’s duty to overpower nature (“It is kill—or be killed”). BP: The 1970 film mourning nature’s loss to industrial civilization. (“How could it be possible to exhaust the inexhaustible? Man assumes it is not. But behind every question of man’s resources, there now grows one master question. People.”) What a change of temper in fifteen short years. However, and in hindsight, for the film trade it was a sadder symmetry. Shell: Yes. In 1955 we’d sponsored industrial cinema’s first “blockbuster,” presaging years of plenty . . . BP: . . . but ours of 1970 proved its last, its success promising more but actually belying imminent stagnation. Shell: Western economies were about to tank, oil industry fortunes heavily implicated in the bust as in the boom it now shattered. BP: Oil shock! Not the first time prospected countries had asserted their rights to oil profits: witness Abadan, 1951 . . . Shell: This time causing more widespread effects: on film as on many industries. Shell’s global “family” of film units now contracted, leaving only

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their UK mothership. But this was a period not only of economic change but of generational handover. Moves were made here to reduce our permanent staff and increase preference toward freelancing. For a while Film Centre continued managing that talent and our brand identity, but was dealt a fatal blow by Arthur Elton’s 1973 death. Henceforth we took a leaf from your book and began contracting to external production houses, even while maintaining the Shell Film Unit name, bypassing our long-time agency which soon closed. BP: In 1974, the PFB closed down . . . Shell-Mex and BP wound up in 1975 ... Shell: Our “new model” unit was overseen by Dora Thomas as Head of Audio-Visual Media. Having risen through the ranks, after joining Shell in 1950 as a film librarian, she subsequently became responsible for the Group’s “television” interests—another propitious development, Shell’s 1960s establishment of a video production facility—and now proficiently negotiated stormy weather ahead. BP: Winds of change. Here, on Stafford’s ascension, he was replaced by deputy Ian Brundle. Shell: A former Shell man incidentally. BP: Yes. Stafford and Brundle both made a practice of pinching Shell creatives. Like Armstrong and Pendry, whose joint firm Pelican Films supplied many of our best productions from the late 1960s to early 1980s. Or de Normanville, directing, among other BP films, Energy in Perspective (1976), a characteristically analytical study of the history and limitations of fossil fuels. Brundle was BP’s final films officer in the postwar mold. The prestige film—expensive while loose in its aims, begging questions of return on investment—was dying, symbolized when Greenpark’s long-term head, Stafford associate Humphrey Swingler, retired in 1975 and the Film Producers Guild took the opportunity to close its “art” unit, restructuring itself for a harsher business climate. Shell: It wasn’t just personnel change, restructure and economic crisis that did for the prestige documentary. Increasing TV ownership had changed the means by which audiences expected to receive information . . . BP: . . . as a generational change in society saw its youth more loudly cynical of the energy sector than their elders, and of any industry’s motives making movies. Shell: One of our continuous 1970s efforts was in refreshing many older titles in the Shell canon, often making color remakes of the earlier black

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and white classics which had become archaic, sometimes merely re-editing them. BP: The oil industry’s situation, however, was brighter than it might have looked. BP’s fortunes, and to a great extent Britain’s, rested on our success, after lengthy failure, of upstream explorations in two cold places, inhospitable but politically stable: Alaska’s North Slope and Britain’s North Sea. Shell: The former the site of the prestige film’s last gasp. BP: Our aptly titled The End of the Road (1976): an Oscar-nominated Pelican production directed by John Armstrong, scripted by Derek Williams and scored by Edward Williams, showing our development of America’s largest oilfield, inside the Arctic Circle at Prudhoe Bay, and an 800-mile pipeline to carry oil south to an ice-free port. Shell: The style had survived, but its audience really hadn’t . . . BP: We’d been looking for British oil since the 1950s, then were heavily involved in the discovery of North Sea gas in the following decade, and finally struck North Sea oil, bringing it ashore in 1975. So it was that the oil industry’s forward step coincided with its film industry’s contraction. Shell: Besides re-editing Underwater Search to incorporate the North Sea, we sponsored new films like Offshore (1977), and Robin Jackson’s films Waiting on Weather (1975), about the work of supply ships, and Engineering—North Sea (1976), centered on the Shell-operated Auk and Brent fields. Shell: Desolate for generations, the North Sea now comprised many concessions and consortia. Our adventure there was that of another consortium, with Esso. A Town Called Charlie (1981) took us to the 1980s with a joint take on the story of a platform and the people living and working on it. The New Frontier (1983) directed by Glyn Jones, charted development and transport of a new platform to the Shell Fulmar field further north. BP: BP’s North Sea omnipresence (brought about by our canny program of license acquisition) prompted many films, among them Location North Sea (1974) and, about the large northern fields under our control, the awardwinning Sea Area Forties, both by Armstrong and Pelican, and Magnus (1983) by Peter Hopkinson at World Wide Pictures. As systems tools, they succeeded, encouraging investors. As carriers of prestige they largely failed. BP: Our industry’s last major contribution to cinema was its final Oscar nomination, Williams’ environmental masterpiece The Shetland Experience (1977).13

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Shell: We still had environmental aspirations too and one of our first films to be made on 16 mm was Pendry’s Fate of the Forests (1982), examining tropical rainforest destruction. 16 mm had enabled greater logistical flexibility, helpful in our locales, as in For Want of Water (1983), in the Legg tradition on the provision of clean water in remote areas of Africa and Nepal. BP: But television had long since claimed hand-held synch-sound shooting, first on 16mm then on videotape, as the staple of documentary reportage. Shell: While many corporations, if even surviving the 1980s’ economic revolution, saw drastic discontinuity between film and video eras, the oil companies, who in large measure underwrote that revolution, experienced a more complex, subtle changeover. BP: Leading, in the digital twenty-first century, to Shell and BP, befitting continuing prominence and profitability, running two of the busiest corporate audiovisual departments around. Shell: But that, as they say, is another story.

Epilogue: Power in Perspective14 In which our heroes step back to consider their filmic achievements and their implications Ultimately these films must be an extension of the interest of the company . . . that paid for them. The valuable thing is that they can contain messages of great importance to society and use all the intellectual and emotional effects that only film can deploy to communicate them . . . Basically they may be regarded as insincere; yet in many ways society would be much poorer without their messages. —KEN GAY15

I was never interested in politics. I made films for industry, but I was never interested in industry, or industrial processes, or money, or marketing . . . My motives were aesthetic, and I think that goes for many of my colleagues . . . They wanted to make good films . . . perhaps pretty films . . . we saw it as our objective to influence sponsors . . . help them to understand that their cause would be served by better films . . . I think we developed an instinct as to how far the sponsor would go . . . so we instinctively stayed on the right side of the line. You may say we were slavish and we’d learned

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to be slavish . . . we tried to coax industry into making more oblique films. [Eventually] we were able to make films which were obliquely critical of industry [itself] . . . a very good situation for the filmmaker to stride into with his camera. Unfortunately . . . improvements in sponsorship—the broadening, the more liberal tendencies of sponsorship . . . were lost because it was like . . . improvements on the deck of the Titanic . . . it must be seen in the context of our industry, which was dying in a general sense. So it didn’t come to very much in the end. —DEREK WILLIAMS16

Shell: Looking back, we were the same . . . BP: . . . but different. Our cinemas involve relationships between content, form and function that are comparable . . . Shell: . . . but not identical. Likewise relationships, off-screen, between sponsor and maker, were comparable . . . BP: . . . but not identical. Little in life is more complicated than relationships! The industrial films business being made up of so many moving parts, it’s unwise to apply too reductionist a rationalism to it. It needs, too, a hefty injection of empiricism . . . Shell: . . . attentive to circumstances on which its dynamics heavily depend. It’s axiomatic that our Shell business interests fixed loose boundaries beyond which films we funded couldn’t logically or practically stray. BP: But they didn’t necessitate what was done within those boundaries. One cannot axiomatically infer from BP business objectives exactly what films we’d fund. Shell: To be sure it’s an obvious mistake, on one hand, to reduce our films’ authorship largely to their production and direction, their meaning to aesthetics merely occasioned by sponsorship. BP: (A naivety lurking, easily detected, beneath romanticism; valorizing the artist . . .) Shell: But on the other, it’s an error too to reduce their authorship wholly to their sponsorship, their meaning to organizational objectives, merely delivered by producers. BP: (A naivety lurking, less easily detected, beneath cynicism: mistrusting the corporation.)

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Shell: (“Naïve cynicism”—very good!) Realistically, authorship comprises several layers, and meaning compounds them. Each may involve varying degrees of sincerity . . . BP: Put less tendentiously: sincerity about different things. Differing priorities ... Shell: . . . mixed motives. And the most crucial layer, arguably, is the easiest to neglect: the stratum between paymaster and producer. Minus Elton, our oil-on-film story would have played out quite differently. BP: So would ours sans Tritton. Or had Tritton and Elton occupied opposite positions. Shell: Or had Legg and Thomas not entered the Shell picture. BP: Or had Knott, Stafford or Brundle not found their way to BP. Shell: The films officer: part oilman; part film-man; all middleman. He—she, in Thomas’ case—managed both downwards and upwards. BP: Downwards deploying intimate familiarity with the film industry: the costs, competencies and character of production units, and individuals they employed. Shell: Film Centre molded a unit we trusted to project our brand values. Within it, giving two examples of individual contribution, Peter de Normanville and Bill Mason were outstanding Shell filmmakers, due not just to their aptitudes but to their dispositions. De Normanville, the educator, coolly elucidating science with elegant pictorial precision, versus Mason, the master of motor sports, evoking them with hot-blooded excitement. Different faces of Shell. BP: Not auteurs in any purist sense, then, more examples of diverging directorial skillsets, differently mediating corporate functions and cinematic forms. Examples from our side: James Hill and Derek Williams personify different BPs. Hill the storyteller, a carefree, picaresque adventurer at home in hotter climes reached by virile global capitalism, versus Williams the sober, somewhat melancholic essayist, an explorer too but better suiting lonelier, chillier places and a more philosophical take on industry’s relationship with the world. Shell: Such people had become industrial filmmakers not out of any particular enthusiasm for corporate-capitalism but out of their zeal for cinema itself. But at a time when quality documentary-making could, it seemed, only realistically be produced under patronage of state . . . and, increasingly, of trade

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BP: For their long-run reputations, a generational misfortune, not easily foreseen. Shell: Documentary would come, over the course of their careers, to be funded and exhibited by radically different means: television. BP: And increasingly to be judged by the extent of its independence, and the bite of its critique, of both government and business. Shell: While it abandoned classical aesthetics . . . Come the twilight of their careers, art and oil, so conventional wisdom had concluded, couldn’t mix. BP: Moreover, oil itself had come to agree . . . Shell: Yes, eventually industry no longer valued the prestigious qualities that the likes of de Normanville and Mason, Hill and Williams had brought the form. A contract lapsed, once mutually agreeable but ultimately unequal: between petroleum, a multinational colossus, and a local London cottage industry. BP: The British sponsored documentary sector. Goliath commissioning David. Shell: Wealthy patron hiring struggling artisan. BP: Shades of renaissance? Shell: Maybe so. BP: But a renaissance conducted, like others perhaps, largely through oneto-one personal relationships. Shell: We paid our filmmakers union rates. Our affluence benefited them less in their pockets . . . BP: . . . than in their work: Shell: 35mm; color stocks; research and shooting schedules undreamt of elsewhere . . . BP: . . . given trusting, relatively hands-off oversight. Precisely because our middlemen managed not only downwards but also upwards. Doing capitalist-corporatism’s film thinking for it, applying our industry’s objectives, interpreting their employer’s PR policies . . . Shell: . . . but sometimes adjusting those policies in the very act of applying them. BP: Stafford recalled the relative freedom with which his department operated, while noting his hotline to our chairman, upon whom he relied

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to defend films against skeptical board members. He pressed ahead with his outstanding commission, parading industrial degradation, against stiff internal resistance, reputedly jeopardizing his very career here. Shell: A jeopardy predicated, nevertheless, on inherited premises: that film, if playing a role in shaping big industry’s image, protecting it . . . BP: . . . or changing it . . . Shell: . . .   required quality, subtlety. Refined product. BP: Not crude! Our annual spending on film dwarfed that of most other corporates of the day. Shell: A tiny proportion of annual turnover, mind you, but with scant return on investment. Scant direct return, a loss-leader . . . BP: Admirers, holding no particular brief for our industry, judged us intelligent, liberal sponsors thinking broadly, beyond bottom line. Shell: This “liberal” conception of corporate film would largely vanish by the end of the century. BP: Yes. But here’s the thing. It’s returning today, in markedly different guise: online video “branded content.” Shell: That’s right, the PFB was a branded content library! You might compare it to some brands’ YouTube channels today. Or, rather differently, to our industry’s modern sponsorship of museums and galleries, contentious as it is . . . BP: “Art Not Oil!” Shell: Much of our postwar filmmaking, and some of yours, aspires to another contemporary concept too: demonstration of Corporate Social Responsibility. BP: We both of us played several screen roles, postwar. Shell: Humanitarian here and environmentalist there, here scientist, there statesman . . . BP: . . . a documentarist and a storyteller, an essayist and educator, here artist, there entertainer . . . Shell: . . . an explorer: here pilot, there passenger. Which roles come closest to, and which lie furthest from, our innermost corporate selves? BP: (If, that is, any large organization even has some single “self” of which to speak? This, after all, is imagined dialogue . . .

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Shell: . . . between fictional characters!? Let’s not go there . . .). BP: Each was a case of what, today, is termed “Soft Power.” Shell: Be our films appreciated or critiqued . . . BP: One can do both. Shell—had they been less thoughtfully commissioned, less capably crafted, less appreciated, they would matter, but matter less. Our films were good. BP: Within limitations of course. Of subject, genre, taste, style . . . Shell: . . . and viewpoint. The confines, ultimately, of corporate sponsorship itself. Ones many a guilded craftsman, down the centuries, might recognize. Some with a frown. BP: And some with a smile. In the century of cinema and of oil-fueled prosperity, pollution and public affairs, it was Orson Welles, wasn’t it, who liked to observe that the absence of limitations . . . Shell: . . . is the enemy of art!

Notes 1 Ken Myer, “High Standard Evident in Films of Industry,” The Guardian, June 24, 1970: 14. Myer was one of several journalists employed as industrial films columnists by UK national newspapers. 2 Williams, interviewed by Glyn Jones, BECTU History Project, 2002. 3 The significant secondary sources on Shell and BP films are: Colin Burgess, “Sixty Years of Shel Film Sponsorship, 1934-94,” Journal of British Cinema and Television 7, no. 2 (2010): 213–31; Rudmer Canjels, “Films from Beyond the Well,” in Vinzenz Hediger and Patrick Vonderau (eds.), Films That Work: Industrial Film and the Productivity of Media (Amsterdam: University of Amsterdam Press, 2009), 243–55; Rudmer Canjels, “From Oil to Celluloid: A History of Shell Films,” in Jan Luiten van Zanden (ed.), A History of Royal Dutch Shell, Vol. 4 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 6–33; Mona Damluji, “The Image World of Middle Eastern Oil,” in Subterranean Estates: Life Worlds of Oil and Gas (New York: Cornell University Press, 2015), 14–165; Patrick Russell, and J. P. Taylor, eds., Shadows of Progress: Documentary Film in Post-War Britain (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). 4 Hidden Power is the title for a 1961 BP film by Derek Stewart Productions (frequent contractor for many of BP’s more technical films) extolling lubrication’s role in increasing machinery’s power output. 5 Distant Neighbours (1956) is the title of a BP/Greenpark film directed by Humphrey Swingler, a story of brothers in the Scottish Hebrides, Canada, and Australia set to songs supervised by folk music revivalist A. L. Lloyd.

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6 “Clarity” repeated in many sources, including Shell Film Unit director Michael Clarke, “Discovery and Inventions,” British Universities Film & Video Council Newsletter, May 1985. ‘ . . . interpenetrate’ is from Elton’s introduction to his edited revision of Klingender, Francis Art and the Industrial Revolution (Paladine, 1972); Elton’s heroes in industrial art included Philip de Loutherbourg, GF Watt, Joseph Wright and railways lithographer John Bourne. ‘film machine’ in Arthur Elton, “How We Use Films 17: In Shell,” Film User, August 1956: 344–8. 7 Ronald Tritton, “How We Use Films 1: At Anglo-Iranian,” Film User, September 1953: 464–5. 8 Grierson was under contract to the COI from 1948 to 1950 as Controller of Films, a role that seems to have been superior to Tritton’s as director of the COI Films Division, 1946–8. 9 Such as Mona Damluji, “The Oil City in Focus: The Cinematic Spaces of Abadan in the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company’s Persian Story,” in Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 33, no. 1 (2013): 75–88. 10 Stafford, interviewed by Rodney Giesler, BECTU History Project, 2001. 11 Ken Gay, “Documentary,” Films and Filming 19, no. 2 (November 1972): 74. Gay was the long-standing correspondent for documentary, industrial, and short films for this popular cinephile monthly. 12 For a subtle interpretation and critique of the film, see Brian Jacobson, “The Shadow of Progress and the Cultural Markers of the Anthropocene,” Environmental History Environmental History 24, no. 1 (2018): 158–72. 13 This was a complex piece of sponsorship. The film was commissioned by the Environmental Advisory Group of the Sullom Voe Association, to which both the Shetland Islands local council and the oil industries working Shetland’s waters all belonged; BP took the leading role in facilitating the film project. 14 Power in Perspective is the title of a 1955 Shell Film Unit film, directed by Alan Pendry, a 3-D demonstration film of model machinery in action. 15 Ken Gay, “Documentary,” Films and Filming 17, no. 12 (1971): 82. 16 Williams, interviewed by Patrick Russell and James Piers Taylor, 2009.

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PART TWO

Advertisements and Sponsorship

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4 On the Road with Mickey and Donald Walt Disney, Standard Oil, and the Golden Gate International Exposition of 1939 Susan Ohmer

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n the spring and summer of 1939, Americans were on the move in fiction and in film. In John Steinbeck’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Grapes of Wrath, the Joad family began its forced migration from Oklahoma’s Dust Bowl to California, with the hope of finding work and stability. On the screen, John Wayne rode shotgun in Stagecoach (John Ford, 1939), navigating bandits and dusty trails, while Cecil B. DeMille’s Union Pacific celebrated the completion of the first transcontinental railroad across the United States. And in The Wizard of Oz (Victor Fleming, 1939), Dorothy and her companions—the Tin Man, the Cowardly Lion, and the Scarecrow—fought witches and flying monkeys on the road to Oz, a land whose shining towers and association with magic and mystery evoked some of the awe inspired by that year’s two world’s fairs. Whether they drove in automobiles, maneuvered stagecoaches, took to the rails, or walked, these characters making their way across the landscape celebrated the mobility that has long been considered an essential part of US culture, a mobility often made possible by oil and gasoline.

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1939 was also the year of world’s fairs on both the east and the west coasts of the United States. The New York World’s Fair, promoted as “The World of Tomorrow,” is perhaps the more celebrated, known for its trylon and perisphere structures, and dramatized in novels such as E. L. Doctorow’s World’s Fair (Random House, 1985), but its counterpart on the west coast, the Golden Gate International Exposition (GGIE) on Treasure Island in San Francisco, deserves attention as well. Like the New York fair, the GGIE featured exhibits that celebrated US technology and industry and was built on long-standing Western narratives of expansion and progress. The San Francisco fair also aimed to draw attention to business opportunities in the western United States and in the Pacific region. For some exhibitors, in particular, the Standard Oil Company of California (SoCal), not only the fair itself but the process of travel to the fair became a focus of attention. This chapter examines SoCal and its relationship to the GGIE as a locus around which to investigate several issues. The SoCal had been spun off from its parent company, Standard Oil of New Jersey, in one of the most famous antitrust cases of the twentieth century, and sought to construct an independent identity that built on regional differences and classic myths of individualism and entrepreneurship. Looking at SoCal’s involvement in the GGIE reveals the role of the petroleum industry in an important industrial exhibition near the end of the Depression and on the eve of the Second World War and enables us to see how the company marketed itself to the public and to other businesses. In addition to the public relations benefits, SoCal supported the GGIE to address imbalances in supply and demand for its products that developed during the economic depression of the 1930s. SoCal was not only interested in having people visit the fair; it wanted to encourage the public to drive there and to consume gasoline and oil along the way, in particular, by visiting the many service stations SoCal had constructed in the western United States. To achieve this goal, SoCal hired the Walt Disney Studio to develop a national advertising campaign in the spring and summer of 1939 to promote travel to the GGIE and the consumption of SoCal’s products and services en route. This extensive campaign is of interest for several reasons. It marked a collaboration between one of most significant industrial concerns in California and one of the country’s leading providers of popular entertainment, allowing us to see how a firm with a troubled public image harnessed itself to one that was universally admired. SoCal’s explanation for the collaboration and presentation of the partnership to its shareholders and employees reveals the ways in which the oil company constructed a discourse of shared values. For Disney, the venture offered significant financial support while the company was moving to a new studio and ramping up production on four feature films. Standard Oil of California celebrated its association with Disney in its monthly bulletins for employees and stockholders and in special stage show

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­ erformances for its dealers and distributors. The advertising campaign Disney p constructed ran from February 1939 through fall 1940, during the fair’s second year, and ranged across several media: newspapers, billboards, posters for gas stations, the promotional film The Standard Parade of 1939, and, in particular, in special color comic supplements called Travel Tykes Weekly that Standard Oil dealers distributed to children and their families. The comics featured a frontpage adventure in which well-known Disney characters drove across the country to California, finding the need for Standard Oil services in each story; two inside pages with gags, games, riddles, and things to make; and a back page that narrated a race between Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck to be the first to reach the Exposition in California. Children were encouraged to follow the Disney characters by tracking them across a separate pictorial map that represented each state in terms of its historic sites, natural attractions, and typical products. On their journeys to California, Mickey, Donald, and other Disney characters including Goofy, Pluto, Snow White, and the seven dwarfs stopped at historic US landmarks and national parks, visiting Standard Oil service stations at every step. The advertising campaign that linked Standard Oil and its products to Disney and its characters also connected them both to broader cultural discourses about leisure, tourism, and national identity of the time. When Disney’s characters complete their travels and reach the Golden Gate Exposition, we see how this collaboration, and the mélange of attractions and exhibits at the fair, may have shaped Disney’s approach to Disneyland later. This analysis draws on primary material relating to Standard Oil history, in particular, the company’s own published histories of its activities and SoCal’s monthly bulletins for employees and stockholders, in order to understand how SoCal represented its involvement with the Exposition and its decision to partner with Disney. Evidence of the advertising campaign can be found in newspapers and popular magazines of the time, but the most important sources are the twenty-four-page comic weeklies that Disney artists developed and that SoCal distributed through its service stations. These comic supplements allow us to study in detail how Disney characters were inscribed within SoCal’s corporate ambitions and, at the same time, understand how this advertising campaign enabled the animation studio to expand its own involvement in US culture.

“A Literature and a Litigation” As Upton Sinclair’s novel Oil! (1926) demonstrates, the history of oil companies in the United States reflects both myth and brutal reality: the myth of the

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individual entrepreneur who dreams of founding a company and striking it rich, and the brutal reality that the oil industry was one of the most notorious examples of nineteenth-century industrial capitalism in action. Looking at the formation of the SoCal and its relationship to its parent company, Standard Oil of New Jersey, allows us to understand SoCal’s complex origins and its efforts to differentiate itself from its parent by creating an image of itself as innovative and risk-taking. In representing its partnership with Disney, SoCal highlighted values it believed the two companies shared, values that reflected traditional American ideals of independence and entrepreneurship rather than cutthroat, competitive capitalism. The organization that eventually became SoCal took shape in the California oil fields of the 1850s, during a time of “mineral fever,” when prospectors poured into the region looking for gold and silver. D. G. Scofield, a prospector from Pennsylvania, located oil in Pico Canyon, northwest of Los Angeles, and formed California Star Oil Works Company in 1876 with the aim to drill, refine, and transport the oil to market. Star Oil reincorporated as the Pacific Coast Oil Company in 1879 and it is this event that SoCal later marked as its origin and that inspired company narratives for many years to come. At a dinner celebrating SoCal’s 100th anniversary in 1980, board chair Harold J. Haynes argued, We are the spiritual descendants . . . of the visionary men who risked their reputations, their fortunes, and on occasion even their lives, to bring to the marketplaces of America, and the world, the necessities, the conveniences and the pleasures that petroleum and its products bring to us today. No, ladies and gentlemen. We are not just in it for the money. This is a business of sweeping opportunity, of far horizons. . . . It is a business in which an individual can test himself—against nature, against the odds.1 As we will see, this conviction that SoCal grew from visionary and daring men who tested themselves against the odds attracted its executives to Walt Disney. During the time that Pacific Coast Oil was building its holding in California, however, John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil of New Jersey had also begun to consolidate its distribution operations in the western United States. While Pacific Coast owned the fields that produced the crude oil, it did not have the refinery capacity or pipelines to transport the oil to national markets, two areas where Standard Oil of New Jersey dominated. In 1900, Rockefeller’s firm purchased a controlling interest in Pacific Coast and enabled Pacific Coast to build the most advanced refinery in California and the state’s first major pipeline. In 1906, Pacific Coast changed its name to Standard Oil Company (California) and took over operation of the western assets of Standard Oil.

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Pacific Coast’s production, refining, and transportation capabilities were also combined with Standard Oil’s marketing abilities.2 Soon after Pacific Coast combined with Standard Oil, however, it became embroiled in one of the largest antitrust movements in US history. Standard Oil has been one of the most scrutinized corporations in American business, investigated by journalists, historians, and economists since John D. Rockefeller began buying up land after the Civil War and formed the Standard Oil Trust in 1882. In an early example of vertical and horizontal integration, Rockefeller bought land containing oil and natural gas, built refineries to process them, leased railroads to transport the liquids, and invented service stations to deliver gas and oil to consumers. Standard Oil ruthlessly undercut competitors, colluded with railroads to gain lower rates to transport its oil, and hid the extent of its ownership in layers of shell corporations.3 By the early 1900s, at the time of its merger with Pacific Coast, Standard Oil controlled over 90 percent of the refining capacity in the United States, and its complex structure and cutthroat practices spurred one of the great muckraking reports of all time, Ida Tarbell’s series for McClure’s magazine from 1902 to 1904.4 As another writer noted in the Saturday Evening Post, “No one need be told that the words ‘Standard’ and ‘suspicion’ were formerly almost synonymous. . . . The Standard has inspired a literature and a litigation all its own.”5 Tarbell’s exposé and President Theodore Roosevelt’s determination to break the trusts that dominated the US economy led to a landmark Supreme Court decision in 1911 that found Standard Oil had violated the Sherman antitrust act by restraining interstate and foreign trade in petroleum and its products.6 The court forced Standard Oil to break up its regional divisions into separate and independent components. Under the new system, the former components of Standard Oil each had geographical exclusivity: Standard Oil (California) oversaw the production, refining, and marketing of oil in the far western United States, including the Pacific Coast and Southwest. Over the next decade the California company in turn established subsidiaries in Texas, Colorado, Arizona, Oregon, Washington, Montana, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Idaho, Nevada, and Utah—states that later figured in the Disney campaign. In 1926, Standard Oil (California) became known as Standard Oil Company of California.7 By the mid-1930s, SoCal had become the largest producer of crude petroleum in the United States.8 The Depression, however, hit the company hard. As industries sat idle and Americans could not afford to buy gasoline for their cars, demand for oil fell. By the end of the decade, the price of gas was 33 percent lower than it had been fifteen years earlier and did not cover the costs of extraction and refining. In 1938 SoCal had to put 31 million barrels of oil and petroleum products into storage. During this period the company operated under a voluntary conservation program in which an “Oil Umpire”

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set production figures for each Standard Oil. (One might call this an attempt to prop up prices as well.) In California, this led to a decrease in production of about 10 percent in barrels per day. At the same time during this period, the petroleum industry was still spending money to locate, obtain, refine, and improve oil and gas products. Thus, the output per well declined at the same time that Standard Oil of California was drilling new wells and reconditioning existing ones. In fiscal year 1938, profits declined 30 percent.9 Standard Oil pursued several strategies to cope with this situation. The company developed new motor oils, such as RPM, which featured prominently in the Disney campaign. As the aviation industry developed, the company built a new plant to refine the kind of high-octane fuel planes needed. SoCal also introduced a national credit card that allowed drivers to spread out payments, increased its marketing efforts along major highways, and opened new service stations.10 The Disney campaign would publicize these efforts, but none of them could resolve the fundamental imbalance between supply and demand that plagued the company and the entire oil industry. New sources of demand were required and to create them, Standard Oil of California turned to a strategy that had succeeded for countries, cities, and companies in the past: supporting a world’s fair in San Francisco, the city where SoCal had its headquarters.

“The Great West Is Now in Readiness” Historians have noted that world’s fairs have historically celebrated the technological prowess and imperial ambitions of the nations or cities that sponsored them. In the United States, world’s fairs have introduced visitors to new scientific and technological advances and have modeled new forms of architecture, urban planning, and public and private transportation. Critics have noted that while fairs celebrate a nation’s ambitions, they often paper over contemporary economic struggles to create a view of the future as utopian. During the 1930s, for examples, US cities sponsored a total of six expositions that strove to whip up enthusiasm for the promise of America.11 As historian David Nye has noted, “exposition values do not simply mirror the world outside the perimeter of the fairgrounds. Indeed, they often depict the reversal of existing economic conditions . . . offering a site for the pilgrims of modern society to express their faith in technology and progress.”12 California had already hosted earlier world’s fairs and expositions and the GGIE of 1939 would be the second one to take place in San Francisco in a quarter century. The first San Francisco World’s Fair, the Panama-Pacific

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­ xposition of 1915, in fact served as a model for the 1939 exposition. The E original architect for the 1939 fair had designed the 1915 fair and when he died in 1937, the commission passed to another architect who had worked on the 1915 plans.13 The 1915 fair celebrated the completion of the Panama Canal and the four hundredth anniversary of Balboa’s sighting of the Pacific Ocean, while the 1939 exposition began with the intention of honoring the completion of both the Bay Bridge connecting San Francisco and Oakland and the Golden Gate Bridge linking San Francisco to Marin County.14 It was not long, however, before that original vision expanded into something much grander, according to SoCal’s March 1936 bulletin. The original idea of the Exposition was to celebrate the completion of the new bridges, but now thought is running in the direction of having something of broader significance, something to glorify the Pacific Ocean, the countries and people adjacent thereto, to herald their achievements, and to promote peace, unity and cooperation between all of these peoples in the future.15 And this more expansive and international vision could also serve to spur travel to California and to the Exposition. In February 1939, the month the GGIE opened, Standard’s monthly bulletin argued, The great West is now in readiness for the influx of tourists the Exposition will draw here. It is estimated that over four million visitors from outside California will come by every means of transportation and by every highway route of the nation. Through this mass movement of people the entire eleven western states should derive immeasurable value. These tourists coming to the fair certainly will visit numerous of this great country’s natural attractions en route. The spending of these travelers, it has been predicted, will reach $400,000,000—a distribution of “new money” going to every form of commercial effort. Thus may be said that with the swinging open of the gates of this amazingly beautiful world’s fair, the West receives an important economic value.16 Standard Oil of California took an active role in shaping the 1939 Exposition. SoCal public relations executive Ted Huggins is often credited for proposing the idea in the first place, in a March 1, 1933 speech where he suggested that San Francisco celebrate the completion of the Golden Gate and Bay Bridges with a World’s Fair in 1937. His idea was taken up by Howard Freeman of the San Francisco Chronicle and another publicity agent who suggested the site be called “Treasure Island” to evoke images of the Robert Louis

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Stevenson novel and of the state’s historical gold rush. Though the fair did not take place until 1939, Standard Oil continued to advocate for the idea as a way to promote travel to the west and to sell gasoline. SoCal participated in many fairs and shows during the 1930s in the seven western states where it operated and even had an employee, Oliver Applegate, whose job was to coordinate SoCal’s exhibits for those events.17 SoCal’s bulletins for employees and shareholders spoke at length and in detail about exactly how the fair would stimulate demand for its products and services. More travel throughout the west would increase sales in motor fuel and gasoline and promote the use of SoCal’s credit card to pay for them. The company also planned to expand the travel information service it had established to help visitors plan their trip and stops along the way.18 Most importantly, the company aimed to promote travel to the Exposition as a way to increase sales at its service stations throughout the western United States. Standard Oil opened the first service station in the United States in 1907 and by 1926 Standard Oil of California owned and operated 654 service stations in nearly every major town on Pacific Coast. In 1933, the stations were reorganized as a wholly owned subsidiary that began to offer not only gas but also tires and batteries, maps, and advice on local road conditions and recreational opportunities.19 The stations continued to be a profit center for the company even when its total sales declined. In 1938, when overall profits fell 30 percent, the service station subsidiary saw an increase in revenue of 6.7 percent.20 SoCal carefully selected their service station employees and took pride in their training because it was through them that many motorists interacted with the company.21 A campaign that highlighted these stations would therefore promote one of the company’s few centers of profit.

“Devoted Workers and Millions of Friends”: Collaborating with Disney The GGIE had the potential to benefit Standard Oil of California in many ways: by stimulating the consumption of oil and gas as people drove to the fair; by increasing visits to service stations along the way; by linking the company with other business ventures and with travel beyond the United States; and by associating what had been a notorious business trust with a respected regional and national exposition. Given the importance of the GGIE to SoCal’s financial situation, it is perhaps not surprising that the company would choose to hire an internationally known film producer such as the Walt Disney Studio to develop an advertising campaign to promote automobile travel to

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the Exposition. Their decision reflects the complex interrelationships among industrial and entertainment firms in this period and the Disney’s studios use of licensing arrangements as a way to fund its production of animated films. According to the trade publication Western Advertising, the idea of working with Disney arose within SoCal’s advertising agency McCann Erickson, after the company decided to focus on promoting its service stations. To gain information from which to develop a campaign, McCann Erickson hired a national polling firm, the Ross-Federal Research Corporation, to interview fifty thousand motorists about their opinions on service stations.22 Opinion polls using survey methodology and large samples had become popular in 1936, when the Gallup Poll correctly predicted that Franklin Roosevelt would win the presidential election, and SoCal’s decision to hire Ross-Federal lent scientific support to its findings.23 The survey found the public believed that Standard maintained the most inviting service stations, with courteous attendants, clean restrooms, a range of services, and quality gasoline.24 These findings became the basis for the Disney campaign, providing “reasons why” motorists should patronize SoCal service stations. In addition to commissioning the Ross-Federal survey, McCann Erikson also negotiated the licensing agreement with Disney through Kay Kamen, the executive in charge of negotiating all of Disney’s licensing agreements at this time.25 By partnering with the Disney Studio, SoCal allied itself with a company that was enjoying enormous popular and financial success. Not only had Disney’s short cartoons gained international popularity, but by 1937, sales of licensed Disney merchandise had also “skyrocketed” to $35 million. Licensees included a wide range of manufacturers, including General Foods, RCA Victor, Kroger, and International Silver. Snow White alone had eighty different licensees.26 In hiring Disney, then, SoCal was partnering with one of the most successful and profitable sources of licensed merchandise in the country. It is also possible that the association between Disney and SoCal was encouraged by Nelson Rockefeller, the son of John D. Rockefeller Jr. and a grandson of John D. Rockefeller. Rockefeller served on the board of directors of RKO, the studio that distributed Disney’s films during this period. In 1933, RKO had declared bankruptcy and stopped making rental payments on Radio City Music Hall, its flagship theater and the site of Snow White’s US premiere. The Rockefeller family owned Radio City (where Kamen’s office was located) and, as part of the bankruptcy process, gained a seat on RKO’s board of directors. The Rockefeller family appointed Nelson to represent their interests. RKO had begun distributing Disney’s films in 1936 and supported the studio by advancing production funding and arranging favorable exhibition terms. In return, Disney’s box office success kept RKO afloat in the late 1930s, when that studio had few successes.27 Nelson Rockefeller personally supported

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Walt Disney; for example, he arranged for the producer to take a trip to Latin America in the summer of 1941 when a labor strike had crippled the studio. Given the Rockefeller’s long history with Standard Oil, Nelson Rockefeller’s financial interest in RKO and support of Walt Disney may have served as an added impetus for the collaboration. For Disney, the motivation to undertake this advertising campaign was primarily economic. During the 1930s, the company kept afloat because of its merchandise licensing agreements and expansion into other forms of media, such as comic strips and comic books. Disney’s short cartoons did not earn back their costs, because theater owners paid only $25–40 to screen them and the studio spent up to several hundred thousand dollars each to produce them. In addition, Walt Disney’s decision to develop a naturalistic, personality-driven style of animation and his focus on story structure required a specialized division of labor and an expansion of staff that had no parallel with any other cartoon studio. During the four years in which Snow White was in production, from 1934 to 1937, the studio’s staff expanded to over one thousand people, all of them on salary. Though Snow White, released in December 1937, earned $8 million, Walt Disney plowed the proceeds into building a new studio in Burbank and launching four new features.28 This aggressive expansion in film production made outside revenue even more urgent. Partnering with Standard Oil, then, brought in needed funds. The Disney Studio may also have appreciated the opportunity to promote its characters and brand by allying with the great California exposition and the businesses associated with it. SoCal announced the collaboration with Disney on the cover of its shareholder bulletin for April 1939 (Figure 4.1). In keeping with the campaign’s focus on service stations, a young boy dressed in the colors and hat of a service station attendant holds a Mickey Mouse doll sporting a smaller version of the same hat. In this image, childhood and Disney merge to become the public face of Standard Oil. The bulletin celebrated SoCal’s alliance with Disney inside the front cover as well. An elaborate announcement reviews Walt Disney’s up-from-the-bootstrap story: In 1923 Walt Disney arrived at Hollywood with $300 to live on, a print of his Alice in Cartoonland, drawn the year before, and no job ahead. Sixteen years later he had three honorary university degrees, a two-million-dollar plant under construction, a staff of one thousand devoted workers, and untold millions of friends actually in love with his wonderful little people. Disney’s successful climb from humble beginnings to international fame exemplified the American Dream and the myth of the west as the place where that dream could be brought to life. “It follows,” the bulletin asserts, “that the

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FIGURE 4.1  Cover, Standard Oil Bulletin, April 1939. In this image, childhood and Disney merge to become the public face of Standard Oil Company of California.

Standard Oil Company of California is more than pleased to announce the Walt Disney’s ‘Travel Tykes’ will enliven its advertising throughout the rest of 1939.”29 Yet why exactly “it follows” is not explained. The wording presents Disney as an inspiration, a man with a dream who in a few short years has built a studio with a thousand devoted workers and products that the public loves. By allying itself with Disney, did Standard Oil hope to transfer some of the affection the cartoons inspired to itself? To rewrite its own complex history by referencing the enduring American myth of individual initiative? The logic is ambiguous and suggests that both the quality and popularity of Disney films might be strong enough to lift other brands, perhaps even Standard Oil’s. By linking itself to Disney, Standard Oil evoked its own mythic past and connected with what it felt was a kindred spirit.

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The Standard Parade of 1939 Western Advertising noted, “When an advertiser today is about to inaugurate a new advertising campaign, it is common practice to attempt to drive home the value of the campaign to its sale staff and dealers before the actual advertising reaches the eyes or ears to the general public.”30 In March 1939, SoCal introduced the campaign to its employees, service stations, distributors, and dealers in the western states where it operated in a stage show entitled “The Standard Parade for 1939.” Other oil companies such as Shell also promoted their campaigns in live shows, according to the magazine, but “Standard Oil visioned [sic] this pre-selling on a much larger and broader scale than they or probably any one else ever had done before.”31 The show opened in Seattle’s Music Hall Theatre on March 22, moved to the Mayfair in Portland on the 24th, traveled to the Memorial Opera House in San Francisco on March 27, and finished at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles on March 29. It was estimated that the programs reached fifteen thousand Standard employees and their families during that week.32 Western Advertising lauded the decision to invite employees’ families as well. Obviously it was good tactics to bring wives and kiddies and brothers and sisters to see the show, and the underlying reason wasn’t difficult to determine. If they liked it, wouldn’t they go away feeling more than ever that the head of the household worked for a fine concern; wouldn’t they back him up, think more of him, and wouldn’t he in turn be a better salesman?33 This reasoning lays bare the link between family dynamics and industrial culture and illustrates how corporations believed Disney characters could bridge that gap. The stage programs were developed by Fanchon and Marco, former vaudeville producers who, after the introduction of sound films, began booking live acts to play between the shorts and feature films in motion picture theaters. Their package for SoCal worked from a script written by Hugh Thomas of McCann Erickson and consisted of fifty acrobats, artists, and dancers performing over a two-hour period. The nine acts that made up the stage show illustrate the range of performance types of the late 1930s. In one, a troupe of acrobats, the “Seven Cresonians,” double-flipped into barrels, while helping an artist draw a full-color, billboard-size ad featuring Donald Duck, an allusion to the lightning sketch performances that earlier animators such as Winsor McCay had presented. In another act, twenty “Standard Motorettes” created a life-size ad for RPM Motor Oil from pieces of felt they carried in slings over their shoulders, and at the San Francisco Memorial Opera House, they stood

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on red, white, and blue balls to introduce enormous reproductions of ads in the campaign.34 In addition to these live performances, Disney prepared a promotional film to screen as part of those shows. The Standard Parade of 1939, a seven-minute, black and white film incorporates live-action footage from a behind-thescenes documentary Disney had made for RKO during the release of Snow White.35 This film celebrates Walt Disney’s rise to fame as “the storybook success of a genius who had a dream—and would not give it up” and uses language nearly identical to that of the April 1939 Standard Oil Bulletin, noting his three honorary degrees and the new studio under construction in Burbank. The film praises Disney’s innovative use of sound, introduction of animated films in Technicolor, and credits him for creating Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck. The film celebrates the worldwide popularity of Snow White and shows children enjoying their Mickey Mouse dolls and other toys, a subtle promotion for Disney-licensed merchandise. Images of tributes from international film festivals and foreign governments are also included. The film queries, “you probably are asking, ‘What has Walt Disney’s successstory to do with Standard Oil?’” and responds by presenting a film-within-a-film, a color cartoon short called Standard Parade for 1939—confusingly, a film with the same title as the one in which it is embedded, except for a missing “the” at the beginning. The cartoon is adapted from Disney’s Parade of the Award Nominees (1932), which was designed to be shown at the 1932 Academy Awards to honor the acting nominees for that year.36 Like its 1932 predecessor, Standard Parade for 1939 features Mickey Mouse leading familiar Disney characters as they march horizontally across the screen, carrying banners. While the banner in the 1932 film announces “Parade of the Award Nominees,” the one heading the parade in the 1939 short says “Standard Goes Disney for 1939.” The 1932 film caricatures familiar stars of the era such as Marie Dressler and Frederic March as Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde parading across a flower-strewn carpet, while the 1939 short focuses on the seven dwarfs, who carry signs that spell out “Standard.” Donald Duck, Goofy, and Pluto and the three little pigs march as well. In the 1939 film, the characters hold banners that enumerate the media where the advertising campaign can be found: newspapers—billboards—station posters—tire covers—time signals—and a comic weekly. The Big Bad Wolf brings up the rear, holding a sign that asks “Can They Do It?” Both films use the same soundtrack, a cost-saving feature, and the backgrounds for the 1939 short are not as detailed as those in the earlier film, which features a castle and windmills.37 Unlike the promotional films that oil companies such as Shell produced during this time, Standard Parade for 1939 does not dramatize oil production or try to educate viewers; instead, Disney’s short reduces the company to letters on banners, condensing a complex industrial firm to a simple graphic design.38

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“Let’s Make Some Advertisements” As Western Advertising noted, during the spring of 1939 Standard’s campaign with Disney was “everywhere.” The tie-ups appeared in print and broadcast media and in regional and national outlets. In print, ads could be found in black and white or full color, in daily and Sunday newspapers, and in national magazines such as American Weekly and regional travel magazines such as Sunset. On the radio, Disney’s ads for Standard Oil could be heard on the Standard-sponsored Symphony and its School Broadcast; even the signals announcing the time were “Disneyized.” Standard service stations, dealers, and distributors featured giant cutouts of Donald Duck and the cranky character also appeared on the spare tire on the rear of yellow cabs in major cities along the Pacific Coast.39 The first announcement of the campaign in the Los Angeles Times on April 6, 1939, occupies nearly a full page and highlights the findings of the RossFederal Research survey about the public’s high regard for Standard’s service stations. Donald Duck holds a telescope under a bubble that asks, “Looking for More Value?” and the ad lists the reasons the public ranks Standard service stations highly. At the bottom of the display ad, the seven dwarfs carry the letters that spell “Standard,” as they did in the short film shown to company employees. The copy also includes an imaginary conversation with Walt Disney in which he asks Standard what its message is and then, having been convinced by the survey results, says “that is worth telling . . . And now let’s make some advertisements so interesting everyone will want to read about it.”40 Not only Disney’s characters but Walt Disney himself attests to the value of both Standard’s research and its products. Another ad highlighting the survey findings appeared on the back cover of Motor Land magazine in November 1939. This time, various Disney characters including Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, Horace Horsecollar, Goofy, Minnie, and the tortoise from Tortoise and the Hare sport cowboy hats and lassos as they say “yippee!” Ads not only promoted Standard’s service stations and gasoline but also a new motor oil the company had developed in 1935 called RPM.41 Magazines that promoted travel and tourism in the western United States, such as Motor Land and Sunset, featured ads for RPM Motor Oil in many issues published while the fair was open in 1939 and 1940. Ads featured Disney’s stars, Mickey, Donald, and Minnie, praising the oil’s modern quality, its ability to keep “blistering high-speed motors” performing at their best.42 Captions drew analogies between the motor oil’s qualities and the Disney characters’ personalities. Mickey is deferential to Minnie, treating her like a queen in “Oil Service to the Queen’s Taste.”43 Donald’s temper manifests itself in an ad titled “Made for Punishment,” where he waves a hairbrush as he gets ready to spank one of

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his nephews. The copy draws an analogy between the punishment Donald is about to deliver and promises that, while other, “‘weak-sister’ oils can’t take it,” RPM can stand up to punishment44 (Figure 4.2). In addition to promoting SoCal’s service stations, gasoline, and motor oil, ads also brought to the attention of the public the company’s credit card and travel information service. “Good as Gold!” features Mickey, Minnie, Donald, and the tortoise and the elephant from Disney’s Silly Symphonies confronting the Big Bad Wolf, who not only drains the gas from their car but also steals their money. Yet, “They get their gas just in a flash, Without a single cent of cash! For Mickey—always on the guard—Presents his Standard Credit Card! It’s good as gold—and off they go!”45 Many ads link all of these services together. “Stretches for Miles,” an ad that features Goofy clutching onto the long neck of a giraffe, appeared in Sunset in October 1940 and promoted the extra mileage provided from Standard’s gasoline, the company’s credit card to

FIGURE 4.2  “Made for Punishment” ads drew analogies between the motor oil’s qualities and Disney characters’ personalities.

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pay for it, and the travel information service that could help drivers plan their next trip.46 In an ad from the same magazine in May 1940, Minnie is shown at a telephone switchboard under the caption “Gives you long distance.” The line refers to the extra mileage Standard gasoline provides, the credit card that one can use across the country, and the extra services that Standard stations offer.47 The integration between Standard’s products and services in these ads serves as a synecdoche for the smooth integration of the company’s activities. SoCal’s monthly bulletins promote the fair in every issue during the summer of 1939, including nearly the entire issue for May, and readers are also often reminded of its partnership with Disney. For example, an ad on the inside back cover of the April 1939 bulletin, entitled “No Three Little Pig Pies Today!” presents a series of vignettes in which a service station attendant helps the three little pigs avoid the wolf. In the first vignette, the Wolf learns that the pigs are planning to go swimming the next day and drains the oil from their car. “Heh! Heh! At last I’ll catch you for a fine repast.” The two “foolish porkers,” presumably the same ones who built their houses of sticks and straw, want to head right for the swimming hole, but the more responsible pig insists on visiting the service station first. “Good thing you came,” says “Standard’s Man.” “Here’s trouble in the old oil pan. So Mr. Wolf’s been up to tricks—Relax! There’s nothing we can’t fix.” The last panel celebrates the partnership and promise of the campaign to come. “With Standard Gas they roll in high! The wolf is mad enough to cry! ‘It’s Standard Service done me wrong!’ And the pigs respond: ‘It’s Hail to Standard! Standard Hail!’”48 And an insert in the August 1939 issue celebrates the success of the partnership so far: “Somehow we like the idea of Walt Disney’s tiny people come into our family—a happening which we hope you have noted elsewhere. We like them all—even bumbling Donald Duck—because they are tops, characters with character. . . . They have achieved exactly what this Company has sought to do—with a gratifying degree of success.”49 The widespread dissemination of these ads, and Standard’s pride in the results, underscores the success of their collaboration with Disney.

The Travel Tykes “See Standard First” Ads linking Disney and Standard Oil appeared in many places and in different forms, but a crucial element in the GGIE campaign was a four-page comics publication in newspaper form that appeared weekly from April through August 1939, in the summer of the fair’s first year. The four-page paper, titled

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“Travel Tykes Weekly,” was printed in four colors on newsprint and was similar in style to the comic supplements in the Sunday papers. In each issue the front page presented a comic narrative in which Mickey, Donald Duck, the dwarfs, Goofy, Snow White, or some combination thereof, visit scenic or historic spots around the United States as they drove to the exposition on Treasure Island. The inside two pages of each issue featured puzzles, jokes, and games, as well as helpful advice on the importance of such activities as brushing one’s teeth, drinking milk, or practicing good table manners. The new publication was announced in the Los Angeles Times on April 24, 1939, shortly after SoCal’s stage shows for employees and the same month that Mickey Mouse appeared on the cover of its employee and shareholder bulletin. The nearly full-page ad in the Times promoted the various features to be found in the Weekly and linked them to the personalities of Disney characters, such as “Goofy” games and wisecracks from Donald Duck.50 The choice to use a comic strip format was intended to attract an audience of children and through them, their parents. As Western Advertising noted, “if there’s something special to interest Johnny and Betty to want a ‘give away’ badly enough, they’ll easily induce fond parents to buy where it is obtainable. And considering juvenile popularity, a plan was developed, if possible, to bring dad and mother into a Standard Oil service station once a week for eighteen consecutive weeks.”51 The strategy of using popular cartoon characters to sell industrial products in newspaper comics had become accepted practice by the late 1930s. In the early 1930s, businesses, newspapers, and advertising agencies recognized that comics were an effective medium to promote sales. George Gallup, the noted political pollster who began his career in advertising research, conducted studies in the early 1930s that found that more adults read the comic strips than front-page news stories.52 Advertisers took note of this way of attracting readers’ attention and began creating ads that featured cartoon characters or that framed a sales pitch as a four-panel comic strip.53 In 1931, the Hearst newspaper chain began selling advertising space in the comics sections of its Sunday papers, and their success spurred other newspaper groups to adopt the practice. Within a year, newspapers across the country were featuring advertising arranged as a page of comics within their comics section.54 By 1939, annual expenditures on advertising in color comic sections had reached $11,000,000.55 Some of these ads appeared as full-page stories, with entertaining narratives and characters and sometimes an informative message—the format that Disney adopted in its ads for Standard Oil. At the time of the Standard Oil campaign, the Disney Studio had developed a robust series of comic strips and magazines featuring its characters, and the magazines had already served as giveaways to promote businesses such as dairy

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companies.56 Putting its characters in the “service” of an international energy conglomerate marked a much greater expansion of Disney’s reach. Each of Disney’s weekly “Travel Tykes” issues for SoCal presents a narrative in four or five parts that involves some mishap or threat that is resolved through the help of Standard Oil. In many of these ads, the Disney characters have set out to enjoy recreational activities such as swimming, boating, and hiking, activities that require cars to enjoy. In the comics, cars fueled by Standard Gas are more powerful and reliable. When the dwarfs travel to the Grand Canyon, for example, their car radiator starts to hiss and conks out. Grumpy sets out for help and sees scary sights at every turn, including two fiery eyes that resolve themselves into headlights. Donald Duck has come to rescue his stranded buddies. Says Donald, “Standard sure equips your car for carefree motor trips! So after this, why not be smart—Get Standard Service ‘fore you start!’” Grumpy and the comic’s readers are reminded to “See Standard First” if we want reliable gas and oil.57 Similarly, when Donald and the dwarfs visit Yosemite and Grumpy falls into Mirror Lake, Mickey lassos all of his friends and pulls them out. “Hold tight,” he shouts, “I’ll save you, gang! With Standard Gas the car is full and it’s got pull when you need pull!”58 The weekly comics featured different Disney characters but their reactions to these challenges maintain the personalities viewers saw on screen. In “Seeing Puget Sound,” the three little pigs decide to set off for a sail with a skipper who turns out to be the Big Bad Wolf, though the wise pig warns against it. Far from shore, the Wolf reveals his identify: “hands up! You’re in my power! This is your final hour!” Inspired to jump for it and swim to shore, “We’d rather drown than nourish him,” the pigs reach their car on land. “It’s ready to flee—it’s all OK—For Standard checked ‘er up today.”59 Just as the Wolf is always the villain in these comics, Mickey is consistently a hero. When a herd of bison chase Clarabelle Cow and Horace Horsecollar in “Seeing Great Salt Lake,” it is Mickey’s car, powered by Standard gasoline, that rescues them.60 When Donald gets hit by a wave off the shores of Waikiki and is about to be attacked by a merman, Mickey’s car flies overhead to rescue him.61 The distinctive personalities of each of the seven dwarfs enliven other narratives. In “Seeing Death Valley,” they marvel at the strange flora and rock formations in the desert before their attention comes to rest on a “big important flower” that Doc warns them “is s’posed to eat men, hide and hair!” Grumpy doesn’t believe it and marches up to the flower, only to be seized by the “grabby buttercup.” The concerted efforts of all of the other dwarfs can’t extract him, and they too are swallowed up. It isn’t until Mickey drives up and ties a rope to Grumpy’s “last remaining toe” that they are rescued. “Remember,” Doc says, “he’s got Standard Gas.”62 Grabby and greedy nature is tamed by Standard Oil’s gas and through harnessing its power, Mickey saves the day (Figure 4.3).

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FIGURE 4.3  Grumpy and the “grabby buttercup.” The distinctive personalities of the Seven dwarfs enliven encounters with unruly nature. In addition to presenting new situations involving familiar Disney characters, the studio’s campaign for Standard Oil also helped promote its most recent film releases. The character of Ferdinand the bull, who first appeared in the November 1938 Ferdinand, is the focus of one week’s adventure, “Dude Ranching’s the Life.” As in the film, Ferdinand is a peaceful bull who would rather spend his day sitting under a tree than challenging matadors in a bullring. He wants to sit and smell the flowers—“I love each fragrant, perfumed sniff!”—but is spotted by a cattle rustler who seems to be the Big Bad Wolf in disguise. The Wolf/rustler spots “a luscious haul . . . such tender beef’” and vows “tonight I’ll dine on T-bone steak that’s extra fine!” But when Mickey gets word, he rushes to the rescue to foil the wolf’s “dirty, dirty deed.”63 Not only does the ad promote Disney’s new film, it connects Ferdinand with the studio’s other popular characters and extends their following to him. Like Disney’s South American films of the early 1940s, Saludos Amigos and The Three Caballeros, which exoticized the inhabitants of central and South America, these comics also exoticize the native inhabitants of the western United States. In “Seeing Arizona,” Mickey and Donald encounter a “heap big Indian brave” who tells them in broken English, “Me plenty mad—Gas buggy dead—me got no chance To get home time for big Rain Dance!” Once again, Mickey and Standard come to the rescue, “Come, let’s go!” says Mickey. “I’ll give your balking bus a tow” right into the Standard dealer in town, who diagnoses battery trouble. In thanks, Chief Big Bull awards Mickey a feathered headdress, which provokes him to say, “Whee—these feathers, gee! You

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can’t tell Donald Duck from me!”64 Other ethnic groups are also stereotyped. In “Seeing Hollywood,” Mickey, Donald, and Horace sneak through a fence and find themselves on a movie set for “His Desert Love.” “Arab hordes” with swords and rifles attack them.65 The stereotyping of Native Americans in particular calls up the portrayal of the “Red Man” in Disney’s 1953 feature Peter Pan and underscores the ongoing denigration of this group in Disney’s films of this period. In addition to promoting SoCal’s gasoline and service stations, the frontpage stories in the Travel Tykes Weekly often promoted the company’s travel service as well. As was the case with the magazine and newspaper ads discussed earlier, these front-page stories remind readers that Standard can also provide advice about interesting places to visit. In “Seeing Lake Tahoe,” the “Standard Man” recommends that Mickey, Horace, and Minnie visit a nearby lake to watch a speed-boat race and when they arrive, they find that Donald Duck is one of the competitors. When the Wolf, who is also a competitor, pursues him, Donald avoids tipping his boat on its side and gives Standard the credit for steering his friends to the race.66 In these weekly dramas, Standard Oil of California positions itself as a necessary component of the travel experience, one that enables drivers and passengers to conquer mechanical and logistical difficulties.

The Race to Treasure Island These Travel Tykes Weekly publications were also linked to another element of Disney’s campaign for SoCal, a travel map of the United States. The back page of each of these four-page comic supplements featured another adventure involving Disney characters: an imaginary race between Mickey and Donald to be the first to reach the GGIE. The race began on the east coast, with Mickey taking a northern route and Donald traveling through the south, and each week the characters moved through different states that would connect with readers across the United States. In addition to a narrative description of their travels, each back page also included two colored images that readers could cut out and paste onto a separate lithographed map entitled “Mickey and Donald’s Race to Treasure Island.” Ads promoting the campaign announced: “Free colored cutouts for your Race Game are printed each week in Standard’s new Funny Paper—Travel Tykes Weekly. Cut ‘em out and paste ‘em on your big colored map. Will you go for it—Oh Boy! Oh Boy!”67 Like the color supplements, these maps were also available at Standard service stations.

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SoCal’s decision to distribute these race maps through its service stations links the Disney campaign to a long history of automobile maps. As map historian Walter Ristow has demonstrated, oil companies began publishing road maps in the early days of automobiles, and service stations such as Standard Oil’s offered maps to customers almost as soon as they opened. By the 1920s, these gas station maps also included information about recreational areas, historic landmarks, and scenic landscapes that could enhance the experience of travel.68 The racing map Disney designed for SoCal, however, is not intended to be strictly informative; it does not include highway designations or directions, for example. Instead, the racing map can be described as a “pictorial map” that, according to historian Stephen Hornsby, featured “artistic renderings of places, regions, and countries . . . for the purpose of telling a visual story or to capture a sense of place.”69 Pictorial maps often included humorous vignettes that illustrated a region’s historic sites, geographical features, notable animals or crops, and popular activities.70 In the Treasure Island map, for example, Philadelphia is represented by the Liberty Bell and the area of Mississippi includes an image of cotton. Pictorial maps were especially popular during the 1930s because they celebrated regional cultures and were thought to attract both children and adults.71 The “Race to Treasure Island” map was not the first pictorial map to feature Disney characters and these earlier designs directly influenced the 1939 map. Earlier in the 1930s, Disney licensed the Dixon Pencil Box Company to produce a “Mickey Mouse Map of the United States” that showed the studio’s popular characters participating in or reacting to typical sites and activities of each state, such as horse racing in Kentucky and the Grand Canyon in Arizona.72 Some of the vignettes are repeated in the 1939 map, though with different characters. For example, in the 1930 map, Mickey Mouse steers a Conestoga wagon over the Santa Fe trail, while in the 1939 racing map, Donald Duck navigates the trail. In 1930, Horace Horsecollar picks cotton in Alabama, but in 1939 it is Donald Duck, whose character did not exist in 1930. Similarly, in 1937, Disney’s licensing agent Kay Kamen organized a “Mickey Mouse Globe Trotters Promotion” in which participating bakeries gave away maps that allowed children to follow a race around the world between Mickey Mouse and the Big Bad Wolf. As in the 1939 racing map, children would receive cards when they bought bread that they could paste in blocks that formed the edge of the map.73 As it had in The Standard Parade of 1939 film, Disney adapted strategies, images, and situations from earlier projects to create the “Race to Treasure Island” map. The choice cut costs and enabled the studio to focus its creative energies on films; often different staff members designed these campaigns, rather than the studio’s animation team.74

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Formally titled “Standard Oil Company of California Presents/Mickey and Donald’s Race to Treasure Island/Golden Gate International Exposition on San Francisco Bay,” the map measures 50 cm by 68 cm and includes each of the United States except for Alaska and Hawaii, which did not become states until 1959, as well as the lower third of Canada, where Standard Oil was expanding its market and developing new holdings in early 1939.75 The space for each US state and Canadian province features at least one and sometimes two images of a well-known feature of that region: a natural monument, such as Pike’s Peak in Colorado or Niagara Falls in New York; a notable export, such as Georgia peaches, Iowa corn, or southern cotton and tobacco; or an historical feature, such as the Alamo in Texas or the Capitol in Washington, DC. Canadian provinces were marked by pictures of their natural resources, such as fishing in British Columbia or wheat in Manitoba. The map shows Mickey Mouse beginning the race, suitcase in hand, just off the coast of New York, and Donald launching his quest off the coast of Florida. The map is surrounded by thirty-six rectangles that are 7.6 cm high × 4.5 cm wide and there are fourteen each across the bottom and top of the map and an additional four down each side. The first two issues of the Travel Tykes Weekly advertised when the maps would be available and explained the process for pasting the cutouts from each issue into the spaces on the map. Each issue of the weekly Travel Tykes four-page comic supplement dedicated its back page to the race between Mickey and Donald to reach Treasure Island, even when the first page of the supplement showed them engaged somewhere else. For example, in issue five, “Seeing Hawaii,” Mickey and Donald visit the islands on the front page of the supplement but are still making their way along the east coast on the back page.76 Similarly, issue nine shows that they have already reached Treasure Island in the front-page adventure, but they are in Idaho on the back page.77 The different parts of the supplement, then, were meant to stand alone, and the characters might also be involved in other activities on the second and third pages of the supplement, such as solving puzzles or making jokes. The four-page supplement models the range of spaces in which Disney characters operated in the 1930s, from promoting manufacturer’s products, to educating young audiences, to providing entertainment. While the front page of each comic supplement featured narratives that promoted Standard Oil’s products and services, the racing feature on the back page presented Mickey and Donald as the celebrities. Travel Tykes No. 3, “The Big Race is On!” covers the start of the race as if it were the Indy 500. Mickey Mouse in New York and Donald Duck in Miami, surrounded by newspaper men, radio men and photographers, stood waiting impatiently for the word that would start them on their great race—the Race of the Century! The people of New York and Miami, as well as everyone else

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in the country, were excited . . . You could tell that something big was in the air.78 Mickey is presented as the more celebrated of the two, however. He leaves New York City “with motorcycle cops and radio cars, sirens screaming, as they cleared the way before him.” Mickey’s departure is described in accurate geographical detail: up Canal Street, west on Canal to the tunnel under the Hudson River, then the state road across New Jersey, through Newark and New Brunswick to Trenton. When Donald leaves Miami, the narrative mentions that he travels through the Everglades and Palm Beach, crosses the state line into Alabama, and stops just outside of Birmingham, glossing over many sites in between.79 In keeping with Mickey’s privileged position in the studio hierarchy, the narrative of the race reinforces his higher status. The weekly updates of their race continue to highlight key differences between Mickey and Donald’s personalities. Mickey takes the opportunity to learn about each state as he travels and in turn educates readers about each state’s flower and bird, main agricultural crops, and famous historic sites. In Travel Tykes No. 5, Mickey reaches Philadelphia, where he visits Independence Hall and takes a moment to explain that the Continental Congress signed the Declaration of Independence there. Donald, on the other hand, almost gets nabbed by an alligator outside of Miami and, although he drives by the famed Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, he stops to enjoy watermelon instead of learning about the history of the historically black university cofounded by Booker T. Washington. Donald’s stops often reinforce stereotypes instead of educating readers. “So he sat there eating watermelon and boasting about how he was going to beat Mickey in this great race. The result was that he overate— and had to stay overnight.”80 Donald’s self-indulgence contrasts with Mickey’s more disciplined approach to their competition. While Mickey is portrayed as being active, dynamic, and focused on the race, Donald Duck is easily distracted. When Mickey comes across cowboys about to begin a round-up at the “RPM Ranch,” he says, “I’d like to see this, but I’m on a race.”81 When Donald goes swimming in Lake Tahoe, he begins to wonder, “Why, oh why, tear away so soon?”82 One problem after another impedes Donald’s progress: “Tough luck! Donald’s car broke down near Bryce Canyon, Utah—and then a burro he was riding balked! What a race!”83 In today’ terms, Donald Duck seems to be suffering from attention-deficit disorder: “Poor Donald. No matter how he tried to keep going, something was always happening to keep him back. He was his usual fighting, quacking self. One minute he was raring to go and the next something claimed his attention and the race was forgotten.”84 In one episode outside of Austin, Texas, Donald comes across a cattle round-up and hops out of his car to join it, while Mickey is in North Dakota, learning about its history and state flower.85 When Mickey

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stops to enjoy cowboys lassoing horses in Montana, he reminds himself, “As much as he would have liked to stay on with the cowboys, he realized he was out to beat Donald in this great race across the country and just couldn’t tarry.”86 The depictions of each character in this racing narrative reinforce the roles they play and personalities they exhibit in Disney’s short cartoons of this period, with Mickey being responsible and focused on the task at hand, while Donald is distracted and unconcerned about time (Figure 4.4).

FIGURE 4.4  Eastern seaboard section of the “Race to Treasure Island” map. This pictorial map enabled readers to track the progress of the “Race to Treasure Island” and highlighted historic sites and typical features of each state.

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The characters Mickey and Donald encounter in the course of the race also show more respect for Mickey than they do for Donald. In Travel Tykes No. 7, a Native American tribe in North Dakota gives Mickey a beautiful feather headdress, though they laugh at him when he parades around wearing it.87 When Donald meets a Native American tribe in New Mexico in Travel Tykes No. 8, they offer him clothing and jewelry to buy, not as a gift, and laugh when he tries them on. Unlike Mickey, Donald loses his temper and refuses to have anything more to do with the tribe.88 Neither adventure mocks the Native Americans with pidgin English, like the “Seeing Arizona” narrative on the front page of Travel Tykes No. 14, and “Race Derby Extra,” the story featuring Mickey on the back of Travel Tykes No. 7, praises the beauty of the headdress they give him and admits that he looks funny wearing it.89 James Akerman, an historian and the curator of maps at the Newberry Library in Chicago, points out that pictorial maps of the 1930s often implied that the purpose of travel was usually recreational. “One searches the imaginary motoring nation . . . in vain for the trek of the Bonus Army or the migration of Okies.”90 In the late nineteenth century, railroad companies, including those that partnered with John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil, also promoted western travel to many of the historic sites that Mickey, Donald, the seven dwarfs, and others visited, but that mode of transportation required travelers to stick to a predetermined time schedule and fixed stops. As historian Hal Rothman points out, traveling by car enabled drivers to plan their own routes and visit a destination within a time frame of their choosing.91 Driving facilitates freedom and mobility and offers the opportunity to design a personal itinerary. Yet at the same time, by highlighting sites that are seen as essential parts of US culture and history, these weekly back-page adventures and the map that tracks them create a shared American culture that contributes to the formation of a national identity.92 Many of the places Mickey, Donald, and their friends visit in the front or back-page narratives of these comic supplements are also national parks: the Grand Canyon in Arizona, Yosemite and Death Valley in California, Carlsbad Caverns in New Mexico; state parks, such as Utah’s Great Salt Lake; or destinations famed for their natural beauty, such as Lake Tahoe or Zion National Park. Often the characters engage with some typical feature of the area: Donald climbs Pike’s Peak before floating in the Great Salt Lake and Mickey visits Mt. Hood and Crater Lake National Park in Oregon.93 John D. Rockefeller Jr. and his wife Abigail were passionate supporters of the national park system and visited many of the sites mentioned in the Travel Tykes Weekly. Their thirty-year correspondence with park director Horace Albright documents their efforts to organize collaborations between private corporations and the US government to conserve the beauty of these locations.94 By highlighting

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these particular locations, the Travel Tykes Weekly and the “Race to Treasure Island” map not only promote a sense of national identity, as Akerman argues, but also model ways to be a tourist. Art historian Diane Dillon has observed that “visiting national parks could help tourists appreciate the nation’s natural resources, while taking in heritage sites could improve their understanding of American history.” Disney’s Travel Tykes Weekly and the “Race to Treasure Island” map also helped to construct a national tourist industry, which inscribed seeing the country as a patriotic duty.95

“An Exotic Chow-Chow” The GGIE was not an immediate financial success. The early start in February, before the summer tourist season, and cost of admission meant fewer visitors turned up than the fair’s sponsors had hoped.96 From Standard Oil’s perspective, however, the campaign to encourage people to drive to the GGIE was a triumph. One of the most important reasons to promote the fair was to stimulate motor travel westward and the fair succeeded in doing that. Ten and a half million people visited the Exposition in 1939 and nearly a million of these tourists had never been to the state before. Standard Oil’s total domestic sales increased by 3 million gallons over 1938, and revenue for the service stations increased by $6.6 million from $41.6 million to $48.2 million, in that period. Standard Oil Executives credited the “forceful advertising program” carried on throughout the year for these increases. California and San Francisco, the fair’s host site, benefited as well. Out-of-state tourists spent $212,400,000 in California as a whole and spending in the San Francisco area alone increased 146 percent over the same period the year before.97 Not surprisingly, the fair’s organizers decided to have another exposition the following year, from May 25 to September 29, 1940. For Standard Oil, the impact of the exposition and of its alliance with Disney was obvious: increased sales and revenue, more brand awareness from print and broadcast ads, an expanded audience in the young readers who followed the comic supplements and coast-to-coast race, and more visitors to its service stations. But what were the benefits for Disney? After all this excitement, this summer long, comic road movie, Mickey, Donald, the seven dwarfs, and Snow White finally reach the fair and, in fact, continued to perform in various ways there. Examining Disney’s role at the fair reveals how the overall structure of the fair itself may have influenced the studio’s approach to Disneyland in the 1950s and, more broadly, how its characters became more enmeshed in other areas of popular entertainment and popular culture.

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The use of a pictorial map to enable the public to track Mickey and Donald’s travels to Treasure Island anticipates Walt Disney’s use of pictorial maps in the planning process for Disneyland. Stephen Hornsby notes, “As early as the 1930s, Disney had recognized the importance of pictorial maps in advertising his cartoon characters, and he saw an enhanced role for such maps in developing Disneyland.” Citing Disney historian Karal Ann Marling, he points out, “To woo New York City financiers to back his plans for a massive theme park in Anaheim, California, Disney used a pictorial map to help them visualize it.” After Disneyland opened in 1955, Walt Disney commissioned large foldout maps of the park and of individual attractions, such as Tom Sawyer Island.98 One can also observe that maps are a prominent narrative and dramatic feature in Disney’s Victory through Air Power (1943), where they visualize the movement of military planes, ships, and ground troops. Disney’s interest in maps links the studio’s visual practices to cartographic styles of the 1930s and underscores the producer’s engagement with regionalism and American history in the 1930s and 1940s. The concept that SoCal articulated for the fair in its March 1936 bulletin was envisioned as something that would “glorify the Pacific Ocean, the countries and people adjacent thereto, to herald their achievements, and to promote peace, unity and cooperation between all of these peoples in the future.”99 The final achievement exceeded even these lofty goals. In the course of the fair’s development, a consortium of eleven western states and thirty-five foreign countries invested $50 million to fund the exposition, including many countries in Latin America as well as the Pacific Basin.100 Visitors could tour an entire group of buildings relating to California as well as a Hall of Western States. Other pavilions celebrated the cultures of most central and South American countries—Guatemala, Nicaragua, Costa Rico, Mexico, Ecuador, Brazil, Peru, Argentina, El Salvador, Venezuela, Uruguay, Paraguay, Chile, Bolivia—as well as the Pacific Basin—the East Indies, Japan, French IndoChina, New Zealand, Australia, the Philippines, and Java. Even Europe was well represented in this Pacific-focused endeavor: France, Sweden, Portugal, Holland, Norway, Denmark, and Italy all sponsored exhibits.101 The subjects of many of these exhibits and pavilions replicated what had been done in the 1915 Panama-Pacific exhibition, but the site of the exposition, Treasure Island, represented an entirely new landmass created by federal and state agencies that had pumped up sand and mud from the bottom of San Francisco Bay, in a conquest of nature that symbolized the engineering prowess of the city and the businesses that sponsored the fair.102 Inside the grounds, fairy-tale settings existed side by side with scientific exhibits: the Tower of the Sun and Court of the Moon could be found next to the Mines, Metals and Machinery Building. Pavilions offered a taste of the foods and beverages of

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participating countries as well as examples of their fine and decorative arts, and the extensive landscaping of the grounds celebrated the many varieties of flowers, plants, and trees that grew in California—many of which had been uprooted from surrounding communities and transplanted to the fairgrounds. Prominent US companies such as the Ford, General Motors, and IBM sponsored exhibits, but the single largest industrial exhibit at the fair was the one designed by the leading oil companies in the western United States. As the Standard Oil Bulletin for February 1939 noted, competitive interests have been submerged to bring about broad, constructive results of value to the public and to the industries represented. Fifteen important oil companies have cooperatively planned and built a most attractive and informative exhibit designed to show visitors just what the oil industry is and that the industry is doing a good job in its service to the public.103 Occupying an area more than half the size of a football field and dominated by a gleaming oil derrick and storage tanks labeled with the names of participating oil companies, the exhibit presented each phase in the production and distribution of Western petroleum and its products. On the north and south walls, murals 36 feet wide by 30 feet high presented “the city of today, suggesting the part played in its life by petroleum products.” The east and west walls of the exhibit were decorated by eight photomurals, “reproducing on a large scale the important activities of Western life in which petroleum products play a major part.” The exhibit also included 3-D scale models of a refinery and a service station. “The total effect of the petroleum exhibit will be to bring home the basic necessity of the industry, in all its ramifications.”104 SoCal’s Travel Tykes campaign with Disney promoted its own products and services that could support drivers traveling to the fair; at the exposition itself, the company collaborated in supporting the petroleum industry as a whole. In its efforts to bring together art and science, food and petroleum, Java and Denmark, the architecture and exhibits of the fair anticipate the varied collection of lands and exhibits in Disney’s later theme parks. Even the architecture of the buildings themselves created a cultural mélange, “with a new ‘Pacific’ type of architecture that blends old Mayan, Incan, Malayan and Cambodian forms” and exteriors that were finished with “iridescent stucco.”105 The area Vacationland, also the site of the petroleum exhibit, writer Aubrey Drury noted, was “like a big sample-room of Western terrain, summarizing a million square miles of National Parks, lakes and streams and peaks and sunlit beaches brought under one roof.”106 Disney characters had traveled through many of the historic sites and natural parks that featured in Vacationland and interacted with comic versions of the Native American performers and craftspeople who also appeared at the fair. The sheer profusion of cultures and creative mingling of time periods and aesthetic forms inspired Time magazine

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to describe the Exposition as “an exotic chow-chow of the ageless East and the American West,” a description that anticipates some of the characteristics of Disneyland later on.107 In some of the Travel Tykes issues, such as the one for week nine, “Seeing Treasure Island,” Disney’s characters spend the day at the fair, and devote themselves to one place in particular, the “Gayway.” As was the custom with other world’s fairs, the GGIE featured an area that offered popular entertainment. There were rides: a rocket ship that simulated a trip to Mars, a cyclone roller coaster, a Ferris wheel. One could try one’s skill at attractions that invited visitors to hit a bell with a mallet, as Donald Duck did in the Travel Tykes issue, where he takes a whack at ringing a bell with a mallet and nearly hits Pluto.108 There was a Children’s Village where young visitors could meet Humpty Dumpty and Miss Muffet, as well as simulations of famous tourist sites such as Hollywood Boulevard and Chinatown. Visitors could also enjoy elaborate stage shows such as the “Cavalcade of the Golden West” or demonstrations of Native American culture. And there were “Streets of the World” where one could purchase food and souvenirs from the sponsoring countries.109 In this area as well, with its collection of rides and forms of entertainment, one sees an early prototype for Disneyland. Disney scholars such as Karal Ann Marling have noted how world’s fairs and expositions probably shaped Walt Disney’s thinking about theme parks, but these examples provide the first analysis of specific links and influences from the Golden Gate Exposition. Disney’s involvement with Standard Oil extended beyond the GGIE. The studio also created a musical introduction involving the seven dwarfs for an underwater exhibit the company sponsored at two California state fairs in Sacramento and Pomona during the fall of 1939.110 SoCal also turned to Disney to design the company’s float for the Pasadena Tournament of Roses parade in January 1940. The theme that year was “the twentieth century in flowers” and Disney chose to feature the hero of its upcoming new release, Pinocchio, as the float’s centerpiece. SoCal’s February bulletin noted that the float portrayed the motion picture in flowers, “with Pinocchio engagingly rolling his eyes, wiggling his nose and moving his mouth on the screen,” representing “motion pictures” in floral terms. “The ‘audience’ in the theatre, with heads constantly bobbing, was [also] made of flowers.” The bulletin drew attention once again to its collaboration with Disney, arguing that “the float’s especial appropriateness stemmed from Standard’s current use of Walt Disney’s little people in gasoline, oil and service advertising.”111 And just as they had in 1939, SoCal’s monthly bulletins for 1940 often printed ads featuring Mickey, Minnie, and Donald on their back covers. Disney’s additions to the state fair exhibits and commission to design the Tournament of Roses float further entwined the studio with regional culture.

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Looking at the range of media and narratives with which Disney engages in its campaign for Standard Oil of California also allows us to assess the broader cultural discourses in which these ads participate. The campaign imagines historic monuments and natural attractions as part of a journey through America, a journey that Standard Oil facilitates and mediates through its network of service stations. One can argue that the travel campaign might even have helped to develop a car culture for US children who grew up to become the adult drivers of the 1950s. The campaign is a celebration of travel, of car culture, a road comic with Disney characters. The advertising campaign also celebrates technology, efficiency, the consistency of mass-produced products, and the dependability of a standardized corporation. During the period when Disney was building its new studio in Burbank, a facility praised in business and engineering magazines for many of those same qualities, the animation producer worked closely with a major US corporation whose history and current practices exemplified the kind of streamlined, modern, industrial production that Disney wanted to enhance in its own operations. The campaign’s emphasis on efficiency and consistency is further highlighted when we consider how travel was being discussed in the United States in 1939. Travel was very much in the news that year: in January Amelia Earhart was declared dead after disappearing in the Pacific; Richard Halliburton disappeared in the same region in March; Pan-American airways begins transatlantic flights in May; and New York’s municipal airport was renamed LaGuardia that summer. But perhaps the most notable cultural exploration of travel that year was John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, published during the same month in which the Standard Oil Bulletin announced its alliance with Disney. The novel that secured for its author the Nobel Prize in Literature dramatizes the desperate migration of the Joad family from their home in Oklahoma to California, when the land they had cultivated became a dust bowl. In the novel and in John Ford’s film of the following year, their car becomes their home, the symbol of a last effort to maintain some semblance of intactness. The Joads’ broken-down jalopy enables a last effort at mobility when they are trapped by a dying land. Unlike the Travel Tykes, they traverse the west, not for leisure and pleasure, but to escape an incomprehensible catastrophe. The condition and purpose of the automobile in The Grapes of Wrath serve to highlight by contrast the images Standard Oil constructs of itself, images of mastery, control, and conquest over the land. The Joads probably couldn’t afford much gas or motor oil or any other services at Standard Oil stations. By comparison, Disney’s characters move through the American landscape enjoying light-hearted adventures, never hesitating to stop at a Standard station, knowing that help will always be available and that any difficulties they encounter can be solved. If indeed “it follows” that Standard Oil wanted to

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align itself with a company that enjoyed international popularity, it also follows that Disney may have gained a larger sense of possibilities for itself and its characters from its collaboration with SoCal. Just as SoCal is constructing an industrial myth about itself and its place in the American landscape, Disney is expanding its own reach, enlarging the space in which its characters operate and connecting them with iconic American landscapes and broader patterns of tourism. Moving across the cultural landscape with Standard Oil, Disney expands the imaginative spaces in which its characters and the company can operate, as they make their way to San Francisco and “Treasure Island.”

Notes 1 H. J. Haynes, Standard Oil Company of California: 100 Years Helping to Create the Future (New York: The Newcomen Society in North America, 1980), 8. 2 Ibid., 8; Douglas G. McPhee, The Story of Standard Oil Company of California. Privately printed, 1937, 3–10; Wayne Henderson and Scott Benjamin, Standard Oil: The First 125 Years (Osceola, WI: Motorbooks International, 1996), 64. 3 “Standard Oil Co. (N.J.),” Fortune, April 1940, 148; David O. Whitten and Bessie E. Whitten, The Birth of Big Business in the United States, 1860-1914 (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2006), 139–41. 4 Ida M. Tarbell, A History of the Standard Oil Company (New York: McClure, 1904). The book was listed by the New York Times in 1999 as one of the five most important pieces of American journalism in the twentieth century. See Jonathan Mantle, Companies That Changed the World (London: Quercus Publishing, 2008), 48. 5 Isaac F. Marcosson, “The Black Golconda,” Saturday Evening Post, May 5, 1924, 12. 6 For an extensive analysis of the government’s antitrust case against Standard Oil, see Ron Chernow, Titan (New York: Random House, 1998), 537–59. 7 Haynes, Standard Oil Company of California, 11 and 65–6; McPhee, The Story of Standard Oil Company of California, 17–26; Henderson and Benjamin, Standard Oil: The First 125 Years, 15. 8 “The Standard Oils,” Business Week, May 18, 1932, 16–17. 9 “Annual Statement to Stockholders, 1938,” Standard Oil Bulletin, Standard Oil Company of California, April 1939, 1–2 and “The Price of Gasoline,” Standard Oil Bulletin, Standard Oil of California, January 1939, 1. 10 “Annual Statement to Stockholders, 1936,” Standard Oil Company of California, 1 and Ibid., 7.

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11 Robert W. Rydell, John E. Findling, and Kimberly D. Pelle, eds., Fair America: World’s Fairs in the United States (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Press, 2000), 1–11. 12 David E. Nye, Narratives and Spaces: Technology and the Construction of American Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 130. 13 Richard Reinhardt, Treasure Island: San Francisco’s Exposition Years (San Francisco: Scrimshaw Press, 1973, 41. 14 Abigail M. Markwyn, Empress San Francisco (San Francisco, CA: University of Nebraska Press, 2014), 3; Standard Oil Bulletin, Standard Oil of California, February 1936, inside front cover. 15 “The Exposition on San Francisco Bay—1939,” Standard Oil Bulletin, Standard Oil of California, March 1936, 1. 16 “An Impetus for the West,” Standard Oil Bulletin, Standard Oil of California, February 1939, 1. 17 For stories of the origin of the idea of the 1939 fair, and information about SoCal’s involvement in other fairs, see Patricia F. Carpenter and Paul Totah, The San Francisco Fair: Treasure Island 1939-1940 (San Francisco, CA: Scottwall Associates, 1989) and Reinhardt, Treasure Island; Andrew M. Shanken also provides useful history of the fair’s construction in Into the Void Pacific: Building the 1939 San Francisco World’s Fair (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014). 18 “Western Highways, Take a Bow,” Standard Oil Bulletin, Standard Oil of California, January 1939, 12–13 and 16. 19 McPhee, The Story of Standard Oil Company of California, 23–9. 20 “Standard Oil Reports Profit,” Los Angeles Times, April 18, 1939, A20 and “S. O. of California Net for 1938 Cut,” Wall Street Journal, April 18, 1939, 9, Proquest Historical Newspapers. 21 “Standard Stations, Inc.,” Standard Oil Bulletin, Standard Oil of California, April 1940, 7. 22 “’Standard Parade of 1939,’” Western Advertising, May 5, 1939, 49. 23 Susan Ohmer, George Gallup in Hollywood (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), 51–75. 24 “’Standard Parade of 1939,’” 49. 25 “’Standard Parade of 1939,’” 50. 26 Theodore N. Beckman and Henry A. Burd, “Digest of Some Leading Articles,” The Journal of Marketing 3, no. 1 (July 1938): 128. 27 Ohmer, George Gallup in Hollywood, 194–6. 28 Susan Ohmer, “Classical Hollywood, 1928-1946,” in Scott Curtis (ed.), Animation (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2019), 64–6. 29 Inside front cover, Standard Oil Bulletin, Standard Oil of California, April 1939. 30 “‘Standard Parade of 1939,’” 49.

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31 Ibid., 50. 32 Ibid., 49–50. 33 Ibid., 50. 34 Ibid., 49–50. 35 “The Standard Parade of 1939” (black and white film, 7:34) can be seen at: https​:/​/ww​​w​.you​​tube.​​com​/w​​atch?​​v​=OBA​​j7nsS​​​Zag​&t​​=26s.​ 36 Parade of the Award Nominees (1932) can be seen at: https​:/​/ww​​w​.you​​tube.​​ com​/w​​atch?​​v​=6Po​​​SjUf1​​j7k. 37 “Standard Parade for 1939,” the Technicolor cartoon short within The Standard Parade of 1939, can be seen at: https​:/​/ww​​w​.you​​tube.​​com​/w​​atch?​​v​=KwZ​​​ 7a3rv​​EGM 38 See, for example, Rudmer Canjels, “Films from Beyond the Well: A Historical Overview of Shell Films,” in Vinzenz Hediger and Patrick Vonderau (eds.), Films That Work: Industrial Film and the Productivity of Media (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2009), 243–5. 39 “’Standard Parade of 1939,’” 49–50 and 68. 40 “Walt Disney’s Little People Tell the Answers to Some Questions about ‘Standard,’” Display Ad, Los Angeles Times, April 6, 1939, ProQuest Historical Newspapers. 41 “Annual Statement to Stockholders,” Standard Oil Company of California, for the year ending December 31, 1936, 14. 42 Ad, back cover, Motor Land, April 1940. 43 “Oil Service” ad, The Oregonian, May 29, 1939, Newspaper Source Plus. Ads, back cover, Motor Land, May, June, July 1940. 44 Ad, back cover, Motor Land, August 1940. The ad also appears in Sunset, August 1940, 5. 45 “Good as Gold!” print ad, San Francisco Chronicle, August 3, 1939. 46 Ad, Sunset, October 1940, 2. 47 Ad, Sunset, May 1940, back cover. 48 Inside back cover, Standard Oil Bulletin, Standard Oil of California, April 1939. 49 Insert, Standard Oil Bulletin, Standard Oil of California, August 1939. 50 “Hey, Kids,” ad, Los Angeles Times, April 24, 1939, ProQuest Historical Newspapers. 51 “’Standard Parade of 1939,’” 68. 52 “Ads in Funnies,” Time, June 13, 1932, 54. 53 Burford Lorimer, “Advertising Adopts the Comic Strip Technique,” Advertising & Selling, April 1, 1931, 27, 82–3. 54 “Comics,” Advertising & Selling, April 1938, 21–2, 96–8. 55 “Press Is Exhorted to Redouble Zeal,” New York Times, April 27, 1939, 14. 56 Justin Knowles, Walt Disney’s Mickey Mouse Memorabilia: The Vintage Years 1928-1938 (New York: Abrams, 1986), 134–4; Tom Tumbusch, Tomart’s

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Illustrated Disneyana Catalog and Price Guide (Tomart Publications, 1989), 32–9. 57 Travel Tykes Weekly No. 8, “Seeing Grand Canyon,” 1. 58 Travel Tykes Weekly No. 11, “Seeing Yosemite,” 1. 59 Travel Tykes Weekly No. 7, “Seeing Puget Sound,” 1. 60 Travel Tykes Weekly No. 4, “Seeing Great Salt Lake,” 1. 61 Travel Tykes Weekly No. 5, “Seeing Hawaii,” 1. 62 Travel Tykes Weekly No. 1, “Seeing Death Valley,” 1. 63 Travel Tykes Weekly No. 12, “Dude Ranching’s the Life,” 1. 64 Travel Tykes Weekly No. 14, “Seeing Arizona,” 1. 65 Travel Tykes Weekly No. 6, “Seeing Hollywood,” 1. 66 Travel Tykes Weekly No. 17, “Seeing Lake Tahoe,” 1. 67 “Hey, Kids,” ad, Los Angeles Times, April 24, 1939: 5. ProQuest Historical Newspapers. 68 Walter W. Ristow, “A Half Century of Oil-Company Road Maps,” Surveying and Mapping 24, no. 4 (December 1964): 617–37. 69 Stephen J. Hornsby and The Library of Congress, Picturing America: The Golden Age of Pictorial Maps (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017): 2. 70 Ibid., 66–82 and 127–47. 71 Ibid., 1–2 and 118. 72 Hornsby, Picturing America, 60–1. 73 Knowles, Walt Disney’s Mickey Mouse Memorabilia, 76. 74 Members of the Disney History Institute, an independent organization of fans, have collected some of these print ads and posters on their website at: https​:/​/ww​​w​.dis​​neyhi​​story​​insti​​tute.​​com​/2​​013​/0​​1​/sta​​ndard​​-oil-​​and​-w​​inter​​ -be​-g​​​oneth​​e​-wal​​t​.htm​​l. Paul F. Anderson, a member of the organization, believes that Disney artist Hank Porter, who drew many of the company’s comic magazines, may have been responsible for much of the Standard Oil campaign. 75 “Companies Plan Oil Development in Canada,” Wall Street Journal, March 6, 1939, ProQuest Historical Newspapers. 76 Travel Tykes Weekly No. 5, 1, 4. 77 Travel Tykes Weekly No. 9, 1, 4. 78 Travel Tykes Weekly No. 3, “The Big Race is On!” 4. 79 Travel Tykes Weekly No. 4, “Extry!” 4. 80 Travel Tykes Weekly No. 5, “Racin’ News Extra!” 4. 81 Travel Tykes Weekly No. 15, “I’ll Win,” 4. 82 Travel Tykes Weekly No. 17, “Home Stretch,” 12. 83 Travel Tykes Weekly No. 12, “Card D-9,” 4.

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84 Travel Tykes Weekly No. 7, “Race Derby Extra!” 4. 85 Ibid. 86 Travel Tykes Weekly No. 8, “Flash,” 4. 87 Travel Tykes Weekly No. 7, “Race Derby Extra!” 4 88 Travel Tykes Weekly No. 8, “Flash,” 4. 89 Travel Tykes Weekly No. 7, “Race Derby Extra” 4 and Travel Tykes Weekly No. 14, “Donald the Mad Duck Hurls Taunt,” 4. 90 James R. Akerman, “Twentieth Century American Road Maps and the Making of a National Motorized Space,” in James R. Akerman (ed.), Cartographies of Travel and Navigation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 193. 91 Hal Rothman, Devil’s Bargains: Tourism in the Twentieth Century American West (Lawrence, KS: University of Kansas Press, 1998). 92 James R. Akerman, “Finding Our Way,” in James R. Akerman and Robert W. Karrow Jr. (eds.), Maps: Finding Our Place in the World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 59. 93 Travel Tykes Weekly Nos. 11 and 14. 94 Joseph W. Ernst, ed., Worthwhile Places: Correspondence of John D. Rockefeller, Jr. and Horace M. Albright (New York: Published for the Rockefeller Archive Center by Fordham University Press, 1991). 95 Diane Dillon, “Consuming Maps,” in James R. Akerman and Robert W. Karrow, Jr. (eds.), Maps: Finding Our Place in the World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 323. 96 “San Francisco Fair Revamped for Fresh Start,” New York Herald Tribune, June 24, 1939, ProQuest Historical Newspapers. 97 “Again, A World’s Fair for the West,” Standard Oil Bulletin, Standard Oil of California, January 1940, 1 and “Annual Report to Stockholders, 1939,” Standard Oil Bulletin, Standard Oil of California, April 1940, 6. 98 Hornsby, Picturing America, 244, 257; Hornsby draws on research by Karal Ann Marling, “Imagineering the Disney Theme Parks,” in Designing Disney’s Theme Parks: The Architecture of Reassurance (New York and Paris: Flammarion, 1997), 69–79. 99 “The Exposition on San Francisco Bay—1939,” 1. 100 Business Week, January 14, 1939, 30. 101 Official Guide Book, Golden Gate International Exposition (Privately printed, San Francisco Bay Exposition, 1939), 21–3. One can also note that by 1939, Hitler was threatening many of these European countries, so partnering with countries in the Pacific Basin and Latin America would have been even more attractive. 102 Official Guide Book, 21–3; Reinhardt, Treasure Island, 34–6. 103 “An Impetus for the West,” 1. 104 Standard Oil Bulletin, Standard Oil of California, January 1939, 8–9.

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105 Ibid., 3. 106 Aubrey Drury, California: An Intimate Guide (New York: Harper and Bros, 1939), xxviii. 107 Quoted in Reinhardt, Treasure Island. 82. 108 Travel Tykes Weekly No. 9, “Seeing Treasure Island,” 1. 109 Official Guide Book, 21–3. 110 Inside back cover, Standard Oil Bulletin, Standard Oil Company of California, November 1939. 111 “Pinocchio Takes an Extra Bow,” Standard Oil Bulletin, Standard Oil Company of California, February 1940, inside front cover.

5 Petroleum and Hollywood Stardom Making Way for Oil Consumption through Visual Culture Marina Dahlquist

T

he Mobiloil Movie titled Smooth Performance, starring Fredric March and Florence Eldridge, opens with Eldridge looking at the clock, impatiently waiting for March to pick her up to go to Times Square for the preview of the Paramount movie Design for Living (Ernst Lubitsch, 1933), starring March, Miriam Hopkins and Gary Cooper. March, however, has been delayed because his car won’t start due to the cold weather. After calling the garage, the car is treated with Mobiloil Arctic and Mobilgas, which winterizes it, and March is able to pick Eldridge up just in time to make it to the movie theater. The last scene shows the couple at the movies where March and Eldridge—who were married in real life—are in their seats in front of the screen where the very same March is holding Hopkins in his arms. This metafilm of sorts ends with the lines: Eldridge: “My, isn’t she attractive—and such a good little actress!” March: “You can thank another couple of smooth performers [Mobiloil Arctic and Mobilgas] for our being on time!”1 (Figure 5.1)

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In a Hollywood storyboard format, this Mobiloil Arctic and Mobilgas print advertisement, with Hollywood stars and a ride in the car as the core of the plot, was published in the Saturday Evening Post on January 13, 1934,2 just two weeks after the release of the film referred to—Design for Living.3 The

FIGURE 5.1  Mobiloil Movie Smooth Performance, published in the Saturday Evening Post, January 13, 1934. Courtesy of Exxon Mobil Corporate.

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tie-in advertisement brings together a multitude of products in an interesting movie-adjacent format, including the reliable Mobil products Mobiloil and Mobilgas, references to the Paramount production Design for Living; the Hollywood stars Fredric March, Miriam Hopkins, and Gary Cooper, who appear in the film, as well as Florence Eldridge who isn’t in the film itself but in the “Mobiloil Movie.” The history of “tie-ins,” the term that dominated the discourse during much of the classical era, is characterized by a diversity of forms and practices in which film productions and consumer goods appears in a film or its context.4 In the example of Mobiloil Movies, a storytelling format similar to Hollywood movies is integrated in printed ads promoting Mobiloil products. It emphasizes modern mobility by way of a still rather exclusive means of transportation—the automobile. Illustrated panels with dialogue in subtitles dramatize the trip to the movie theater, combining the necessity of a car to get there and, by extension, good oil and gas. As Susan Ohmer shows in her contribution to this volume, advertisers noted and made use of the immense popularity of cartoon character and the cartoon format to attract readers’ attention and promote sales. By the first years of the 1930s sales pitch in the format of comic strips grew to a widespread practice in newspapers and journals. The Mobiloil Movies presented no cartoon character, but rather Hollywood stars usually in two to five parts narratives, involving some kinds of misadventure that were solved thanks to Mobil products5 (Figure 5.2). Another Mobiloil Movie titled Blizzards Be Darned, starring Claudette Colbert and Herbert Marshall, was also featured in the 1934 print ad campaign in the Saturday Evening Post. In three illustrated panels, the references to Hollywood and film production are even more striking.6 It’s clear that not only are Colbert and Marshall starring in Blizzards Be Darned but the advertisement’s story line is actually also referring to the shooting of Cecil B. DeMille’s Paramount production Four Frightened People, which was released the day before the advertisement was published, on January 26, 1934. The Mobiloil story starts with Colbert and Marshall ice-skating and with Colbert’s first line: “Looks like there’s a blizzard coming up, Herbert. Remember, we have to be back at the studio to finish up ‘Four Frightened People.’” In the second image we see Colbert and Marshall in a car about to head back to the set. In the third and final image, the two stars are in the middle of a film scene at the studio, when the cameraman notes, “Well, Mr. DeMille, all your worry about that blizzard holding up Colbert and Marshall went for nothing.” DeMille himself replies, directly advertising Mobiloil products: “If he hadn’t had that car winterproofed with Mobiloil Arctic and Mobilgas as I told him to, they’d be a long way from the lot!” The advertisement line “With this winter oil and gas— you get there” closes the narrative.7 The two advertisements are examples of the importance of and the close interlinkage between moving pictures,

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FIGURE 5.2  Mobiloil Movie Blizzards Be Darned, published in the Saturday Evening Post, January 27, 1934. Courtesy of Exxon Mobil Corporate. a modern lifestyle, mobility by way of private cars, and the revolutionary changes brought about by petroculture.

Petroculture and the Restless Age Even though these advertisements can be apprehended as excessive in their dramatization of both moving pictures and a harsh winter climate’s effect on cars, the mobility they emphasize is fundamental to our perception of a modern way of living and especially so the American. Which is also the case when it comes to the moving picture medium and its penchant for portraying

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urban settings, last-minute rescues, and means of travel such as trains, cable cars, airplanes, and automobiles. Many are the examples of film stars interacting with motor vehicles as part of a sensationalized storyline.8 Just think about the American craze for the action heroines Pearl White and Helen Holmes, who, with amazing ease, move about the modern city landscape, one example of how modern means of transportation provided women with agency via upgraded mobility. In contrast to the Victorian ideals of passivity and domesticity, women were perhaps the primary agents of modernity when media culture became all the rage at the turn of the century in 1900.9 As agrarian society was gradually transformed into an urban one, moving pictures often contrasted the old ways of life with modern ones. These depictions, however, were not only positive but also represented the disadvantages of modernity, especially for women, as portrayed in films like George Loane Tucker’s Traffic in Souls from 1913. The dynamic panorama of sensational scenes in this transforming modern landscape has been explored by scholars such as Ben Singer, Shelley Stamp, and others.10 Apart from film dramas depicting agency within the sociocultural framing of modernity, the industries driving this change themselves used the emerging media culture to inscribe ideas about modernity and new habits of consumption on consumers’ consciousness. As Rick Prelinger and others have shown, industrial companies—in the United States as elsewhere—became extensive users of visual media to promote their products, educate staff, and to inform the public about the new possibilities of a modern lifestyle.11 The numerous ad campaigns made by oil companies elucidate the scope of possibilities at hand as well as the change of focus over time in regard to teaching the public how to understand and navigate modern society. By examining findings in company archives, foremost the ExxonMobil historical collection, I will give examples of how oil companies used visual media to promote modern habits and infrastructure, even throughout the Depression years: from the rise of modern gas stations to automobile culture and leisure. These developments were not only made possible by new means of communicating with the public but also by suggesting that petroculture was linked to the lifestyle of glamorous Hollywood stars.12 The synchronicity of the importance of oil in modern society and the massive changes that came about during the twentieth century is difficult to exaggerate. Oil’s uses had been known for centuries, but it revolutionized life from the late nineteenth century on. The ExxonMobil historical collection provides immensely rich and important source material for documenting the shift from horse-centered logistics to a petrol-driven infrastructure of modern space. With the merging of Exxon and Mobil in 1999, ExxonMobil became the world’s largest energy corporation. The two companies have a shared history

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that dates back to their origins as part of the Standard Oil family of companies. The holdings of the archive consist of records related to Exxon Mobil Corporation and its predecessors and subsidiaries, including Standard Oil Company, Standard Oil Company of New York, Standard Oil Company of New Jersey, Magnolia Petroleum Company, Socony-Vacuum Oil Company, and so forth. The Standard Oil Company, established in 1870 by John D. Rockefeller, was one of the first and largest multinational corporations, and it made Rockefeller the richest person in the world. Its story ended with the dissolution of Standard Oil Company in 1911, when the Supreme Court ruled that Standard Oil was an illegal monopoly, resulting in the Standard Oil Company of New York and Standard Oil Company of New Jersey along with thirty-two other companies. The archival collection shows the development of the petroleum industry, its marketing apparatus, and its societal importance throughout the twentieth century.13 Providing training for personnel through pictures—both moving and still— and lectures was a recurrent phenomenon within oil companies, as in many other industries.14 However, numerous films were considered to have a wider area of use. One example is the so-called “process films,” which appeared in several different contexts.15 A number of films about the oil industry address the production of oil and its ramifications from start to finish. The Story of Oil, produced by Standard Oil Company in 1920, begins with the surveying of fields for drilling and ends with the delivery of the finished product to the customer. While a longer version (105 minutes) was primarily developed for the company’s employees, the shorter version (45 minutes) was still considered to have an educational value, as was common for many films of industrial or sponsor origin. According to The Lamp, the Standard Oil Company of New Jersey’s own publication for shareholders and employees (and at times also serving as a medium for the consumers), the company had received a number of requests for popular viewing.16 Modern automobile culture, with rapid and at times dangerous speeds through the modern metropolis, was, as we have seen, a recurring motif in narratives about the modern world and those living in it: like taxi rides in Paris as described in The Lamp or the action serial star Pearl White taking a ride in New York City while being interviewed.17 With the new “restless age,” a drive had become a Sunday leisure activity or even a vacation by automobile to the Niagara Falls, Florida, California, Canada, or any other “new” tourist attraction now made available by the growing automobile culture that enabled drivers to go anywhere.18 The infrastructure of good roads, accommodations, maps, tourist guides, and the like was of course key to this new style of vacation, with new attractive, clean, and modern gas stations now a pinnacle of modern space and service.19 For example, in 1927, the Standard Oil Co. (NJ), after

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years of distributing free state maps for the guidance of tourism, inaugurated a more ambitious service by creating a touring bureau—the Standard Touring Service—to give advice and help to motorists.20 All kinds of questions were asked by the readers. Many requested maps and advice about baggage, expenses, traffic laws, and Canadian customs regulations. Some of the questions were, however, more difficult to answer, such as: Is it safe to go to Chicago? What places are infested with tornados? Should I carry a gun? Will you guarantee water at tourists’ camps? Is it dangerous for two women to drive alone?21 Motorized culture became a symbol of a new American way of living that was both modern and comfortable. One example of this attitude can be seen in the headline of a Socony-Vacuum advertisement article from 1934, “The Automobile. Symbol of American Social and Economic Progress,” which proclaimed, “More than a means of transportation [. . .] the automobile, of all the machinery of the machine age, is the most important. [. . .] [It] has brought to twenty million U.S. families a convenience, a pleasure, a necessary utility, such as no previous generation could have imagined.”22 In their 1930 publication Oil the American Petroleum Institute explains the considerable oil industry in the United States, as well as its greater demands than in other parts of the world. This was accordingly due to high production quantities, ascribed to, except rich oil resources, and efficient methods of transportation, new consuming agencies for petroleum products—especially the automobile. From the 1910s when the era of extensive expansion started at 1930 the use of gasoline and lubrication oil had become considerate in the United States. American Petroleum Institute gives an approximate account of the US consumption on par with the production of nearly 70 percent of the world’s total oil consumption.23 The modernization of society and its needs would also move into the private sphere as science had gone domestic to facilitate the work of housewives. Many of the advertisements for petroleum products and the rapidly growing petroleum industry were made for an audience of women.24 Not only were there many advertisements depicting the “home of tomorrow” with modern appliances, such as refrigerators and vacuum cleaners, to take the “work” out of housekeeping, but this new vision of housing is also being described as the new industry of the 1940s, after the automobile, aviation, and the radio.25 In the 1930s there were also many advertisements showing young beautiful women, often glamorous, at the wheel or being served by mechanics and gas-station personnel.26 Women drives not only appear in the ads but also in driving manuals, some especially created for women, such as Vacuum Oil Company’s 1930 booklet, “Let’s Drive Better Than Men!”27 And there is an aspect of democratization and equality being put forward in these ads. One example is an advertisement

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for rayon fabric by Socony-Vacuum Oil Company in 1937. The headline “Judy O’Grady dresses like a lady”28 advertises rayon as another “story written in oil,” with reference to Rudyard Kipling’s poem “The Colonel’s Lady and Judy O’Grady” that ends with the line: “The Colonel’s Lady an’ Judy O’Grady are sisters under their skins!” asserting that whatever their class or creed, women were united by a common experience dictated by their sex.29 This newer means of transportation was of course not only a family or national affair. Promotional materials for petroleum products were at this time also consistently underlining its importance in having “revolutionized life in modern times.”30 The international aspects of travel and progress were often underlined as well. The worldwide possibilities of the petroleum industry and its products were promoted in numerous advertisements and campaigns. One example is Gargoyle Lubricants’ national advertising campaign from 1919, which appeared in Literary Digest, Scientific American, Leslie’s Week, and the Saturday Evening Post, demonstrating the actual scope of the Vacuum Oil Company’ products when it came to aircraft lubrication and upcoming transatlantic flights, as well as their international work of transforming traditional and “wasteful” methods as modern machinery took over worldwide. The advertisement “The work must go on” directly claims that “The age of machinery spreads from America” using a number of illustrations depicting traditional settings and work methods in different parts of the world.31 So making way for oil consumption at this time could be seen as Americanization of sorts. Even if many field expeditions were made in the 1920s, the petroleum production was dominated by the United States. As late as 1927, the US share of the world’s petroleum production was estimated to be 72 percent. Modernization and development within the United States were seen as having been made possible by the ample supply of cheap fuel. And the areas for petroleum seemed almost limitless—from gasoline, motor oil, and greases to refined oil for industrial and private uses; from waxes, asphalt, and lamps to ingredients in medicine, cosmetics, and so forth.32 However, in the 1921 advertising campaign for Gargoile Mobiloil and Gargoile Lubricating Oil in Saturday Evening Post, American Magazine, Literary Digest, Scientific American, as well as trade and engineering publications the advertisements emphasize the value of using correct lubrication rather than displaying the large variety of products.33

Hollywood Glamour and Oil Marketing The use of moving pictures and the moving picture industry for oil-promoting purposes was, as we have seen, not at all limited to educational or industrial

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films. Fiction films were an important mediator of a petroleum-centered way of life and the experience of modernity. Advertisements directly referring to film stars and their Hollywood identities are but one example of the extensive craze for modernity that can be found in twentieth-century media culture. The extended ad campaigns in the American illustrated magazine the Saturday Evening Post from 1933 to 1934, and in other magazines such as Collier’s: The National Weekly, are a startling example of the oil industries’ use of the moving picture industry and its reliance on portrayals of speed, last-minutes rescues or arrivals, and the versatility within cinematic space of different activities and settings. The oil industry was not the only industry to benefit from association with star’s fame at this time, as the Saturday Evening Post testifies, as promotional arrangements between outside manufacturers and the moving picture industry were increasingly used from the 1920 either by on-screen appearances or star endorsements and was a common industry practice by 1931.34 For example, the same trio that appears in the Mobiloil Movie Blizzards Be Darned, which I discussed earlier—Cecil B. DeMille, Fredric March, and Claudette Colbert—also advertise products such as Coca-Cola within the context of Paramount Pictures. In a lavish color advertisement on the back cover of the Saturday Evening Post in January 1933, referencing the context of shooting the historical drama The Sign of the Cross (Cecil B. DeMille, 1932). The Mobiloil Movie campaign in the Saturday Evening Post started on May 27, 1933, with First to the Fire, an illustrated six-panel story starring Claudette Colbert and Richard Arlen. Colbert was a star at Paramount but did not appear in Disgraced (Erle Kenton, 1933) as is claimed in the ad.35 However, both Colbert and Arlen are main characters in the Mobiloil Movie where a four-yearold but well-kept ambulance wins a race, due largely to the use of Mobiloil products, while a newer ambulance that, according to the story, was probably maintained with cheap oil was left behind. As the advertisement line says, “Today—with high speeds more and more common—you can’t be too careful in choosing your oil.”36 The speed of the modern automobiles was the topic and main concern of the early advertisements of the campaign, as well as the importance of using the right lubricant. Two weeks later another speed-oriented Mobiloil Movie was published in the Saturday Evening Post—namely, Made for Speed starring Charles Farrell and Ginger Rogers. This fictive story is about a man who almost misses an important order due to the use of cheap motor oil in his vehicle.37 But finally, due to Ginger Rogers’s fast car and her use of Mobiloil, the couple meets the deadline, gets the order, and by that have enough means to get married. Another two weeks after this “movie” we meet Clark Gable and Una Merkel in the Mobiloil Movie The Girl or the Car in yet another storyboard narrative underlining the importance of quality oil for the speed of the day. This time, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) is the studio behind the scenes, featuring their

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two 1933 productions, Hold Your Man (Sam Wood, 1933) and Lady of the Night (William A. Wellman, 1933), in which Gable and Merkel appear.38 The storyboard references the prevalent idea of the high-end life style of film stars, but, nevertheless, illustrates the importance of the choice between supper at the Ritz or real Mobiloil for the car rather than some cheap oil. Fortunately, Clark Gable has his priorities right and does not fall for any of Una Merkel’s suggestions.39 On July 1, The Old Car Comes Through, a rather unglamorous narrative with two characters, a husband and wife, who go on a weekend with another couple, is published.40 The Mobiloil Movie is featuring Adolphe Menjou who had starred in Columbia’s The Circus Queen Murder (Roy William Neill, 1933), Dorothy Mackaill, and “the Gleason” (Lucile and James). Also, in the next Mobiloil Movie there are characters played by Columbia stars.41 This time we have Jack Holt and Fay Wray starring in Old Car to the Rescue, while also appearing in Columbia’s The Woman I Stole (Irvin Cummings, 1933). In the Mobiloil Movie, properly serviced police cars enable, in spite of reduced expenditures on new cars, the speedy rescue of a restaurant’s staff in a holdup. The plot is somewhat similar to that of The Doctor Gets There starring Edmund Lowe, in which an old car, well-kept by way of Mobiloil products, enables the doctor to attend to a sick baby who lives quite far away.42 The Mobiloil Movies continue with narratives about both older and newer cars given either Mobiloil or cheap oil, partnering with various studios along the way, including Paramount, MGM, Columbia, Warner Brothers, Twentieth Century, and Universal.43 Mobiloil Movies were published almost every second week, with a new narrative and new movie stars, until August 1933. The stars usually keep their famous personas in the advertisements, or at least glimpses of them, either comical or glamorous, with lavish ways of living. The Mobiloil storyboard advertisement makes references to the stars and the film industry in several respects: Their characters in the film have the stars’ actual names, a new “film” is advertised, with a made-up title, and several illustrated panels from the supposed movie, and a written dialogue—usually between two film stars advertising the benefits of using Mobiloil rather than cheaper oils. After a summer break, the immensely popular Laurel and Hardy appear in what is supposedly “1933’s slickest feature,” Oil’s Well That Ends Well, with the line, “Your car may not be old enough to act in a comedy—but don’t let it act in the tragedy of high oil bills and shortened car life!”44 After this Mobiloil Movie the advertisement form appeared more irregularly. In December 1933 the Mobiloil Movie Snow Man’s Tip starring Slim Summerville and a snowman, with the advertisement’s only line of dialogue, ends this ad campaign for the year 1933 in the Saturday Evening Post.45 Snow Man’s Tip has an intrigue built into its narrative that can be found in many of

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the ads from the winter months of 1933–4, with film characters advertising Mobil’s winterproof products. Slim Summerville, its star, was at the time also playing in Universal’s production Horse Play (Edward Sedgwick, 1933). The Mobiloil Movie shows, in a plot line of three panels, how Summerville’s car will not start in the winter weather. Summerville gets the advertisement’s message from the head of the snowman that he beats in frustration because the engine wouldn’t start. The Mobiloil Movie storyboard Towing Nellie Home, published (at a minimum) in the Saturday Evening Post and Collier’s: The National Weekly,46 stars Loretta Young and as the two rivals for her affection, Ralph Forbes and Ralph Bellamy. Loretta Young, the advertisement points out, appeared in the Twentieth Century’s production Born to Be Bad (Lowell Sherman, 1934). The Mobiloil Movie features the rivals’ competition in six illustrated panels, with Forbes finally winning the girl. Bellamy’s car breaks down and gets towed to Mobiloil’s filling station to get fixed up while Forbes drives Young home. The main theme being how best to make your winter drives safe and economical. Young points out in her final line to Forbes, “You always seem to know just what to do, with balky cars . . . and rivals, too!”47 and thereby further intertwining the romantic drama with know-how about oil products. Advertisements for automobiles at this time numbered many in the Saturday Evening Post, including ads from Oldsmobile, Chevrolet, Chrysler, Cadillac, Buick, Dodge, and others. Some car advertisements during the winter/ spring season of 1933–4 show a similar structure to those associated with the Mobiloil Movies, appearing with four to six illustrated panels, often showing a regular American family that looks at new cars. Advertisements for the Plymouth Six car appeared at several times in this narrative form.48 The ads underline the good price and quality of the cars, as well as the smooth driving experience. In one case a customer, according to the advertisement a pilot in real life—the airplane being perhaps most emblematic of modern vehicles— chooses the “New Plymouth Six,” because “Driving a Plymouth’s the Next Best Thing to Flying.”49 But using Hollywood stars, as Mobil Movies did, was absolutely a way to get attention in this cascade of advertisements for cars, tires, and motor oil. The references to movie stars—their characters on the screen, sometimes off the screen as well as—and movie picture theaters are explicitly addressed. Not uncommonly, the stars themselves were the audience. In the Mobiloil Movie Double Anniversary, starring Barbara Stanwyck and Frank Fay,50 an actual couple at this time celebrate a wedding anniversary and a car anniversary at the same time by going first to a Mobiloil service station with their car, which then takes them to the movies. On January 13, 1934, Smooth Performance was the first Mobiloil Movie tie-in appearing that year in the Saturday Evening Post. Two weeks later,

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Blizzards Be Darned was to be the last Mobiloil Movie of the 1933–4 campaign. Mobiloil advertisements would continue to appear as frequently as before, but transitioned to one-image ads displaying “ordinary” customers. Even though the movie-style panel narrative disappeared in 1934, the glamorous women and references to the movies lingered. Take, for example, a Socony-Vacuum advertisement from 1937, where one photograph showing a moving picture theater is contrasted with another showing a snow-covered car with the accompanying lines, “Enjoy the movies . . .” and “Two hours later,” and a photograph of a beautiful and glamorous girl waving to us from her car window.51 Cynthia B. Meyers notices a similar phenomenon of tie-ins in advertisements for radio shows.52 In 1934, at the very same time as the Mobiloil advertisement campaign integrated a Hollywood “storyboard,” the Jell-O Program, starring Jack Benny, included what, according to Meyers, was the advertising agency Young & Rubicam’s (Y&R) best-known use of a strategy of weaving the product through an entire show rather than interrupting the program for commercials.53 Jell-O was thereby integrated into the program text, combining showmanship and salesmanship. In a 1938 advertisement, Y&R also integrated the Jack Benny program into Jell-O’s print advertising in an illustrated panel, in which the program’s characters are set against a backdrop of Jell-Ocolored whirls. Headlined “Jack Benny and the Mystery Girl,” illustrated panels include dialogue similar to that of the Mobiloil Movies to present a radio sketch in a printed form showing Jack and his partner both in the show and in real life—Mary Livingstone—dancing at a party. They discover the nationality of a “mystery star” who is a “gorgeous blonde” by way of inviting her to their table and serving her Jell-O, which makes her reveal herself not as an exotic European but as an American Midwesterner who enjoys the quintessentially American dessert.54 The first images of the advertisement suggest that it is a moving picture set—we see a man in a director chair, the strong lamps of a studio, and the blond woman in the middle of a scene with a male star. As Meyers points out, most nationally broadcast programs or network radio were created and produced by advertising companies during the period from the late 1920s to late 1940s. We find a similar style of integrated advertisement carried over into print advertisements in a 1935 example appearing as a comic strip in the Saturday Evening Post, with a narrative that integrates the advertisement into a supposed episode of Maxwell House Show Boat.55 This form of advertisement was recurrent in the Saturday Evening Post in the mid-1930s, with or without a reference to Hollywood. For example, the advertisement “How Betty Found Fame,” an illustrated panel story from 1934, was about a woman named Betty who, with the help of Yeast Foam Tablets gets “marvelous” skin and becomes

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a moving picture star.56 During this time period, Yeast Foam advertisements maintained a narrative strategy of showing different examples of the usefulness of the product including an expert offering helpful solutions to health problems. Another Hollywood-adjacent ad was for the Copper and Brass Research Association starring Eddie Cantor in an integrated advertisement of the Samuel Goldwyn Production’s Roman Scandals (Frank Tuttle, 1933) that compared copper and brass pipes, dishes, and other utensils used both in ancient Rome and modern America.57

Conclusion Widening the research on petrocinema to a broad approach in company archives provides much-needed context for studying moving pictures. Company archives include sources and material beyond the actual films that have survived—in spite of archival policies and the decay of film stock—and beyond even the written sources concerning film production and distribution found in film archive. Broadening our approach in company archives, we get a more complex moving picture context, beyond the dichotomies of the theatrical and nontheatrical film and even beyond debates about industrial, educational, sponsored, or fiction films. As the examples here make evident, Hollywood’s influence in promoting petroleum and its products in the mid-1930s was wide-ranging and significant. Hollywood stars appearing in film productions proper running at the theaters at the time propelled narratives in print ads where the storyboard format of preproduction of film had merged with the need of Motoroil products. Printed advertisements with a narrative in a storyboard format were quite common at this time, and famous people, performers, or adventurers were used as “heroes” or “heroines” who “fit” within the image of the advertised product as, for example, the advertisements for Camels makes evident. The cigarette could apparently calm your nerves even in the most dangerous of situations. At least according to Mary Higgins, a stunt performer,58 and Frank Buck, a collector of animals. Buck starred in a Camel advertisement that also made reference to his book Bring ‘Em Back Alive, published in 1930, and his jungle adventure documentary with the same name produced by RKO Pictures in 1932.59 The rhetoric of modernity and the use of moving pictures, even in narrative representations, as the form of modern media par excellence, was a prominent vehicle for producing conspicuous advertisements. Modern ways of living and means of transportation were underlined in oil company

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advertisement materials as, for example, in Magnolia Petroleum Company’s 1928 advertisement brochure, History Movies, in which industrial development and societal change are portrayed via “action cartoons” where modern transportation, highways, telephone, lighting, commercial aviation, oil, gas, and the building of pipelines and the like, as well as the development of the automobile, were described for pupils of the schools of Texas.60 But there were not only time-saving, glamorous, and positive sides of the new petroleum-centered modernity. The moving picture medium would also continue to be prominent as a source of inspiration as well as education and information for audiences. And Then There Were Four is one of several educational films on traffic safety that stressed the dangers of careless driving. The film was produced by Socony-Vacuum Oil Company in 1950, made available in 16 mm safety film to church and civic groups, service clubs, schools, and the like, and was also offered to movie theaters free of charge. The film was even used to educate traffic offenders by a judge in Milwaukee.61 The renowned film star James Stewart does the voice-over in the film, which was heavily promoted in booklets and advertisements. Company representatives were provided with suggested remarks to be made before the screening: As a large company that supplies the fuel and the lubricants without which the automobile cannot run, we are deeply concerned with the fact that a vehicle which should bring only pleasure and convenience has brought much sorrow, suffering and death.62 In 1951, it was estimated that there had been one million traffic fatalities from the horseless carriage in the United States alone. The utility of petrocinema by then included not only the craze for modern speed and vehicles but also the reverse of the medal concerning traffic safety and causalities of petroculture.

Notes 1 The Mobiloil Movie ads are to be found in the folders “Marketing, Advertising, Print Ads, United States, Socony-Vacuum, 1933” and “Marketing, Advertising, Print Aids, United States, Socony-Vacuum, 1934.” ExxonMobil historical collection, Briscoe Center for American History, The University of Texas, Austin. 2 Ad for Mobiloil/Mobilgas in the Saturday Evening Post, January 13, 1934: 50. 3 Design for Living (Ernst Lubitsch, 1933) was released on December 29, 1933. 4 For a discussion on tie-ins or tie-ups as they were called from the 1920s and through the 1970s, see Jay Newell, Charles T. Salmon, and Susan Chang,

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“The Hidden History of Product Placement,” Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media (December 2006): 576–8; see also Patrick Vonderau, “Kim Novak and Morgan Stairways: Thinking about the Theory and History of the Tie-In,” in Bo Florin, Nico de Klerk and Patrick Vonderau (eds.), Films That Sell (London: BFI, 2016). 5 Burford Lorimer, “Advertising Adopts the Comic Strip Technique,” Advertising & Selling, April 1, 1931. 6 The Saturday Evening Post 206, no. 31 (January 27, 1934): 39. 7 Ibid. 8 See for example Ben Singer, Melodrama and Modernity: Early Sensational Cinema and Its Contexts (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001). 9 Marina Dahlquist, ed., Exporting Perilous Pauline: Pearl White and the Serial Film Craze (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2013); Kathryn A. Fuller, At the Picture Show: Small-Town Audiences and the Creation of Movie Fan Culture (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1996). 10 See for example Singer, Melodrama and Modernity; Shelley Stamp, MovieStruck Girls: Women and Motion Picture Culture after the Nickelodeon (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000). 11 There are several early publications discussing advertisements and the moving picture industry. See for example: E. A. Dench, Advertising by Motion Pictures (Cincinnati, OH: Standard, 1916); Lewis R. Freeman, “Movie Signboards: How the Cinema Has Advertised American Goods,” Saturday Evening Post 192, no. 29 (January 17, 1920): 12–13, 61; John Francis Barry and Epes Winthrop Sargent, Building Theatre Patronage: Management and Merchandising (New York: Chalmers, 1927). For a more contemporary discussion see for example; Rick Prelinger, The Field Guide to Sponsored Films (San Francisco: National Film Preservation Foundation, 2006); Newell, Salmon, and Chang, “The Hidden History of Product Placement”; Florin, Klerk and Vonderau, eds., Films That Sell. 12 There are many examples found in the Exxon Mobil Historical Collection. Just one example is the advertisements in The Lamp, which was the Standard Oil Company of New Jersey’s own publication. Prominent examples from The Lamp are the cover of the October and December 1923 issues, in which a city by night is lit up by traffic, and, as gasoline is energizing different motor vehicles in a swirl of movement, the back of the front cover of the June 1922 issue had an image illustrating the part automobiles played to carry businessmen to and from work in Cleveland. The Lamp 5, no. 1 (June 1922) (back of front cover). 13 For more information about the collection see: https​:/​/le​​gacy.​​lib​.u​​texas​​.edu/​​ taro/​​utcah​​/0035​​2​/cah​​​-0035​​2​.htm​l 14 See the setup of courses given at the Magnolia Oil Company covering the areas: (1) Products, that is, process films; (2) Service Station Management (outlining a standardized service for Magnolia stations); and (3) Lubrication (the job of lubrication of a car) using a series of moving images such as Origin of Petroleum, Through the Customer’s Eyes, What’s under the Hood, How

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Magnolia Gasolines Are Refined, Certified Lubrication Service, Magnolia Plus Ethyl, Certified Information about Motor Oils, New Socony Motor Oil, a series of articles in Magnolia Oil News “Magnolia Goes to School,” Magnolia Oil News (October 1931): 22–3; “Magnolia Goes to School,” Magnolia Oil News (November 1931): 20–1. “Magnolia Goes to School,” Magnolia Oil News (December 1931): 12–13. 15 For a discussion about “process films,” see: Tom Gunning, “Before Documentary: Early Nonfiction Films and the ‘View’ Aesthetic,” in Daan Hertogs and Nico de Klerk (eds.), Uncharted Territory: Essays on Early Nonfiction Film (Amsterdam: Stichting Nederlands Filmmuseum, 1997), 9–24. 16 Unsigned, “A Film on the Oil Industry,” The Lamp (June 1920): 4. 17 See for example: “On the Highways of Europe. Where Filling Stations Are Rare and Pump Sales Small; The Adventure of Taxi Riding in Paris,” The Lamp 9, no. 4 (December 1926), 21; Marina Dahlquist, “Corporeality and Female Modernity: Intermediality and Early Film Celebrities,” red. Scott Curtis, Tom Gunning, and Joshua Yumibe, The Image in Early Cinema: Form and Material (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2018), 174–84. 18 Unsigned, “This Restless Age: Statisticians Say We Have 23,000,000 Automobiles and the Sunday Driver Replies That He Has Seen Them All,” The Lamp 10, no. 2 (August 1927): 5–6. 19 See for example: “The New Neighborhood Store,” The Lamp 10, no. 2 (August 1927): 13–16. See also, “Behind the Pump: Individual Attention and Organized Efficiency Have Combined in the Development of the Modern Service Station to Form a New Ideal of Merchandising,” The Lamp 12, no. 5 (February 1930): 18–22. 20 Unsigned, “This Restless Age: Statisticians Say We Have 23,000,000 Automobiles and the Sunday Driver Replies That He Has Seen Them All,” 6. See also “Going Places?” The Lamp 15, no. 1 (June 1932): 20–3. 21 “Going Places?” 20. 22 “The Automobile: Symbol of American Social and Economic Progress.” Marketing, Advertising, Print Aids, United States, Socony-Vacuum, 1934. 23 American Petroleum Institute, Oil (New York: American Petroleum Institute, c. 1930), 35–7, 44–5, 57–8. 24 Human Resources Women, 1917–85. ExxonMobil historical collection. 25 Apart from modern appliances, prefabricated homes are described in “The Next Great Industry,” The Lamp 17, no. 6 (April 1935): 16–22. 26 See for example “Marketing, Advertising, Print Ads, United States, SoconyVacuum, 1933,” and “Marketing, Advertising, Print Aids, United States, Socony-Vacuum, 1934.” 27 Mary Arnold, “Let’s Drive Better Than Men!,” Vacuum Oil Company, 1930. Human Resources Women, 1917–85. 28 Marketing, Advertising, Print Ads, United States, Socony-Vacuum, 1937. ExxonMobil historical collection.

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29 New fabrics as well as the Prêt-à-Porter industry made as Kathy Peiss and others have demonstrated a more “democratic” and classless appearance. Kathy Peiss, Cheap Amusements. Working Women and Leisure in Turn-ofthe-Century New York (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1986), 56–87; Nancy L. Green, Ready-to-Wear and Ready-to-Work: A Century of Industry and Immigrants in Paris and New York (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997). 30 See for example George H. Jones, “The Saga of Petroleum: Known for Thousands of Years, but Little Used until the Last Half Century, Oil Has Revolutionized Life in Modern Times,” The Lamp 9, no. 4 (December 1926): 8–13. 31 The 1919 National Advertising Campaign. Gargoyle Lubricant. (New York: Vacuum Oil Company, 1919). Marketing, Advertising. ExxonMobil Historical Collection. 32 See for example “They Didn’t Know What to Do with It,” The Lamp 14, no. 5 (February 1932): 8–10. See also American Petroleum Institute, Oil (New York: American Petroleum Institute, c. 1930), 177–88. 33 The 1921 National Advertising Campaign. Gargoyle Lubricant. (New York: Vacuum Oil Company, 1921). Marketing, Advertising. ExxonMobil Historical Collection. 34 For a discussion on the development of product placement in motion pictures see Jay Newell, Charles T. Salmon, and Susan Chang, “The Hidden History of Product Placement,” Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media (December 2006). 35 Richard Arlen, on the other hand, was an actual star of Paramount’s Song of the Eagle (Ralph Murphy, 1933). 36 Saturday Evening Post 205, no. 48 (May 27, 1933): 25. 37 Saturday Evening Post 205, no. 50 (June 10, 1933): 36. 38 Saturday Evening Post 205, no. 52 (June 24, 1933): 38. 39 Saturday Evening Post 205, no. 52 (June 24, 1933): 37. 40 Saturday Evening Post 206, no. 1 (July 1, 1933): 36–7. 41 Saturday Evening Post 206, no. 3 (July 15, 1933): 41. 42 Advertisement in Collier’: The National Weekly. Marketing, Advertising, Print Ads, United States, Socony-Vacuum, 1933. 43 Another example is “Good Getaway,” starring Joan Blondell, Douglas Fairbanks Jr., and Guy Kibbee, with Blondell and Fairbanks also starring in Warner Brothers’ films Goodbye Again (Michael Curtiz, 1933) and The Narrow Corner (Alfred E. Green, 1933). In the “movie” Blondell and Fairbanks are a couple and Kibbe is in the part of her father. The Saturday Evening Post 206, no. 5 (July 29, 1933): 33. 44 Saturday Evening Post 206, no. 10 (September 2, 1933): 33. 45 Saturday Evening Post 206, no. 24 (December 9, 1933): 55. 46 Saturday Evening Post 206, no. 21 (November 18, 1933): 32–3.

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47 Another Mobiloil Movie advertising the excellence of Mobiloil Arctic to keep your car running during cold winters was The Jack Takes the Queen starring Helen Twelvetrees and Jack Oakie. The Saturday Evening Post 206, no. 22 (November 25, 1933): 41. 48 Ad in the Saturday Evening Post 205, no. 31 (January 28, 1933): 29; 205, no. 33 (February 11, 1933): 30–1; 205, no. 35 (February 25, 1933): 37; 205, no. 37 (March 11, 1933): 36–7; 205, no. 38 (March 18, 1933): 33, etcetera. 49 Saturday Evening Post 205, no. 41 (April 8, 1933): 40–1. 50 Saturday Evening Post 206, no. 14 (September 30, 1933): 39. 51 Marketing, Advertising, Print Ads, United States, Socony-Vacuum, 1937. 52 Cynthia B. Meyers, A World from Our Sponsor: Admen, Advertising, and the Golden Age of Radio (New York: Fordham University Press, 2014). 53 Ibid., 161. 54 Ibid., 162–4. 55 Saturday Evening Post, 207, no. 38 (March 23, 1935): 4. During the run of “Captain Henry’s Maxwell House Show Boat” on NBC Radio, Maxwell House Coffee ran a series of magazine ads promoting the show. These fullpage advertisements appeared monthly in The Saturday Evening Post over the course of 1933–7. 56 Saturday Evening Post 206, no. 29 (January 13, 1934): 83. Other examples of advertisements for Fleishmann’s Yeast with this format, however without the Hollywood angle, appear in Saturday Evening Post 206, no. 28 (January 6, 1934): 33, where the famous skin specialist Dr. Hufnagel describes a typical case, and Dr. Taillandier of the Salpétrière Hospital in Paris gives his advice in Saturday Evening Post 206, no. 30 (January 20, 1934): 48, and we meet a Dr. Ploos van Amstel from Amsterdam in Saturday Evening Post, 206, no. 32 (February 3, 1934): 29; other examples of integrated advertisement are ads for Sanka coffee 206, no. 29 (January 13, 1934): 31, and 206, no. 33 (February 10, 1934): 31; ad for Pennzoil in Saturday Evening Post 206, no. 30 (January 20, 1934): 51; ad for Lifebuoy Health Soap and Lifebuoy Shaving cream, Saturday Evening Post 206, no. 31 (January 27, 1934): 46; and ad for Ovaltine. the Saturday Evening Post 206, no. 34 (February 17, 1934): 97. 57 Saturday Evening Post 206, no. 32 (February 3, 1934): 75. Another example of a direct reference to a “star” in Hollywood is “interpreted” by Fanny Brice, comedienne, singer, theater and film actress, and star of the Ziegfeld Follies on Broadway and a smoker of Spud Menthol-cooled cigarettes, Saturday Evening Post 206, no. 40 (March 31, 1934): 41. Or what in the ad is called a real-life movie “The Folly of Frances Ames,” which supposedly was a “reallife” story about a worn-down airline hostess who nearly loses her job when her doctor recommends her to eat Bran Flakes, which saves the situation by giving her energy. The Saturday Evening Post 206, no. 33 (February 10, 1934): 79. 58 Saturday Evening Post 206, no. 20 (November 11, 1933): 45.

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59 Saturday Evening Post 206, no. 12 (September 16, 1933): 28. For another interesting example on Camel’s narrative advertisements see: Saturday Evening Post 206, no. 6 (August 5, 1933): 32 60 Mobil, “Texas History Movies: Four Hundred Years of History and Development,” advertisement brochure Texas: Magnolia Petroleum Company, 1928. ExxonMobil historical collection. 61 “Safety Film Shown to Traffic Violators,” Milwaukee Journal, May 5, 1951. 62 “And Then There Were Four,” 1950–63. ExxonMobil historical collection.

6 The American Petroleum Institute Sponsored Motion Pictures in the Service of Public Relations Gregory A. Waller

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rom the 1920s through the 1970s, the petroleum industry in the United States made extensive use of motion pictures, particularly if we take into account the number of films circulated under the auspices of gasoline retailers. At mid-century, during the post–Second World War boom in the production of 16 mm sponsored motion pictures, Business Screen noted that “practically every oil company of any size is an active user of the film medium,”1 and this prominent trade magazine offered a detailed and highly complimentary three-part account of “The Oil Industry and the Screen” (November 1953–January 1954). This company-by-company survey covering distribution and exhibition as well as production reads almost like a compendium of how sponsored nonfiction motion picture might be used: films designed for training employees and dealers, consumer sales, safety education, and corporate team-building—often used in tandem with what were identified as other “audio-visual tools,” particularly slidefilms. The “most general purpose for which films are employed” by the oil industry, declared Business Screen, is “‘public relations,’” which was defined in simple terms as using media to “make industry’s complex facts clear and colorful” and to

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underscore its commitment to American progress and prosperity, an effort particularly evident in the “organized film effort” of companies like Shell, Standard Oil, Esso, and Texaco and the media outreach undertaken by the American Petroleum Institute (API)2 (Figure 6.1). As the industry’s major trade association, the American Petroleum Institute (API) was largely concerned with lobbying, disseminating statistical information, developing best practices, encouraging applied research, and working with federal government agencies. This chapter examines the use of motion pictures by the API from the 1920s through the 1950s, within the context of this organization’s broader efforts at improving the public standing of an industry that regularly faced criticism for allegedly fixing prices, limiting competition, and reaping windfall profits. I will focus in particular on the API’s Oil Industry Information Committee (OIIC), an ambitious public relations initiative formed in 1948, which funded and circulated a whole battery of media products, including, most notably, a major film production annually between 1949 and 1956.

FIGURE 6.1  Cover, Business Screen 7.14 (1953) special issue: The Oil Industry and the Screen.

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Tracking the activities of the API offers an illuminating perspective both on the history of sponsored petrocinema and also on the emergence and, particularly, the flourishing of public relations as post–Second World War media practice.

The American Petroleum Institute and the US Bureau of Mines Designed to serve as a national trade association representing all branches of the petroleum industry and to facilitate cooperation between this industry and the US government, the API was incorporated on March 24, 1919.3 The extraordinarily important role of oil as a military resource during the First World War shaped this postwar initiative. The API had its precursor in the National Petroleum War Service Committee, which epitomized, in Daniel Yergin’s phrase, “the new pattern of close cooperation between business and government” when it came to the petroleum industry, a working relation far from the US government’s progressivist trust-busting fervor of a generation earlier.4 Trade journals like Oildom and the Mining and Oil Bulletin fully endorsed this new collaborative effort, and the API’s original by-laws called for the new organization to “co-operate with the Government in all matters of national concern,” boost trade, and “promote in general the interests of the petroleum industry.”5 These interests during the 1920s included encouraging and satisfying the ever-increasing American consumption of gasoline and other petroleum products, developing new sources for oil outside the United States, promoting the roll back of antitrust legislation, and dealing with the headline-grabbing Teapot Dome scandal involving the secretary of the interior and the illegal leasing of drilling rights on public land to private companies.6 Surveying the API’s first decade, a speaker at the American Statistical Association’s 1929 conference concluded that the API’s “most valuable achievement” had been in “the standardization of mechanical equipment,” though it had also contributed much by way of gathering and publicly disseminating statistical data about oil production and consumption through press notices, weekly bulletins, and volumes like Petroleum Facts and Figures (1928).7 These activities correlate directly to a plan laid out in early 1919 by then director of the US Bureau of Mines (USBM), Van H. Manning, that set the parameters and ambitions for the API, most notably by recommending that the organization fund an ambitious “Division of Research and Statistics” largely dedicated toward increasing efficiency and standardization.8 (Manning would resign from his government position and become director of research for the API in 1920, underscoring what would remain a close relation between the USBM

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and the API.9) Significantly, while this plan (which was implemented in September 1919) did not mention the sort of lobbying efforts that would become part of API’s role, it did call for the establishment of a publicity department tasked with promoting and “protecting” the industry at large by disseminating advice as to legitimate operators, engineers and oil companies. Considerable odium attaches to the oil industry because of the many fakers who are busy, and prevalent opinions as to big gushers and quick fortunes. Gushers and the spectacular type of oil operations receive undue notice. A publicity department should advise the public of the hazards attached to the industry, and call attention not only to the fortunes made but also to the many failures, the dry holes, etc.10 By 1924, with the Teapot Dome scandal in the news and the creation of a new regulatory agency (the Federal Oil Conservation Board), the API felt compelled to put more resources specifically into public relations. Syndicated newspaper articles announced that the API had allocated an estimated annual budget of $100,000 to “tell the people the true story of the [oil] business.”11 For the most part this effort apparently entailed disseminating the sort of “statistical work” mentioned before, as well as a 250-page volume addressing anxieties about the depletion of America’s oil resources.12 In addition to these efforts, the API announced in 1927 that it was funding—for the first time—a motion picture, earmarking $25,000 for The Story of Petroleum (1928), an eight-reel film to be produced by the US Bureau of Mines (USBM) and shot at a range of locations across the United States.13 A description of the completed film in the International Review of Educational Cinematography—following closely the USBM’s own synopsis of the film—indicates that The Story of Petroleum relied on animation as well as location footage to follow in detail an elaborate and technologically sophisticated process that led from exploration and drilling through transportation and refinement of crude oil and the delivery of finished petroleum products.14 The Story of Petroleum was very much in keeping with other ways that the API sought to boost public (and hence government) support for the industry through the dissemination of “educational” material, most notably a set of booklets entitled, simply, Oil. First published in 1930, Oil was a straightforward celebration of America’s petroleum-driven “age of machinery,” a new level of civilization enabled by bountiful natural resources, “great new consuming agencies” (like the automobile), and a “free and little hampered” competitive capitalist economy. In what would become an obsessive refrain over the next two decades, like some kind of magic incantation to dispel the specter of Rockefeller’s monopolistic Standard Oil, this Depression-era API

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publication boasted that the oil industry c. 1930 is “probably the most highly competitive of American industries,” technologically and scientifically innovative, constantly improving and adding to its array of useful products, and epitomizing modern merchandising methods, above all by transforming the gasoline filling station into a service station.15 Geared toward adults and students in high school and beyond, these pamphlets were also published as a book and then issued in 1935 in a second edition with the title, Petroleum, The Story of an American Industry.16 Even more directly geared toward addressing the worldwide economic crisis and critiques of American-style capitalism was a slide lecture available from the API, entitled How Can Industry Return to Normal (1933), which was billed as a “film-talk.”17 If The Story of Petroleum clearly fits within the API’s public relations agenda, this film also points to the significant role of the USBM in producing and distributing films during the 1920s and beyond, films whose production costs were underwritten by oil companies (as well as other “industrial concerns”).18 In fact, by the time it released The Story of Petroleum, the USBM’s library of films—all available for only shipping costs and also distributed by certain American public universities as well as the American Museum of Natural History—featured several titles about the oil industry, including a four-reel film also called The Story of Petroleum that was released in 1919. This early sponsored film was widely circulated nontheatrically after being screened to industry gatherings like the annual meeting of the Kansas-Oklahoma Oil & Gas Association and the ceremony marking the fiftieth anniversary of the original Standard Oil Company.19 Funded by Sinclair Consolidated Oil, The Story of Petroleum, wrote Oil Trade Journal, “is being shown in schools, colleges, churches, etc. and the Bureau [of Mines] men accompany it with a lecture. The Bureau has also arranged to lend this film to churches, factories, schools and lodges.”20 From the mid-1920s on, readily available guidebooks like the Film Daily Year Book and One Thousand and One: The Blue Book of Non-Theatrical Film highlighted the USBM’s film operation, listing The Story of Petroleum along with related titles, including The Story of Gasoline and The Story of Lubricating Oil (two-reel films funded by Standard Oil of Indiana) and Refining the Crude (four reels, funded by the Gulf Refining Company). Particularly well publicized and circulated were USMB films that tracked the industry beyond the United States, reflecting the increasing competition during the 1920s for “foreign” oil resources: Mexico and Its Oil (1922, four reels, produced in cooperation with Sinclair Consolidated Oil): Technical aspects of the petroleum industry in Mexico, with views of “domestic” life;21 The Story of a Mexican Oil Gusher (c. 1922, two reels, produced in cooperation with Pan-American Petroleum and Transport Company):

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Discovery of petroleum in Mexican jungle, construction of derrick, use of modern conservation equipment; Through the Oil Fields of Mexico (c. 1922, three reels, produced in cooperation with Pan-American Petroleum and Transport Company): Survey of Mexico’s richest oil fields, gushers, and modern equipment, transportation of petroleum products from Vera Cruz to Tampico to Baltimore, Maryland, in the United States; Through Oil Lands of Europe and Africa (1925, three-part film in eight reels, produced by the Rothacker Company for the Pan-American Petroleum and Transport Company). Part 1 (two reels) covers Germany, France, Spain, Morocco, and Algeria; Part 2 (three reels) covers Italy, Hungary, the Danube, and Rumania; Part 3 (four reels) covers Poland, Greece, and Egypt.22 What these four multireel films underscore is the overlap between corporatesponsored films—often funded by sponsored railroad companies and, later, by automobile manufacturers and gasoline retailers—and certain conventions of the travelogue, including descriptive intertitles, slow pans, and footage of landscapes and local “nonindustrial” practices. Among the USMB films, this connection is particularly evident in Through Oil Lands of Europe and Africa, which begins with the title: “the oil industry in Europe and Africa can not be properly understood without some knowledge of the habits and social conditions of the people.”23 All of these oil-related titles appeared in the USBM’s 1931 motion picture catalog, which noted that while the “cost of production” for USBM films “is paid by cooperating industrial concerns,” “Bureau of Mines films are produced and circulated under the direction of John A. Davis, chief engineer, information division,” with M. F. Leopold, the supervising engineer for the motion picture production section, in charge of production. In an attempt to waylay any public and congressional misgivings about this cooperation between a state agency and private corporate interests, the USBM insisted that the films it circulated—and therefore vouched for—“are free from trademarks, trade names, or other direct advertising material. They are censored by a board of review selected from the technical staff of the bureau by the director and with his approval.”24 Around twelve of the USMB’s sixty titles dealt in some way with the petroleum industry, and even at this relatively early date, three of the petroleum films were available in 16 mm as well as 35 mm. The USMB was also in the practice of what it called “revising” and reissuing titles, fully aware of the potential extended shelf life for nontheatrical films. Thus, this agency released

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in 1934 an updated version of the API-funded The Story of Petroleum, retitled as Petroleum, the Liquid Mineral.25 With more than one hundred prints of most of its titles available, the Bureau targeted a broad range of venues and audiences, a multisited realm comprised of “educational institutions, engineering and scientific societies, civic and business associations, clubs, churches, miners’ local unions, and the various service schools of the Army and Navy.”26 Suggesting the extensive nontheatrical circulation of USMB films, the Motion Picture Herald reported that during 1937 the most popular USBM title, screened 4,938 times before audiences totaling 537,741, was The Evolution of the Oil Industry (1933), a three-reel film available in 16 and 35 mm produced in cooperation with Sinclair Refining Company and very likely based on The World Struggle for Oil (1924), which had also been funded by Sinclair.27 A shorter, revised, and presumably updated sound version of The Evolution of the Oil Industry was released by the USBM in 1941 and another revised version appeared in 1945.28 USBM titles were regularly promoted in the American Petroleum Institute Quarterly, a trade journal introduced by the API in 1931 that offered a record of the organization’s varied public relations efforts as the industry weathered the Depression, grappled with New Deal policies, and attempted to overcome reduced automobile use and increased taxes on gasoline, even as American oil resources greatly expanded with the discovery of major fields in Texas and Oklahoma.29 When the USBM released Petroleum, the Liquid Mineral in 1934, the API Quarterly felt compelled to explain the organization’s relation to this federal bureau: “The negative,” for this “four-reel narrative film,” “which is owned by the American Petroleum Institute, carries the usual Bureau of Mines emblem and government title, but by arrangement with the bureau, copies may be made bearing the name of a particular company or association in place of the Institute’s name which appears in the courtesy title at the beginning and end of the film.”30 Here the potential complexities and the variations in designating sponsorship are apparent. Sponsorship could be explicitly indicated (or not) onto prints that could be identified as being exhibited under the auspices of the API, the USBM, or any “company or association” that purchased and screened its own copy. One screening site for USBM films was at the meetings of various API chapters across the country. In fact, the descriptions of these meetings in API Quarterly point to another widespread and easily overlooked role that motion pictures played within the American oil industry. As might be expected, the API chapters made use of industrial films from tractor and farm machinery manufacturers, as well as from individual oil companies (and, on occasion, films with no direct connection to the industry—like amateur travelogues, sports films, and during the war, various types of films dealing with the war).

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More interesting is the evidence of petroleum-related films that were not apparently designed for broader dissemination to the general public, like footage of experiments by the American Association of Petroleum Geologists and of specific oil well fires and firefighting efforts—that is, films that could document events, demonstrate methods, or advertise products of special interest to “oil men.”31 Into the 1940s and beyond, such screenings continued to be included in API chapter meetings, indicating both the range of films exhibited in these nontheatrical venues and also the regularity of this practice.32

Oil for Victory By the end of the 1930s, with the Justice Department again threatening to undertake antitrust action against not only the major oil companies but also the API, this trade association continued to devote resources for public relations.33 A report in the January 1940 issue of API Quarterly suggests the national range of this ongoing effort, highlighting the work of twenty-eight regional public relations committees, the broad distribution of pamphlets like What Price Gasoline?, the creation of speaker’s bureaus, the publication of a new handbook designed to standardize PR efforts (A Study of Good Practices in Public Relations), and the launching of an apparently unrealized plan to prepare “a series of short motion pictures for showing at luncheon clubs and at oil-company meetings—each dealing with some phase of the industry.”34 The API’s priorities in terms of public relations shifted considerably after the United States entered the Second World War. As an essential part of the American mobilization efforts during the war, the petroleum industry came even more into the public eye, highlighted by the unprecedented construction of two major domestic pipelines that each ran for more 1,200 miles as well as the establishment of the industry-based Petroleum Industry War Council (involving most of the API’s board of directors) and the federal Petroleum Administration for War (PAW), which marked a new level of partnership between the oil industry and the government. For the Axis and the Allies alike, in Yergin’s phrase, “oil was recognized as the critical strategic commodity for the war and was essential for national power and international predominance.”35 When the API met for its annual convention in October 1943—which not surprisingly had as its theme, “Oil Goes to War”—featured screenings including the self-congratulatory color film, Oil for War (1943), which ended with footage of the Battle of Midway after detailing the construction of the “Big Inch” pipeline.36 The following year, API Quarterly announced that several copies of a comparable film, Victory’s Oil (1944)—produced by the

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­ etroleum Industry War Council—could be borrowed from the API’s DepartP ment of Information (and prints could be purchased directly from the Council for $250).37 Distributing Victory’s Oil was very much in keeping with the aims of the Department of Information, whose director in April 1944 declared that the API must encourage “good will toward the industry” and counter “public mistrust” with “a continuous missionary campaign, [which] coupled with exemplary performance and unflagging but modest recitals of accomplishment, offers the best means of gaining and maintaining the friendship of our public.”38 One quite serious effort at public “friendship” was Men, Oil and War (1946), a monograph published by the Petroleum Industry Committee, which identified the Second World War as the “latest and most thrilling chapter in the whole romantic story of the oil industry.”39 Even more celebratory was Oil for Victory: The Story of Petroleum in War and Peace (1946), a heavily illustrated volume detailing the heroic wartime efforts of this industry. Representatives of the API, Standard Oil, and the Petroleum Industry War Council provided editorial oversight for Oil for Victory, which was prepared by the editors of Look, one of America’s highest-circulation photographic weekly magazines. The oil industry could hardly have wished for a more positive and enthusiastic public relations gesture, for this book underscored the worldwide importance of American oil, the value of “free” competition and risk-taking, and the unwavering patriotic commitment and “enterprising, pioneering spirit” of petroleum companies.40 Perhaps most significant, Oil for Victory personalized the industry, foregrounding the work of countless individuals, from executives, scientists, and engineers to refinery workers, pipeline builders, and the crews of oil tankers. These themes, not surprisingly, would become prominent in API’s postwar promotional efforts, including a series of widely circulated films, as well as collaboration with Coca-Cola in the production of The Story of Oil (1946), a fifteen-minute color slide film designed for various educational uses and distributed nationally by Coca-Cola bottlers.41 A full-fledged public relations “missionary campaign” became a major API priority soon after the ending of the war, which had demonstrated the essential role of oil in terms of national security and foreign policy, a role that the Cold War would underscore. Peace brought the lifting of gasoline rationing in August 1945, an oil shortage in 1946, and an increasing awareness that domestic production could not satisfy the demands of American consumers. The postwar years, claim Roger and Diana Olien, saw the reemergence of the “cultural construction” of the oil industry as “monopolistic, overpowerful, speculative, and risky, conspiratorial, wasteful, disorderly, out to gouge consumers, out to corrupt government, and in general a threat to public welfare.”42 More specifically, the industry was anxious about the extent of federal

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regulatory oversight even as it sought to expand its exploitation of “foreign” oil resources, particularly in the Middle East, and to ramp up consumer purchases of gasoline and other petroleum products—all in the face of apparently widespread concern that the industry was fixing prices, limiting competition, and reaping windfall profits, concern voiced in a scathing report by the Federal Trade Commission on what it called the “International Oil Cartel.”43

The Oil Industry Information Committee: Oil Progress Week In January 1947, the API launched a self-styled “industrywide public relations campaign” after a 140-page survey it commissioned from Opinion Research, Inc., pointed to a “colossal shortage of [public] understanding about the oil industry.” Opinion Research recommended that the API pitch the industry as “progressive,” a veritable “pace maker of progress.”44 The API’s annual convention later that year took as its keynote the idea that “the world’s oil man is an American,” meaning that the capitalist-free world’s savior and benefactor is the American oil industry, provided that it “is left free to summon the last full measure of its characteristic ingenuity, resourcefulness, courage, skill, and technical know-how unhampered by strangling government regulation which, finally, cannot get another barrel of oil to the consumer.”45 Fresh from wartime service as a top-ranking naval officer specializing in public relations, Harold Blaine Miller was hired to head the API’s new Department of Information, which included the newly constituted OIIC, whose “official objective” was “to make clear how well the people of the United States are served by America’s oil businesses and to gain support for conditions under which they can continue to be privately managed, fully competitive and financially sound.”46 The vast amount of public relations material this committee generated over the next several years suggests that the OIIC was tasked with producing media to answer (again and again) a set of interlocking and ideologically loaded questions: What is the oil industry? Who makes up its workforce? How do the many businesses that comprise this industry do business? What does it produce and provide for Americans? How does this industry shepherd American natural resources, while generating countless different jobs, improving the standard of living for US citizens, furthering scientific research, and bolstering national defense in a world fully dependent on petroleum?47 Beginning in 1948, the OIIC imprint appears across a range of media products designed to set the record straight, including newspaper advertising

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spelling out the need for fuel conservation and pamphlets (often with companion slidefilms) like Bill Burns, Fable Killer (1950) purporting to “tell the American public the facts about oil and what they mean.” In May 1948, the OIIC launched a $750,000 print advertising campaign boasting of the effort and investment that goes into “progress in oil,” utilizing a series of monthly full-page advertisements that ran in the Saturday Evening Post and other national magazines with striking woodcuts (by noted illustrator, Lynd Ward) that pictured as a synecdoche for the industry at large a confident American oil man at work amid massive refineries or derricks.48 OIIC’s greatest effort in 1948 went into staging in October of that year a celebratory event (or pseudoevent) dubbed Oil Progress Day, concocted purely as a public relations opportunity that encouraged members of the oil industry across the country to reach out to their local communities, spreading the gospel according to the API. For the inaugural Oil Progress Day, the emphasis was on advertisements in newspapers, national magazines, and the oil trade press, as well as radio commercials and poster displays.49 By 1949, the OIIC was garnering very broad industry support, with 94 trade associations and 4,039 companies nationally participating in its efforts, and an annual budget set at $1.8 million, which grew to a high of $3.2 million by 1954.50 Encouraging and shaping this participation remained a central OIIC objective, for it was the local owners and employees of oil companies who were responsible for purchasing advertising space in hometown newspapers and radio stations, arranging and introducing film screenings, and working with school officials, elected civic leaders, churches, and service clubs. From its central office in New York City, the OIIC developed a wide array of material: what it called “pattern speeches” for local spokespeople; pamphlets like Power Farming (1952), Facts about Oil (which was updated annually), and Careers in Petroleum (1954); filmstrips like Petroleum in Today’s Living (1952); study kits specifically designed for school use; radio programming like Romance of Oil (1952), a “series of 13 fifteen-minute radio programs” available on disc; and a regularly issued “Oil Newsletter,” some issues of which were reprinted in full in the trade magazine, Broadcasting.51 For the API—and likely for American business more generally—an ambitious (and unquestioningly necessary) public relations campaign required tailored, complementary, reiterated messages and an orchestrated, multiple-media plan for circulating these messages, most often to targeted audiences. For my purposes, among the most notable OIIC print products was Movies on Oil: A Catalog of Motion Pictures of General Interest about Petroleum, first published in 1948 or early 1949, and then appearing in revised and expanded new editions in 1951 and 1953.52 The OIIC claimed to have distributed fortyfive thousand copies of the first edition, which covers seventy-four films in a

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range of areas (agriculture, exploration, oil in wartime, refining, transportation, etc.), almost all produced after the Second World War and all available “free on loan” in sound 16 mm versions. Films sponsored by Standard Oil, Esso, Shell, and the Texas Company figure prominently in the catalog, which also lists eight titles from the USBM and includes films from the Arabian American Oil Company and smaller American companies based in the South and Southwest. (The only API film listed is Victory’s Oil.) While attesting to the investment by individual oil companies in motion pictures designed to be screened nontheatrically by “clubs and organized groups,” Movies on Oil underscores the OIIC’s role in facilitating the circulation of sponsored films as part of a broader public relations strategy that was never linked to specific companies but rather purported to always speak for and about the Oil Industry writ large.53 Sponsored film also very quickly came to play a central role in the OIIC’s major annual promotional initiative, which in 1949 expanded from a one-day event to become Oil Progress Week. By 1953 this event was being celebrated in 4,400 different US cities and towns, though it would disappear almost entirely by the end of the decade.54 A cornerstone of these annual events was the release of a new high-quality motion picture commissioned and presented by the OIIC, though Oil Progress Week was always a multifaceted, highly orchestrated, centrally planned media campaign that required extensive involvement from regional subcommittees and more than 3,500 local community committees. In 1950, for instance, the OIIC distributed more than eight thousand “community packages,” each including twelve radio announcements and nine radio scripts, a new booklet, window displays, and newspaper advertising material. Local representatives could also request a billboard poster, displays highlighting petroleum research, and one of the six hundred prints struck of the latest OIIC-sponsored film.55

The Last Ten Feet The first of the films of OIIC that debuted as part of Oil Progress Week was The Last Ten Feet (1949), a twenty-minute celebratory overview of the American oil industry in action, emphasizing the labor-and-technology intensive processes of exploring, drilling, refining, and transporting petroleum that led quickly and efficiently to the delivery of gasoline to the consumer through the 10 feet of hose in the hands of a friendly attendant at a neighborhood service station.56 This film was produced for the OIIC by Warner News, which had been incorporated as a subsidiary of Warner Bros. dedicated to newsreels and news magazine short subjects after the studio had purchased the library and

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assets of Pathe News in 1947.57 Alfred Butterfield, the producer of The Last Ten Feet, had begun his career at the March of Time before joining Pathe News as a scriptwriter and newsreel editor and then as editor-in-chief.58 Leonard Hein, the editor of The Last Ten Feet, would become managing editor of Warner Pathe News and News Magazine of the Screen in 1951.59 It is not surprising, then, that The Last Ten Feet relies extensively (perhaps exclusively) on stock footage and clips from other films about oil, hundreds and hundreds of brief shots that edited in Hollywood montage style, dramatically scored, and unified by a fast-paced, nonstop voice-over narration filled with facts and hyperbolic claims about the “story of [American] progress, the story of oil.” Delivered in the professionalized style of a screen news magazine short (quite unlike, e.g., Petroleum [1947], Encyclopedia Britannica’s classroom film), this story “begins and ends with men and women,” millions of them with “strength and skill and teamwork,” carrying out a host of different highly specialized jobs. According to The Last Ten Feet, profiting from oil requires substantial investment, scientific know-how, sophisticated technology, human expertise, and true grit. For the purposes of this film, the more visually striking the equipment and machinery the better, whether in the laboratory, the refinery, the offshore platform, the oilfield, or the factory. The petroleum industry on display in The Last Ten Feet is an aggressively expanding, innovative, forward-looking, competitive, quintessentially American enterprise that serves the nation by improving the quality of life and helping secure “the promise of a strong, free America in the world of tomorrow.” The countless service stations across the United States—like the one that figures prominently in The Last Ten Feet as the local face of the industry— were an obvious site for getting public relations pamphlets from individual companies and the AIP into the hands of consumers. But how would OIIC maximize the usefulness of its first commissioned public relations film? The successful circulation of The Last Ten Feet—which I have pieced together here from information in local newspapers and API Quarterly, since no internal OIIC documents on the distribution of its films are apparently available—became a model for how the OIIC would distribute its films over the next few years. The circulation of The Last Ten Feet gives a good sense of the difficulties and opportunities sponsored films encountered in reaching intended audiences in the first decade after the Second World War, as the range and number of screening sites for 16 mm expanded dramatically in the United States. A total of 633 prints of The Last Ten Feet were distributed through ten metropolitan district offices of the OIIC, from Boston and Chicago to Atlanta and New Orleans, as well as through individual oil companies that had acquired the film for their own libraries. Simultaneously, the OIIC also circulated 497 slidefilms based on this motion picture, designed as an instructional aid

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for dealers.60 This internally organized distribution strategy remained in place until 1954, when the OIIC began to distribute its films nontheatrically as well as theatrically through the Modern Talking Picture Service, the major distributor for sponsored film.61 Sent out from OIIC district offices, The Last Ten Feet was initially screened during 1949’s Oil Progress Week to a host of groups around the country, particularly clustered in oil-producing areas. Newspaper ads for screenings sometimes hailed oil company employees and their families, but very often the film was screened at sites where middle- and upper-middle-class opinion leaders traditionally gathered: Rotary Club luncheons, weekly meetings of the Kiwanis and the Optimist Club and other service/social organizations, and meetings of local business associations and denominational religious groups.62 In the racially segregated small cities of Benton Harbor and St. Joseph, Michigan, for instance, The Last Ten Feet made the rounds during Oil Progress Week, screening at high schools and at programs arranged for the Lions Club, the Optimist’s Club, and for the Zion Evangelical Church Brotherhood.63 In Abilene, Texas, located in the heart of oil country, the film screened for junior and senior high school classes, for services clubs, and a special banquet “for all distributors and dealers of petroleum products” and their guests.64 Many newspaper accounts indicate these screenings also featured a local speaker from the community who worked in the oil industry and represented the OIIC, making unquestionably apparent who was sponsoring the event. These speakers provided a local face to what otherwise might seem to be a trade association representing only the interests of the handful of major oil companies, companies then looking well beyond America for new resources.65 The following summer, from June 24 to September 4, 1950, The Last Ten Feet was exhibited daily at an event called the “Chicago Fair,” held on the city’s lakefront. This attraction was a major commercially driven, privately funded exposition, whose main attractions were a patriotic historical pageant entitled “Frontiers of Freedom” (which included in one scene a working derrick gushing “simulated” oil), major exhibits from electrical companies, and the Westinghouse Company’s “Theater of the Atom,” where from beyond plate glass windows, fairgoers were entertainingly educated about the promise of atomic energy. Standing prominently among the exhibits was the Oil Industry Service Center, which provided free to all fairgoers comfortable chairs, soothing radio music, roadmaps, and post cards. This building housed a fifty-seat motion picture theater continually running forty-five-minute shows that paired The Last Ten Feet with one of the other eighteen oil films available. This Service Center and the films it screened underscored the oil industry’s commitment to the business of serving consumers even as it promoted its technological sophistication and unmatched contributions to American economic prosperity.66

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As noted in The Dollars and Sense of Business Films (1954), a report by the Association of National Advertisers, one unquestionable benefit of a sponsored motion picture was that it could have an extended shelf life, remaining in circulation for years (as was the case with the films about oil distributed by the USBM).67 After the flurry of activity around Oil Progress Week and the Chicago Fair, The Last Ten Feet continued to be screened at schools and social clubs into the early 1950s, and the OIIC also immediately began to target television as another exhibition possibility.68 As early as November 1949, The Last Ten Feet was telecast on local commercial stations in California, Utah, and Indiana, and likely many more.69 Of at least equal significance, The Last Ten Feet found its way into the libraries of distributors specializing in the educational market, like Indiana University’s Audio Visual Center, which listed the film in the 1960 edition of its catalog as one of fourteen titles under the category of Petroleum. Being available from (and hence under the auspices of) a distributor like this major public university meant that The Last Ten Feet continued to make its way into American classrooms for at least a decade after its initial release.70

Style and Genre in the Public Relations Film From the release of The Last Ten Feet in 1949–56, when the OIIC shifted its media resources largely into television programming, this API initiative funded one major public relations motion picture each year, rolled out with much fanfare as part of Oil Progress Week. As a way of justifying this investment, the OIIC regularly reported in API Quarterly on the circulation of and audiences for its films, including bookings in commercial theaters and on television. The OIIC claimed, for example, that during 1955 its films were screened 92,500 times with an audience over 12 million.71 The total number of viewers reached by this public relations effort was surely higher, since the OIIC always offered to sell prints of its films (usually in both 16 mm and 35 mm), which would very likely end up in nontheatrical film libraries. As much as the OIIC tracked the audiences reached by its films and made clear its sponsorship of these titles, none of the OIIC films were actually made in-house. For each film, the OIIC hired Film Counselors, Inc., a New York firm to “supervise” production, an important role in the growing business of sponsored films in this period. Film Counselors was formed in 1946 by two veterans of the US military’s photographic services who had previously been associated with the March of Time. The firm found a profitable niche in what it called “offering a film advisory service for manufacturers,

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a­ dvertising ­agencies, and public relations firms” that included “supervision of film production and film distribution and utilization planning.”72 During the years it oversaw film production for the OIIC, Film Counselors other clients included the American Bankers Association, the American Gas Association, and the American Cancer Society. After The Last Ten Feet, Film Counselors supervised the production of seven more OIIC-sponsored films: 24 Hours of Progress (1950) 28 minutes, produced by Louis de Rochemont Associates; later repurposed in a 10-minute version (1952) Man on the Land (1951) 15 minutes, produced by United Productions of America (UPA); also released as a filmstrip (1952) Crossroads, U.S.A. (1952) 25 minutes, produced by Screen Gems American Frontier (1953) 29 minutes, produced by Affiliated Films The Story of Colonel Drake (1954) 29 minutes, produced by Roland Reed Productions, also distributed as Born in Freedom: The Story of Colonel Drake Barrel Number One (1955) 29 minutes, produced by Apex Film Corporation Destination Earth (1956) 13 minutes, produced by John Sutherland Productions (Figure 6.2).73 I have not been able to determine the precise role played by Film Counselors in planning and overseeing OIIC film projects, but not surprisingly, given the public relations agenda of the API, a shared set of broader, directly articulated claims are woven through these films: the world-changing significance of oil, the many ways petroleum products have boosted industrial productivity and improved the American standard of living, the complex machines, technologies, and skilled, dedicated people who make up the industry, and the bountiful rewards and fundamental rightness of highly competitive Americanstyle private enterprise. This final point became even more stridently asserted as the decade progressed and is particularly evident in OIIC’s 1956 offering, Destination Earth, an animated science-fiction parable that expresses both the imperatives of Cold War anti-communism and also the oil industry’s anxieties about increased government regulation. Common themes notwithstanding, in terms of style and genre, the OIIC films are quite diverse in ways that I can only briefly suggest here. For example, like The Last Ten Feet, Barrel Number One (directed by Hollingsworth

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FIGURE 6.2  Three of the films sponsored by Oil Industry Information Committee, initially released as part of the annual Oil Progress Week. Morris, whose career as a director of television series lasted from 1952 to 1986) offers a sweeping overview of the present-day oil industry, but this 1955 film moves chronologically through the difficult and costly steps required to find and make use of one barrel of oil. Barrel Number One tells this story with stirring music, occasional sync sound, easy-to-follow continuity editing, dramatic voice-over explanations, and a cast of professional actors playing representative industry types (the driller, the executive, the scientist, the refinery supervisor, etc.) all shot in carefully framed and fully legible images such as could be found in almost any mainstream fiction film or filmed TV episode, except that these performers stop to directly address the camera, offering (in character) expert explanatory information about each step of the process that brings gasoline to the consumer. Even closer than Barrel Number One to a conventional Hollywood short subject was OIIC’s 1954 film, The Story of Colonel Drake, whose director, Arthur Pierson, specialized largely in directing for dramatic television series in the 1950s and whose veteran screenwriter, Norman Riley Maine, had worked on features at Warner Bros. and Republic before concentrating on teleplays. This highly dramatic, historical biopic shot in Technicolor featured film and television actor Vincent Price playing the dauntless, independent, visionary man who was responsible for America’s first oil well and thus the beginning of the great oil industry that is supposedly still driven by these same values. The Story of Colonel Drake relies on period costumes, elaborate sets, and location filming, yet also jumps from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century in an epilogue that stresses the importance of Drake’s discovery for

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the ­countless satisfied consumers driving cars and enjoying “America’s high standard of living” under “vast and free American skies.” The skies were darker but the outlook still somehow promising in Crossroads, U.S.A., which OIIC released the year before The Story of Colonel Drake. (All the copies I have been able to locate of this 1953 film run for only a very coherent ten minutes, though initial descriptions put the running time at twenty-five minutes.) Relying on a professional cast, produced by Screen Gems, then the television production subsidiary of Columbia Pictures, and directed by Jules Bricken, whose credits in the 1950s include over forty episodes of various top-tier dramatic television shows, Crossroads, U.S.A. is unmistakably designed to be recognizable as a Hollywood movie, indebted, in particular, to the audiovisual conventions of film noir. The film begins in a shadowy, storm-tossed, small-town America disturbed by police sirens, threatened by an armed criminal on the run, and home to a disillusioned young man longing to escape and make “some real money” rather than working at the local service station. It is at this gas station, the final destination point of the oil industry, where a storm brings together a cross-section of middle America, including an oilman who explains to the young man the risky and difficult but ultimately successful search for oil in the area—thus allowing for an instructional interlude in the middle of the film featuring (again) footage of derricks and drilling. This hard-earned discovery promises to bring economic revitalization for the community and boundless opportunities for anyone who has the requisite faith, initiative, and strong work ethic. The lesson is well-learned by the young man who had been caught in the grip by greed and wanderlust. Faced with the choice of opting for the easy way out by joining the crook or going straight, the young man does the right thing, taking a bullet in the process, though that flesh wound doesn’t deter him from accepting the service station owner’s offer and starting a career in the oil industry. The employment opportunities and economic growth that follow from the discovery of oil likewise figure in American Frontier, which also features action-filled footage detailing the labor and machinery involved in locating and drilling for oil. But nothing in Crossroads, U.S.A. or any of the other OIIC films prepares one for the stylistic choices informing American Frontier, produced and directed by Willard Van Dyke, the distinguished documentary filmmaker who shot The River (1938) and directed The City (1939) and in 1946 was one of the founders of Affiliated Film Production, a progressive company aiming “to make motion pictures in the public interest.”74 In practice, this meant producing films for various sponsors including the US State Department, Bryn Mawr College, the National Educational Association, and the Mental Health Film Board—and for the OIIC.75

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American Frontier eschews both the conventions of 1950s Hollywood drama and the editing strategies of a celebratory compilation film. Instead, it tells the story of the oil industry by focusing on the Norwegian-American citizens of a small town during the winter in frigid North Dakota, site of the Williston Basin oil discovery in 1951. Filmed on location with a host of scenes involving local schoolchildren, citizen meetings, farmhouse interiors, and striking tableaus of the snow-covered prairie, the film, according to Business Screen, qualified as a “masterful documentary”—an accolade that would not have been applied to any of the other OIIC films.76 The public relations message in American Frontier celebrates not the oil industry’s global reach, its support of advanced scientific research, or its ever-increasing delivery of modern consumer products, but rather the ability of the industry to bring jobs and a wave of prosperity to a region that had been devastated during the Great Depression—all while respecting the land and the values of the local population.

Conclusion One relevant context for films like American Frontier and The Last Ten Feet is surely what muckraking journalist Harvey O’Connor in The Empire of Oil (1955) called Big Oil’s dangerous investment in “institutional advertising,” which encompassed other media efforts like sponsoring popular radio and television programs and commissioning in-house histories.77 From this perspective what is most noteworthy about the eight quite different OIIC films are their shared ideological emphases as they explicitly champion a brand of free enterprise, a teleology of petroleum-driven progress, and a version of American exceptionalism, often by “explaining” in matter-of-fact words and images how American oil companies go about the business of finding, extracting, refining, and distributing petroleum and petroleum products. But, as I have suggested in this chapter, the “institutional” context for these particular films is best understood in broader historical terms, taking into account the aims and activities of Oil Progress Week, the Oil Institute Information Committee, and the American Petroleum Institute. And motion picture “advertising” prepared under the auspices of this trade association is more accurately understood as sponsored cinema in the service of public relations media campaigns. The API example points to changes in these campaigns and in the production, distribution, and exhibition of sponsored film from the 1920s into the 1950s. As such, this chapter stands as a case study potentially relevant well beyond the oil industry, particularly for historical research concerning how nongovernmental national associations or agencies

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in the decade after the Second World War put cinema to multisited use for the purposes of public relations.78

Notes 1 “Oil Companies Active Film Sponsors,” Business Screen 11, no. 6 (1950): 27. For a discussion of the representation of the oil industry in American commercial feature film includes Robert Lifset and Brian C. Black, “Imaging the ‘Devil’s Excrement’: Big Oil in Petroleum Cinema, 1940-2007,” Journal of American History 99 (June 2012): 135–44. 2 “Oil and the Screen,” Business Screen 14, no. 7 (1953): 37–45; “Oil and the Screen Part II,” Business Screen 14, no. 8 (1953): 44–8; “Oil and the Screen Part III,” Business Screen 15, no. 1 (1954): 120, 122, 128. 3 Gerald D. Nash, United States Oil Policy, 1890-1964: Business and Government in Twentieth Century America (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1968), 40–2. Leonard M. Fanning offers an insider’s overview of the API in The Story of American Petroleum Institute: A Study and Report, with Personal Reminiscences (New York: World Petroleum Policies, 1959). 4 Daniel Yergin, The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power (New York: Free Press, 1992), 178. 5 “Formation of the Petroleum Institute,” Oildom 10, no. 4 (April 1919): 24; see also, for example, “The American Petroleum Institute,” Mining and Oil Bulletin 5 (April 1919): 253–4. 6 Yergin, The Prize, 167–228. See Nash, United States Oil Policy, 72–81. 7 Joseph E. Pogue, “The Statistical Work of the American Petroleum Institute,” Journal of the American Statistical Association 24, no. 164 (March 1929), Supplement: Proceedings of the American Statistical Association, 118–20. 8 Van H. Manning, Plan of Proposed Organization of the Division of Research and Statistics of the American Petroleum Institute (Washington: American Petroleum Institute, 1919). 9 “Manning Resigns as Director of U.S. Bureau of Mines,” Engineering and Mining Journal 109 (May 8, 1920): 1090. 10 Manning, Plan of Proposed Organization of the Division of Research and Statistics of the American Petroleum Institute, 8–9. 11 See, for example, “Oil Men Open Meeting Today in Fort Worth,” Arizona Republic [Phoenix], December 9, 1924: 1; “Petroleum Industry to Tell the Story of Oil,” Joplin [MO] Globe, December 10, 1924: 11; and “Story of Oil Is to Be Told to the Nation,” Daily Telegraph [Bluefield WVA], December 11, 1924: 12. Fanning suggests that the leadership of API was hardly unanimous in its support for a public relations campaign, quoting Welch: “The hell with public relations; we want to give out facts and information,” 112.

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12 American Petroleum Supply and Demand: A Report to the Board of Directors of the American Petroleum Institute by a Committee of Eleven Members of the Board (New York: McGraw H-Hill, 1925). 13 See “New Motion Picture Film Will Visualize the Story of Petroleum,” Educational Screen 6, no. 6 (June 1927): 297; “Uncle Sam to Film Texas Oil Fields,” Galveston [TX] Daily News, September 11, 1927: 12; “Story of Petroleum,” Amateur Movie Makers 3, no. 5 (May 1928): 326; “U.S. Cameraman Get Share of Thrills in Making 250 Miles of Film,” Exhibitors Herald-World 95, no. 2 (April 13, 1929): 34. 14 “The Story of Petroleum,” International Review of Educational Cinematography 2, no. 2 (February 1930): 202; Motion Pictures of the United States Bureau of Mines (Washington 1931), p. 14. 15 Oil (New York: American Petroleum Institute, 1930), 59. 16 See copyright record 7752 no. 89 (October 1935): 7757; “‘Petroleum’ Published as Revised Edition of ‘Oil-Industry’ Series,” API Quarterly 5, no. 3 (July 1935): 3. Also circulated during the 1930s were API pamphlets like Gas? School’s Out, Mornin’ that were designed to promote the sale of gasoline and distributed through service stations “Institute Issues Folders to Boost Gasoline Sales to Motorists,” API Quarterly 1, no. 3 (July 1931): 3. 17 How Can Industry Return to Normal was actually called a “talking picture” when it was presented to the Iowa Petroleum Assembly’s “Sunday Talks to Oil Men,” Des Moines [IA] Tribune, February 8, 1933: 14. 18 See, for example, the USBM titles listed in Procedures for Obtaining the Loan of Motion Pictures Distributed by Various Government Departments and Agencies (Washington: United States Information Service, 1937), 13–16. 19 Screening at annual meeting of the Kansas-Oklahoma Oil & Gas Association, Tulsa OK, alongwith address by Van H. Manning of the API, Wichita [KA] Beacon, October 16, 1920: 8. A restored print of The Story of Petroleum is available on certain DVD and Blu-Ray releases of Let There Be Blood (2007). 20 “The Oil Industry in Motion Pictures,” Oil Trade Journal 11, no. 3 (March 1920): 99. 21 “Educational Films: Oil and Mining Industries,” Mining and Oil Bulletin (April 1922): 22. 22 Frederic J. Haskins, “The Government Letter,” Independent Record [Helena Montana], October 14, 1926: 5. See also “Bureau’s Films Tell Story of Mining,” Educational Screen 6, no. 1 (January 1927): 60–1; “Releases of the Bureau of Mines,” Film Daily Year Book (1925): 637–8; “Three New Mines Bureau Subjects,” Educational Film Magazine 7, no. 1 (January 1922): 17; Arthur Edwin Krows, “Motion Pictures—Not for Theatres, Installment 33,” Educational Screen 21, no. 1 (January 1942): 15–16. 23 One clear outlier in the USBM offerings in the 1920s was The World Struggle for Oil (1924, seven reels, produced by Hank E. Butler for the Sinclair Consolidated Oil). Ranging from Noah’s Ark to the present, with an emphasis on modern advances in drilling, refining, and transporting oil, the wealth of petroleum products for the consumer, and comparing production in the

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United States and other countries. This film originally had a theatrical release and was the object of protest accusing it of being propaganda for Sinclair who was implicated in the Teapot Dome scandal. It is not mentioned in the USMB’s 1931 catalog. 24 Motion Pictures of the United States Bureau of Mines, 11. 25 “Bureau of Mines Revises Four Films,” Motion Picture Herald, June 17, 1939: 62. 26 Motion Pictures of the United States Bureau of Mines, 11. 27 “Bureau of Mines Films Shown 102,462 Times,” Motion Picture Herald, April 9, 1938: 36; “Mines Bureau Has Oil Film,” Motion Picture Herald, April 22, 1933: 18. 28 “Department of Interior Releasing Petroleum Film,” Motion Picture Herald, November 1, 1941: 49; “Bureau of Mines Releases New Educational Films,” Motion Picture Herald, December 1, 1945: 24. 29 This public relations work included an exhibit that featured a working model of a refinery in the World’s Fair and Century of Progress Exposition in Chicago (1933). “Scale Models of Oil Fields Feature Chicago Exposition” [sic] API Quarterly 3, no. 2 (April 1933): 10. 30 “Oil Movie in New Edition,” API Quarterly 4, no. 2 (April 1934): 9. 31 See, for example: screening of six reels showing the manufacture and operation of tractors accompanied by company representatives for the Panhandle, Texas chapter (API Quarterly 3, no. 1 [January 1933]: 15); screening for the Seminole, Oklahoma chapter of slides and moving pictures “covering experiments by the Institute and the American Association of Petroleum Geologists showing the effects upon ultimate recovery from different producing rates from a sand charged with gas, oil and water” (API Quarterly 3, no. 2 [April 1933]: 25); screening for the Houston, Texas chapter by a representative of Halliburton Oil Well Cementing Company of Hell’s Wells, “a motion picture showing some of the major blow-outs occurring in the Mid Continent area over a period of years, was presented” by a rep of the company (API Quarterly 5, no. 2 [April 1935]: 25). 32 See, for example, meeting of the North Texas Chapter March 17, 1941, that included a paper by a representative from Halliburton Oil Well Cementing Co., “Taking the Guess Work Out of Oil-Well Construction,” “following which a motion picture in technicolor was presented” (API Quarterly 11, no. 2 [April 1941]: 21); two Pan Am “sound movies in technicolor” at the East Texas Chapter (API Quarterly 11, no. 1 [February 1941]: 21; meeting of the Northeast Oklahoma Chapter on March 4, 1941, included screening of The Army on Wheels, courtesy of Dodge and Plymouth Dealers of Tulsa, Oklahoma (API Quarterly 11, no. 2 [April 1941]: 20). 33 Yergin, The Prize, 372. 34 “Wide Variety of Activities in Public-Relations Program,” API Quarterly 10, no. 1 (January 1940): 41–2. 35 Yergin, The Prize, 395, see also 375, 377–8; Nash, United States Oil Policy, 157–79; Fanning, Story of American Petroleum Institute, 150.

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36 API Quarterly 13, no. 4 (October 1943): 4; “Sound-Color Movies to Show ‘Big Inch,’ Midway Battle, and Life in Regular Army,” API Quarterly 13, no. 4 (October 1943): 9. Oil for War subsequently screened at chapter meetings through 1944. 37 “Victory’s Oil’ Is Sound-and-Color Saga of Petroleum in War and Peace,” API Quarterly 14, no. 2 (April 1944): 14. This article described the film as follows: “Oil as a fighting force is projected into three major theatres of war-including actual battle scenes on Guadacanal, arctic sequences in the Aleutians, the invasion of Italy, and the African campaign by air, sea, and land. Also included are construction of the Big-Inch pipe lines, petroleum chemistry, highlighting aviation gasoline, butadiene, toluene, etc.; and the transition of petroleum transportation from peace to war.” 38 Robert E. Allen, “People and Petroleum,” API Quarterly 14, no. 2 (April 1944): 15. 39 D. Thomas Curtin, Men, Oil and War (Chicago: Petroleum Industry Committee, 1946), 13. 40 The Editors of Look, Oil for Victory: The Story of Petroleum in War and Peace (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1946), 253. 41 “Educational Sound Film: The Story of Oil” API Quarterly 16, no. 4 (October 1946): 10–11. This slidefilm followed Coca-Cola’s Second World War print material on the oil industry designed for classroom use. 42 Roger M. Olien and Diane Davids Olien, Oil and Ideology: The Cultural Creation of the American Petroleum Industry (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 251. 43 See Nash, United States Oil Policy, 180–94; Yergin, The Prize, 472–5. For a more recent overview of the period, see Tyler Priest, “The Dilemmas of Oil Empire,” Journal of American History 99 (June 2012): 237–40. In the postward period (from 1945 into the 1950s), the books published on the oil industry include: Eugene V. Rostow, A National Policy for the Oil Industry (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1948); Leonard M. Fanning, ed., Our Oil Resources (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1950); Ray Brock, Blood, Oil and Sand (Cleveland: World Publishing Company, 1952). 44 Opinion Research was a highly prominent firm founded in 1938 by Claude Robinson and George Gallup, who left the following year. See “Those Who Know You Well Think Well of You,” API Quarterly 17, no. 1 (January 1947): 4–7; and “Industrywide Public-Relations Campaign Launched on Broad Front,” API Quarterly 17, no. 1 (January 1947): 40–2. Initially, the Fred Eldean Organization was hired to supervise the “public relations program” (“Public Relations,” API Quarterly 18, no. 1 [January 1948]: 14). 45 “The World’s Oil Man Is an American,” API Quarterly 18, no. 1 (January 1948): 3. 46 This “official objective” appears in a pamphlet entitled, “Wanted: A Man with Two Hats,” which is intended to enlist volunteers within the industry to serve in the OIIC’s public relations campaign. 47 The aims of the AIP’s public relations efforts from the 1930s into the 1950s were very much in keeping with more general trends in American business

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that, according to Stewart Ewen, emerged as a response to the Depression; see Ewen’s PR! A Social History of Spin (New York: Basic Books, 1996), 288–336. 48 “Oil Industry Ads Starting,” New York Times, May 27, 1948: 42. None of OIIC images of oil workers, engineers, and executives resemble the ultrarich Texas oil tycoon that figured in American popular culture from the postwar period through the heyday of the television series Dallas (1978–91) that Karen R. Merrill examines in “Texas Metropole: Oil, the American West, and U.S. Power in the Postwar Years,” Journal of American History 99 (June 2012): 197–207. 49 “Oil Progress Day’ Sets Precedent,” API Quarterly 18 (October 1948), 21; “Oil Progress Day Set for Oct. 14”; Longview [TX] News-Journal, September 5, 1948: 11. 50 “Plan to Spend $1,850,000,” New York Times, November 10, 1948: 49; Leonard M. Fanning, The Story of the American Petroleum Institute: A Study with Report (New York: World Petroleum Policies, 1959), 168. 51 See “Speeches, Leaflets, Editorials Feature Program,” API Quarterly 21, no. 2 (Spring 1951): 25–6; “OIIC Program for 1952 Aims at 5 Objectives,” API Quarterly 22, no. 1 (Winter 1952): 31; and other annual reports on OIIC activity in API Quarterly. The Oil Newsletter appears in Broadcasting, June 18, 1951: 55. 52 For information on Movies on Oil, see “Speeches, Leaflets, Editorials Feature Program,” API Quarterly 21, no. 2 (Spring 1951): 25; “New Program Materials Produced in First Quarter,” API Quarterly 22, no. 2 (Spring 1952): 3; “Department of Information and OIIC Roundup of Events,” API Quarterly 23, no. 2 (Spring 1953): 14–15. 53 A quite different sort of filmographical effort underscoring the role of specialized instructional films was carried out by the API’s Department of Refining, which published in 1948 A Catalogue of Films Applicable to Training in Refining, covering 1,300 titles. See “Refinery Training Films Catalogued,” API Quarterly 18, no. 4 (October 1948): 24. 54 “Radio and T.V., OPW, and School Programs Feature OIIC Activity,” API Quarterly 24, no. 2 (Spring 1954): 22. 55 “2nd Annual Oil Progress Week Gets Under Way,” API Quarterly 20, no. 4 (Autumn 1950): 4–5; “Oil Industry Information Committee Sponsors Human Story of the Business,” Business Screen 11, no. 6 (1950): 27. 56 Not directly connected to the OIIC were two widely circulated safety films sponsored in whole or in part by the API’s Committee on Agriculture: Farm Tractor Safety (1952) and Farm Petroleum Safety (1954). See “FarmTractor Safety Film,” API Quarterly 22, no. 1 (Winter 1952): 45; and “New Film Dramatizes Fire Prevention on Farms,” API Quarterly 24, no. 2 (Spring 1954): 25. 57 “Warner Pathe to Open August 13,” Motion Picture Herald 168, no. 5 (August 2, 1947): 30; “WB Acquires Pathe News,” Independent Exhibitors Film Bulletin 15, no. 16 (August 4, 1947): 29

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58 William K. McClure, “Top Executives Who Make Skyscraper Studio Tick,” Film Daily, April 25, 1947: 12, With William H. Wolf, the writer of The Last Ten Feet, Butterworth would form Information Productions in 1951, specializing in all types of nonfiction motion pictures, commercials, and slidefilms. 59 “W.B. Shifts Personnel in Shorts Unit,” Motion Picture Herald 185, no. 5 (November 3, 1951): 35. 60 “‘Oscar’ to Institute for Its PR Program,” API Quarterly 20, no. 3 (Summer 1950): 11–12. 61 See listing for the OIIC in A Guide to Film Services of National Associations. Film Counselors Series Number Two (Evanston, IL: Film Councils of American, 1954), 129. 62 See, for example: “Documentary Film on Oil Produced,” Wichita [Wichita Falls TX] Daily Times, July 10, 1949: 9; Morning Olympian [Olympia WA], September 22, 1949: 11; Baytown [TX] Sun, September 30, 1949: 2; “Oil Dealers Meet in City,” Miami [OK] Daily News, October 5, 1949: 9; “Rotary Members See Movie on Oil at Lunch Session,” Troy [NY] Record, October 11, 1949: 32. 63 “Oil Progress Week Given Big Sendoff,” News-Palladium [Benton Harbor MI], October 17, 1949: 3. 64 “Oil Progress Week Observance Set in West Central Texas,” Abilene [TX] Reporter-News, October 9, 1949: 18. 65 See, for example: “Executive Discusses ‘Oil’ Before Wood River Rotary,” Alton [IL] Evening Telegraph, October 25, 1949: 7; “Civic Club Talks Lead Local Observance of Progress Week,” Dallas Morning News, October 19, 1949, sec 3, p. 9; “Story of Oil Told Scottish Rite Club,” Post-Standard [Syracuse NY], October 18, 1949: 20. 66 See Philip Hampson, “Chicago Fair! Acres of Fun, Thrill, Science,” Chicago Tribune, May 31, 1950: 1, 10; “Fair to Show U. S. Inventions, Reaper to Jets,” Chicago Tribune, May 3, 1950: 2; Anthony Wirry, “Oil Industry’s Exhibit to Be Place of Rest,” Chicago Tribune, June 23, 1950: A1; Lucy Key Miller, “Tired Pedestrian is the Favored Customer at a Handy Service Station at Chicago Fair,” Chicago Tribune, August 18, 1950: A8; “Oil Industry Service Center Show Attracts Throngs at the Chicago Fair of 1950,” Business Week 5, no. 11 (1950): 19. 67 The Dollars and Sense of Business Films (New York: Association of National Advertisers, 1954). 68 See, for example: Star-Democrat [Easton Maryland], October 17, 1950: 7; Hamburg [IA] Reporter, October 26, 1950: 10; “Oil Movie Shown at Exchange Luncheon,” Lubbock [TX] Sunday Avalanche Journal, September 18, 1952: 23; Aberdeen [SD] Daily News, December 7, 1957: 6. 69 For example, The Last Ten Feet is listed on the television schedule for station KTSL, San Bernadino, California, at 7:00–7:15 November 15, 1949 (San Bernadino [CA] County Sun, November 15, 1949: 18); for WFBM-TV, Indianapolis, Thursday September 7, 1950 9:00 p.m. (Alexandria [IN] TimesTribune, September 7, 1950, p. 5).

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70 The Last Ten Feet is also listed, e.g., in Nanette Notarius and Allan S. Larson, The Handbook of Free Films (New York: Allanan Associates, 1952), which indicates that prints are available from the OIIC district offices, and from film libraries of Standard Oil of Kentucky, the Texas Company, and the Stanolind Oil & Gas Company (Tulsa, Oklahoma). 71 “Petroleum Institute Films Seen by 18 Million in ’55,” Business Screen 17, no. 3 (1956): 8. 72 See “Film Counselors Open N.Y. Advisory Agency for Sponsors,” Business Screen 7, no. 6 (1946): 45; “Film Counselors,” Movie Makers 21, no. 10 (October 1946): 393, 405; “Pro and Con About the Film Consultant,” Business Screen 8, no. 2 (1947): 33–4; “Theatrical Trailer Helps Fight Cancer and Quack Healers,” Business Screen 10, no. 1 (1949): 35; “Improving Trade Relations,” Business Screen 10, no. 2 (1949): 24; “American Bankers Association Launches Educational Program,” Business Screen 10, no. 7 (1949): 30; “The A. P. I. on the Screen,” Business Screen 14, no. 7 (1953): 38–9. 73 The OIIC also made some use of films shot for purely internal purposes. Screened at the national API conference were The OIIC in New England and It’s Your Move, films that detailed OIIC activities at the local level. See “OIIC in New England,” API Quarterly 23, no. 1 (Winter 1953): 26; “Bigger and Better Oil Progress Week,” API Quarterly 22, no. 4 (Autumn 1952): 19; “Public Relations,” API Quarterly 41, no. 1 (Winter 1954): 12. 74 “Affiliated,” Movie Makers 21, no. 7 (July 1946): 285; “Documentarians in a New Company,” Motion Picture Daily 59, no. 53 (March 19, 1946): 4. 75 “Documentary Filmmakers Seem Not to Have Made Post-War Strides,” Variety, April 30, 1947: 10; Frederic A. Krahn, ed., Educational Film Guide, 11th edn (New York: H. W. Wilson, 1953), 291, 370, 383, 425. 76 “‘American Frontier’: Latest A.P.I. Film Tells Williston Basin Story,” Business Screen 14, no. 7 (1953): 39. 77 Harvey O’ Connor, The Empire of Oil (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1955), 133–44. 78 The 1954 Guide to Film Services of National Associations identifies eightyeight “national associations and agencies representing labor, industry, education, social welfare, men’s and women’s clubs, youth-serving groups and the like.”

7 Industrial Film and the Politics of Visibility in the Early Years of North Sea Oil Brian R. Jacobson

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n March 25, 2012, the Elgin platform, an offshore drilling rig owned by the French petroleum company Total, began leaking natural gas into the North Sea. Fresh on the heels of an oil spill at one of its rigs on the Nigerian coast and in the wake of competitor British Petroleum’s Deepwater Horizon disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, the Elgin leak posed a pressing public relations problem. Total moved quickly to get ahead of the story and took an unprecedented step. Four days later, it launched a YouTube channel and posted its first online videos, both on YouTube and on its recently created Facebook page. The videos initially consisted of talking head interviews with the company’s head of public relations and a series of in-house experts who described the leak and their initial response. In addition, two short videos of fifteen and thirtyone seconds presented raw footage of the platform from a helicopter. Though perhaps designed to suggest transparency about the incident, the videos provided very little evidence of the leak, the danger involved, or, more to the point, the potential solutions. Rather, they offered something rarer: a relatively unmediated window into the dangerous world of offshore extraction. In their rawness, these videos revealed unusual evidence of danger and risk, all left open to interpretation and analysis, while offering little useful data about the leak or Total’s plans to halt it. Not surprisingly, the company soon shifted its media response. On April 5, it posted another round of videos outlining plans for containing the leak.

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FIGURE 7.1  Total—Solutions techniques pour stopper la fuite de gaz sur Elgin / Total—Technical Solutions to Stop the Gas Leak on Elgin 12 April, 2012. The new videos included animated summaries of the situation that notably contrasted with the initial helicopter shots. In place of the filmed footage’s unsteady and unclear view, the animations offered a stable frame and clean, straight lines—a formal transformation ready made for a shift in rhetoric  (Figure 7.1). In transforming the image of the rig and its leak from vague realism to precise abstraction, these animations presented a regulated view of the leak designed to indicate the company’s mastery of the situation. Much as animation could regulate the image of the leak, providing a clear view of a previously unclear situation, so Total, the videos promised, would regulate the leak itself and clear up any uncertainty about the future of its extraction operations there. Total’s turn to social media in 2012 was new, but moving images had long been part of its public relations repertoire. Since at least the 1950s, French oil companies had developed a canny awareness of film’s critical role in shaping public knowledge about industrial processes and technological change. In the case of offshore drilling, these companies had used such images from day one, both as a publicity vehicle and as a practical tool for visualizing work on the ocean floor. This chapter focuses on the mid-1970s, when two French companies, Total and Elf Aquitaine, sought to craft an idea of North Sea drilling for the French public. Motivated by a desire to project positive images of industrial practice and to associate industry with power, prestige, respectability, and progressive ideals, the petroleum companies, like those in n ­ umerous

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other industries, turned to film. But in bringing their spaces and working practices to the screen, these companies also pushed themselves further into public view and into the precarious realm of what media scholar Lisa Parks has termed the “politics of infrastructural visibility.”1 As Parks argues in her analysis of cell phone towers and satellite dishes, companies often go to great lengths to conceal infrastructure as a means for controlling public awareness and knowledge. Or as Parks and Nicole Starosielski put it elsewhere, “infrastructures are defined by their invisibility,” perhaps especially in “capitalist societies [that] generally educate people to appreciate the ‘conveniences’ and ‘choices’ of modern consumer technologies, but to remain blind to the infrastructures that support them.”2 Though not “media” infrastructure in the traditional sense, oil rigs and pipelines function no less as key structural supports for modern communication, and corporations similarly work to manage this infrastructure’s visibility.3 Around mid-century, industrial films became—and still remain—a key tool for such management. By promising information and visual access to infrastructure, they represent a calculated risk that operates on the tenuous balance of desirable visibility and the threat of overexposure. That balance offers an opportunity not only for activists fighting on the terrain of industrial politics but also for scholars interested in the history of technological development and how it has been presented to the world at large. This chapter examines how Total and Elf subsumed the hazards involved in a new and dangerous form of carbon extraction—deep-sea drilling—within another, more abstract risk: the perceived threat to French national security posed by the petroleum shortages that followed the 1973 oil crisis. With limited domestic oil sources and the loss of a significant share of oil in Algeria, which began nationalizing its petroleum industry in 1971, France turned to what Stephanie LeMenager, borrowing from Michael T. Klare, calls “tough oil,” so named because it was hard to find, dangerous and costly to extract, and detrimental to local environments.4 During this period, petroleum companies leveraged their risky “tough oil” operations against public anxiety about oil and gas shortages, all against the backdrop of emerging environmental consciousness. In analyzing Total’s and Elf’s approaches to this situation, I want to underscore both the risk that petroleum companies incurred in using images and the measures they took to manage that risk. On the one hand, these companies quickly learned to balance public opinion with the need to control infrastructural visibility. But on the other hand, the demands of the film medium and the directors hired to produce compelling images of often-banal industrial activities meant that corporate control could only go so far. To bring oil to the screen thus involved a delicate exchange of power: corporations

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might extend their influence over the public image of oil and its political and cultural meaning, but to do so they first had to cede a measure of control to meaning-making culture makers and to the interpretive minds of mass audiences.

French Petrocinema French oil companies came late to film. In part, this had to do with the slow development of the French petroleum industry itself. Prior to the Second World War, French petroleum came primarily from imports and its own share in the Iraq Petroleum Company, one of the remunerations wrested from Germany after the First World War.5 After 1944, with access to the Iraqi oil in doubt due to regional conflict and damaged pipelines, President Charles de Gaulle initiated an aggressive plan to achieve energy independence and created a series of national organizations (the forerunners to Total) to search for and extract petroleum resources across the French empire and at home. Major discoveries came in the 1950s: in 1951, the Société national des pétroles d’Aquitaine located a large natural gas deposit in the foothills of the French Pyrenees, and in 1954, the Régie autonome des pétroles found oil deposits in the Algerian Sahara. Domestic gas began flowing in 1954, Algerian oil arrived in 1958, and by 1961 French companies were supplying more than 90 percent of the nation’s petroleum.6 French petrocinema emerged during this period as a means to cultivate political will and fend off challenges from other French energy industries, especially coal and nuclear. With access to oil in doubt and other energy sources such as coal and hydroelectric still available, the French state had also devoted resources to modernizing these older industries, while the nuclear program, both for weapons and power, was becoming one of France’s post–Second World War calling cards. Petroleum companies thus had to compete with a range of alternative energy providers for state resources, favorable energy policies, and, eventually, consumers. Oil and gas companies looked to France’s growing public relations sector for support. As one PR executive described in 1960, “no profession in France has put as much trust in public relations as the oil industry.”7 French oil executives and their PR agents recognized the potential value of using film, and they were not alone. French automakers had identified film’s utility decades earlier, but until the 1950s the French industrial film industry remained relatively underdeveloped compared to its counterparts in Western Europe and the United States.8 In the oil industry, more specifically, France trailed ­companies

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such as Shell and BP that had developed broad-based film programs in the interwar years. By the 1960s, the circumstances had changed. The domestic gas industry developed an aggressive film campaign beginning in 1955.9 Its films sold the industry as an essential national utility and part of regional economic development in the south. The companies charged with extraction operations in Algeria and West Africa similarly produced films touting their success and contribution to national prestige and enduring authority in the former colonies. Oil and gas industry sponsorship contributed to an already burgeoning community of industrial film producers and filmmakers. This subindustry provided work for feature directors between major projects, for avant-garde and experimental filmmakers seeking funding and creative outlets, and for the new generation of filmmakers graduating from the new state film school, the Institute des hautes études cinématographiques (IDHEC), who needed experience to break into the French film industry. These conditions set the stage for the carefully coordinated PR campaign that supported the development of offshore drilling in the North Sea in the 1970s.

Mythmaking on the High Seas The unique nature of France’s role in North Sea drilling made its PR strategy particularly important. French prospecting in the region began in the late 1960s through British and Norwegian subsidiary companies. In 1969–70 Elf Aquitaine Norge (aka Elf Norge, the Norwegian subsidiary of Elf Aquitaine) acquired sixyear licenses on two sectors in the future Frigg region, while Total’s British affiliate, Total Oil Marine (TOM), acquired similar licenses in the adjacent British territory. Elf Norge discovered the Frigg deposit in June 1971, and Total Oil Marine soon confirmed that the field extended into British waters.10 A United Nations treaty signed in 1976 dictated that all of the gas, including the portion found under Norwegian territory, would be sold to British markets.11 Although none of the Frigg gas would go to France, TOM would manage the construction of the pipelines and receiving terminal on the Scottish coast, while Elf Norge would oversee the rig platforms and drilling operations.12 This arrangement posed an image problem for French authorities, a problem, as I will outline further, that was confirmed in 1978 when the rigs were inaugurated. How could Total and Elf Aquitaine explain the value of their North Sea projects when their supposed product—gas—would never reach French consumers? The solution, at least from the PR perspective, hinged on prestige as much as petroleum. The corporate PR message focused, in part, on finances: press

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releases emphasized that Total and Elf would use profits from managing Frigg’s infrastructure to bolster gas production elsewhere. A second tactic was to encourage the broader view that gas reaching any European market would reduce pressure on the system as whole, thus ensuring both that more gas would be available in France and that the European community would reduce its dependence on OPEC-sourced oil, an important claim in the wake of the 1973–4 oil embargo. A final strategy—the one that would guide press interviews and films—was to emphasize something more abstract: the prestige of French hard work and ingenuity, or “le travail français.” In anticipation of an interview for French TV channel Antenne 2’s “Journal de 20 heurs” (the eight o’clock news) that would run the day of Frigg’s inauguration, one Total PR coordinator summed it up by encouraging executive Louis Deny to focus on this “very simple idea [. . .] of ‘French work’” and French technologies, “among the best in the world,” that would also form the basis for supporting France’s future petroleum needs.13 The latter strategy, in particular, depended on good storytelling, and the Total and Elf teams found a good story to tell. The name “Frigg” given to the drilling site and its platforms came from Germanic myth and particularly the Norse tradition, in which Frigg was best known as the wife of Odin and mother of Balder. It was a logical choice, not only for the synchronous appellation (Frigg) but also because of the goddess’s association with the “Fensalir,” or “sea halls” she called home, and with fertility and wealth, whether as a weaver with a bejeweled spinning wheel or for offering gifts from a magic box that no doubt evoked the undersea gas well the rigs would tap.14 This mythology became central to Total’s publicity program. In photographs and publicity films, Frigg appeared in god-like terms that emphasized its massive scale, superhuman qualities, and bounteous rewards. This approach wasn’t entirely new. From the time they took up film, French petroleum companies had quickly established an idea of their industry based on technological achievement and the adventurous quality of prospecting. The first films produced in the 1950s about prospecting in North Africa told stories of technological conquest and the French oil worker’s capacity to overcome difficult working conditions. The 1957 Gaumont film Petroliers des sables (d. Carlos Villardebo), for instance, begins by describing the Sahara as a land of “thirst” and “death,” with images of desert landscapes and skeletons. Here, the film explained, French workers waged a “battle against the climate,” the victory over which is symbolized in the film’s conclusion by oil flowing out of a newly tapped well. In a similar fashion, the 1963 Elf film Forages sous l’équateur (d. Philippe Brunet), an early story of French offshore drilling, describes how French prospectors in Gabon struggled against “difficult, sometimes hostile” terrain before discovering oil deposits off the Gabonese coast.

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The expansion of French offshore efforts in the 1960s further developed this iconography of technological mastery and triumph over the natural world. Robert Ménégoz’s L’Ile d’Acier (p. Robert Courtot, Cinétest, 1967), for instance, opens by introducing the title “steel island,” Elf’s new Neptune rig, in a dramatic sequence, shot at daybreak, in which a crane pulls the rig workers (and the audience with them) high up onto its platform from the ground below. As the film tracks the movement of Neptune from the construction yard to the Bay of Biscay, Ménégoz calls attention not just to the platform’s immense size but also to its dominance over the land—and seascapes it traverses. The “island of steel” signifies modernity and technological mastery, a point highlighted in advertisements for the film that appeared in the film trade press (Figure 7.2). Framed in long shot by the walls of a seaside grotto, Neptune seems to beckon the audience out of the metaphorical cave and into modernity.

FIGURE 7.2  L’Ile d’Acier advertisement (c. 1967).

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Such films set the standard for those that would accompany expanded offshore drilling efforts during the next decade. By the 1970s, PR teams at French oil companies had identified film’s value, the primary players in the French industrial film business, and the kinds of films that impressed audiences and attracted festival juries and distributors. Distribution and exhibition networks had also been established, in part by the corporations themselves, many of which established their own in-house cinematheques. At the national level, the Conseil National du Patronat Français (CNPF), the association of French manufacturers created in 1945, helped establish a national industrial film festival in 1958 and oversaw international versions beginning in 1959.15 The CNPF also created Connaissance de l’Economie par le Film (CEFILM), an organization with a central cinematheque in Paris that distributed both individual films and preselected programs to subscriber institutions including corporations and secondary schools.16 Perhaps most importantly, French corporations had benefited from a Vichy-era law that required French theaters to include a short film with each feature program. Because distributors were required to provide these shorts but reluctant to fund their production, corporations became one source for short film programming, helping ensure that French film audiences received a steady diet of corporate film programming in popular venues.17 With these conditions in place, companies could be confident that their films would find an audience to help deliver the corporate message.

Filming Frigg Anticipating the value that film would have, Total and Elf thus planned accordingly. The companies developed their film programs independently, each working with a leading French industrial film production company. Elf hired Son et Lumière, the company run by producer Pierre Long that had long-standing relationships with major clients including the French national coal company. As platform construction began, it sent filmmakers to document the process in 16 mm color film. Using this footage, already by 1976, two years before Frigg’s official inauguration, Elf had released two 16 mm films about the rig construction. One film, simply titled Frigg, focused on the Franco-Norwegian collaboration that led to the discovery of the gas deposit and subsequent technical efforts to exploit it. The second, Une torchère pour Frigg, focused on the construction of the 150 m gas flare in Dunkirk, its transport to a fjord in Stavanger, where it was raised vertically, and then finally its placement at the drilling site. This 16 mm footage also became a source for two 35 mm films produced by Elf and Total for release around the inauguration in 1978. Each company

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opted for what had come to be known as “prestige” films—a category of industrial film typically shot on 35 mm color stock, often by known directors from the feature and documentary community, and destined for industrial and short film festivals and theatrical release.18 Elf used the footage to produce Frigg: Le Grand rendez-vous, a twenty-minute film directed by Jean Leduc, an IDHEC graduate with feature credits including Transit à Saigon/Incident in Saigon (1963), Via Macau (1966), and Captain Singrid (1968) as well as a number of documentary and fiction shorts.19 Leduc’s film followed the PR line pursued by corporate executives in television interviews by focusing on the large scale of French work and technological ingenuity required to access what it describes as the world’s “largest deposit of sea gas.” Using footage taken in Cherbourg, the film describes the three years of labor that produced the rig platforms, which it then tracks to their destination 1,000 kilometers away in the North Sea. Using a strategy developed in oil films from the 1950s, Leduc emphasizes the danger involved in offshore extraction: the wind, waves, fog, and storms long known to sailors and fishermen. Such dangers, the film implies, signal adventure and, ultimately, the triumph of French workers and technologies over the natural world. Its insistence that the platforms have been designed for safety and security underscores the technological ingenuity that makes such triumph possible. The film concludes by marking the commencement of production on September 9, 1977, and the celebratory promise that “Elf Aquitaine will be at the rendezvous, on time.” For its film, Total took a more ambitious approach. It entrusted the project to Belgian-born producer Paul de Roubaix’s Les Films du Centaur. Like Son et Lumière, the company had a long record of industrial film production, notably for the French Ministry of Agriculture’s reorganized post-1945 film unit, though de Roubaix had been in the business even longer, having founded a first company, Les films je vois tout, in the mid-1930s.20 De Roubaix must have seemed ideally suited for the project. He had produced numerous exploration films, including Marcel Ichac’s 1959 mountain film Les Étoiles de midi/Stars at Noon, coproduced with Ichac and Jacques-Yves Cousteau’s Les Requins associés. De Roubaix was also an Oscar winner (shared with Ichac for producing Robert Enrico’s 1962 short La Rivière du hibou/The Owl River). Perhaps most importantly, however, he had experience with underwater cinematography, a skill that would be essential for telling the story of the Frigg platform’s placement and Total’s work laying the pipeline to connect it to Scotland. De Roubaix’s codirector, Enrico, brought further experience and prestige to the project. Enrico, a 1951 IDHEC graduate, had won the Best Short film prize at Cannes in 1962 for La Rivière du hibou, the top prize at 1961 Journées internationales du film de court-métrage in Tours for the same film, the Prix Jean Vigo for his 1963 film La Belle vie (also produced by de Roubaix), and the

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César for the best film in France for Le Vieux fusil (1975).21 Additionally, Enrico was well respected in France’s industrial film community, especially for his 1960 film Thaumetopoea (produced once again by Les Films du Centaur for the Ministry of Agriculture), for which he had been awarded a special prize at the 1960 Tours festival.22 In sum, Total’s choice of de Roubaix and Enrico signals what it had in mind for the film. The company sought filmmakers with experience in industrial film, underwater cinematography, and the kind of merging of art and industry that won prizes at festivals and generated corporate prestige. The Films du Centaur production team had this in spades. In addition to Enrico, de Roubaix engaged French animator Arcady to direct short technical sequences, and the film’s score was based on a composition penned by de Roubaix’s son, the celebrated composer François de Roubaix, before his tragic death in a scuba diving accident in November 1975.23 Likely under the influence of Total’s PR team, de Roubaix and Enrico took a broadly similar approach to the project as Leduc had done for Elf Norge. Like Leduc’s Frigg, de Roubaix and Enrico’s Les Sept Iles de Frigg uses the 16 mm footage of platform construction, then tracks the towing of the platforms from dock to drilling site and their placement on the sea floor. The film extends this story to Total’s primary role in the project: pipeline construction shot at the sea floor. This emphasis on process, a standard industrial film strategy of guiding audiences through the stages of a manufacturing or extraction system, fulfilled one of the corporate PR strategies: emphasizing French labor and technological ingenuity. For Enrico, and especially for Paul de Roubaix, this was standard fare: they had been making films like this for decades. In a sense, any experienced industrial filmmaker could have done it, just as Leduc had for Elf. To this de Roubaix and Enrico added the sense of drama and adventure involved in executing such a process on the North Sea. Having worked on adventure films for decades, the two men were well prepared to make Total’s film something more than a straightforward industrial process film that simply recounted the story of the rig’s implementation. The PR team no doubt wanted that “something more.” If it worked, it would attract audiences, keep them engaged, and sell Total’s work in triumphant and patriotic terms. But it also points to the fine line Total was walking in turning a story of real danger into one of heroic adventure, a line that de Roubaix and Enrico would themselves walk during the film’s production. For the codirectors, the North Sea proved a ready backdrop for dramatic images of Total’s quest for new sources of oil and gas. The film begins by emphasizing the North Sea’s inhospitable climate and dangerous conditions. The rough seas and severe weather conditions must have seemed properly

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FIGURE 7.3 Opening title sequence of Les Sept Iles de Frigg (1978). Frame enlargements. cinematic—animated by rapid motion and violent shifts between light and dark. What better opportunity to capture stunning images of nature at its most inhospitable and to deliver it to audiences with powerful immediacy? The short prologue that precedes the film’s titles sets the scene with just this kind of footage, shot first along the Scottish coast, then at the drilling site. The opening shots feature waves crashing on rocky cliffs, ships rising and crashing on surging ocean swells, and finally the platforms themselves, shot from the deck of a lurching ship, emerging out of the maelstrom, buffeted by wind and water. This prologue ends with the opening of François de Roubaix’s eerie electronic score, played over a slow tracking shot that arcs around the foreground gas flare with the film titles suspended over the background platforms (Figure 7.3). Enrico recognized that these scenes revealed not only dangerous working conditions on the rig but also the dangers faced by his film crew. In his autobiography, he fondly recalls that the film’s cinematographer, Didier Tarot, “understood how this spectacle expressed the danger of working on the platforms and filmed only that, taking enormous risk in doing so.”24 According to Enrico, audiences responded enthusiastically to such dangerous conditions and the triumph of the workers who faced them. In one sequence near the film’s midpoint, for instance, a group of workers on the deck of a ship fight wind and waves crashing over the bow to secure cargo waiting to be lifted by a crane up to the rig. Featuring footage of workers who are knocked to the deck by waves at one point and forced to flee a crate careening into the side of the ship at another, the scene demonstrates working conditions that are hard to imagine in any industrial film today (Figure 7.4). At the time, however, they were reportedly at the heart of the film’s success. When it was screened in theaters, Enrico recalls, audiences “applauded these acrobats risking their lives in the midst of giant waves.”25

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FIGURE 7.4  Les Sept Iles de Frigg (1978). Frame enlargement. Such images of danger contrasted starkly with the film’s more banal depictions of rig construction and animated sequences about its design and function, all described by a flat voice-over narration. As Enrico also remembered, Total intended for the film to be shown not only in theaters but also in educational and institutional settings and thus required more “classic” components. These segments, composed of the films produced during the rig’s construction along with new animations, tempered the sense of danger, regulating the filmed image with an air of soothing clarity. Immediately following the title scenes, for instance, the film situates this vague site of high seas adventure with an animated sequence that maps its position more precisely in the North Sea. The film shifts here to a more instructional mode, combining construction footage with animations explaining the rig’s functionality. These scenes perform three important functions that point to one of Total’s approaches to mediating the risks posed by the filmed image and the directors’ artistry. Anticipating the company’s approach to the Elgin leak in 2012, the Frigg film’s animations give clarity to confusing filmed images, mediating the immediacy of the photographic image with the controlled abstraction of animation (Figure 7.5). Second, the animated description of the rig’s design and operation provides an idealized vision of its eventual function. Finally, these animations regulate visibility, removing the sense of risk or danger and obscuring the potential for environmental damage that might be incurred in the rig’s implementation. But if audiences applauded images of danger and it was those images that promised to bring prestige to the film, its makers, and, by extension, Total, why the need to regulate them? Why smooth them over with these ­animations?

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FIGURE 7.5  Animations by Arcady for Les Sept Iles de Frigg (1978). These questions point to the tensions between spectacle and information, between prestige and education, and between risk and reward that lie at the heart of how companies like Total and Elf used film and photography. These tensions had specific resonance in the 1970s. French oil companies’ dual goals of prestige and information were especially important in the context of the shifting terrain of the global oil industry and the emergent environmental movement. After all, France’s interest in North Sea drilling had been motivated, in part, by the widespread nationalization of the oil industries in the Middle East and especially in Algeria, one of France’s main sources of oil. This loss of control over petroleum reserves contributed to fears about oil and gas shortages that achieved greatest visibility in the 1973–4 oil “crisis.” France used these fears to push forward new drilling operations in previously unexplored and dangerous locations such as the North Sea, much as the United States would do on Alaska’s North Slope. In short, companies like Total used concerns about petroleum scarcity to turn risky drilling operations into adventurous quests for energy independence, a project for which films like Les Sept Iles de Frigg would be indispensable. Such films offered these companies a way both to garner public support for difficult, expensive, and dangerous new drilling operations and to shape public opinion about those operations by regulating knowledge about its potential benefits and hazards.

Media Strategy and the Image of Risk Total’s use of film at the May 1978 inauguration ceremony makes clear just how important it was to control information about these developments and the role that moving images would play. The company invited more than one hundred

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European and American newspapers, radio stations, and industry magazines to two days of tours, press conferences, helicopter trips to the platform, fjord boat tours, and cocktail hours in Scotland. A Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation crew was allowed to film at the Frigg platforms, while a BBC crew covered the pipeline’s terminus in Scotland. For other TV outlets, Total provided its own more banal images, taken from the 16 mm Elf footage and from Les Sept Iles de Frigg. Combined with PR directives given to executives like Louis Deny to tell the right story about French labor and technical ingenuity, such efforts to control Frigg’s literal and metaphorical image offer evidence of Total’s approach to securing public support for the project and thereby creating a positive narrative about oil at a potentially difficult moment. These efforts faced perhaps their greatest opportunity and challenge during the May 1978 inauguration ceremonies. On May 7, French television channel Antenne 2 aired its first report about Frigg on its eight o’clock evening news broadcast. The segment begins by repeating the standard line sold in Elf and Total films that Frigg represented the largest offshore gas deposit in the world. Further extending this standard PR approach, journalist Philippe Dumez goes on to invite viewers to “imagine a tower even larger than the Tour Montparnasse” built at sea. In the interview that follows, Dumez delivers the expected question of why, given that the UK would get all of the gas, France would get involved with this project at all, to which Deny successfully responds by insisting that the project’s profits would contribute to Total’s extraction work elsewhere. The segment notably features animated and filmed footage from Les Sept Iles de Frigg that reappeared in similar segments aired on channels TF1 and France 3 (and again on Antenne 2) on May 8 and 9.26 Other than Dumez’s clear skepticism about the project’s failure to provide gas directly to France, the segment maintains the image Total wanted. Such efforts to control the situation were not, however, entirely successful. The problem for the Total PR team was that it couldn’t control all of the day’s news. Two stories that preceded the Frigg segment offered viewers an opportunity to think much more broadly about the offshore narrative Total hoped to establish. The first, a short report about the most recent OPEC meeting would seem to have supported Total’s cause by reminding viewers of the risks of the global oil trade and France’s tenuous reliance upon petroleum imports without greater domestic initiatives like Frigg. Immediately preceding the Frigg story, however, another report about North Sea oil surely would have given some viewers pause. That very morning, in the southern part of that same North Sea, a Greek tanker loaded with 14 million tons of petroleum had been cut in half by a French tanker lost in the fog, reportedly resulting in 2 million tons of oil dumped into the sea. Dumez, clearly noting the irony of the juxtaposition, did his best to make an enthusiastic transition to the Frigg story, explaining,

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“the North Sea again, but not for a petroleum accident this time but for a success, a great success it seems: the Frigg platform.” Such unexpected juxtapositions underscore both Total’s need to control the story about Frigg and the risk it courted in doing so. After all, films like Les Sept Iles de Frigg made the same dangerous seas that had led to the Greek tanker disaster a source of exciting adventure. How could PR agents be sure that de Roubaix and Enrico were right to make such risks one of Frigg’s defining features? Was such artistry worth it? Did the films’ other approaches—the banal work of instruction and the promotion of French workers and technologies—justify the riskier ones? Could they do without them? Such questions go to the heart of Total’s efforts to promote its role in securing France’s energy future and to regulate uncertainty about technological risk by mediating public knowledge. That dynamic defines the central conflict of Les Sept Iles de Frigg and has remained important, in different forms, across Total’s North Sea films up to the Elgin videos of 2012. While danger may have been a contradictory virtue in the 1970s, the emergence of regulatory scrutiny and environmental activism would soon make such risky images a liability. A film like Les Sept Iles de Frigg would surely, as suggested by Total’s media response to the Elgin affair in 2012, no longer make sense today. Gone are the days when most audiences could be expected to applaud images of danger on a deep-sea drilling rig, and television hosts can no longer be expected to smooth over images of offshore oil disaster. For the historian, films like Frigg: Le Grand rendez-vous, Les Sept Iles de Frigg, and hundreds more like them constitute a powerful archive of the history of industrial practice and the sorts of industrial ideologies that, for a time at least, met the approval of oil company public relations departments, executives, and at least a portion of a public that was hungry for images. As the Elgin videos and the footage associated with the BP Gulf Coast spill make clear, such films continue to have currency today on dozens of corporate YouTube channels like the ones created by Total and BP after their respective oil spills. We should remain attentive to such films and to how visual technologies and infrastructural visibility continue to shape the politics and epistemologies of big oil and public perceptions of it today while also recognizing that these strategies are not new, but rather continue practices developed over more than half a century in an unheralded but critical corner of film culture.

Notes 1 Lisa Parks, “Around the Antenna Tree: The Politics of Infrastructural Visibility,” Flow, March 6, 2009, http:​/​/www​​.flow​​journ​​al​.or​​g​/200​​9​/03/​​aroun​​d​-the​​-ante​​

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nna​-t​​ree​-t​​​he​-po​​litic​​s​-of-​ infra​struc​tural​-visi​bilit​ylisa​-park​s-uc-​santa​-barb​ara/.​ See also Parks, “Techno Struggles and the Satellite Dish: A Populist Approach to Infrastructure,” in Göran Bolin (ed.), Cultural Technologies: The Shaping of Culture in Media and Society (London: Routledge, 2012), 64–84. 2 Lisa Parks and Nicole Starosielski, “Introduction,” in Lisa Parks and Nicole Starosielski (eds.), Signal Traffic: Critical Studies of Media Infrastructures (Urbana-Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2015), 6. 3 For more about oil and its infrastructure as forms of media, see Brian R. Jacobson, “Prospecting: Cinema and the Exploration of Extraction,” in James Leo Cahill and Luca Caminati (eds.), Cinema of Exploration: Essays on an Adventurous Film Practice (New York: AFI/Routledge, 2021), 280–94. 4 Stephanie LeMenager, Living Oil: Petroleum Culture in the American Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 3. 5 On France’s stake in the Turkish Petroleum Company, see Daniel Yergin, The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power (New York, NY: Free Press, 1991), 168–73. Other than a deposit of natural gas discovered in 1939, domestic petroleum production remained limited. 6 Yergin, The Prize, 508. 7 Franck Bauer, “Pétrole, dirigisme et Relations Publiques,” La Maison de verre, April 1960: 36. 8 On French auto-industry films see Alain P. Michel, “Corporate Films of Industrial Work: Renault (1916-1939),” in Vinzenz Hediger and Patrick Vonderau (eds.), Films That Work: Industrial Film and the Productivity of Media (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2009), 167–86; on the film work of the Ford Motor Company, which may have helped inspire its French counterparts, see Lee Grieveson, “The Work of Film in the Age of Fordist Mechanization,” Cinema Journal 51, no. 3 (Spring 2012): 25–51. 9 For more see Brian R. Jacobson, “Corporate Authorship: French Industrial Culture and the Culture of French Industry,” in Joshua Malitsky (ed.), A Companion to Documentary Film History (Wiley Blackwell, forthcoming). 10 “FRIGG” (unpublished manuscript, Paris, 1978). Archives Total S.A. 11 United Nations, “Treaty Between the Government of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and the Government of the Kingdom of Norway Relating to the Exploitation of the Frigg Field Reservoir and the Transmission of Gas therefrom to the United Kingdom,” May 10, 1976, I-16878, Treaty Series Vol. 1098. 12 Gérard Sambet, “FRIGG,” Le Nouvel Explorateur, no. 6 (May 1977): 14. 13 Philipe Laurence to Louis Deny, April 26, 1978, Archives Total S.A. 14 A description of the goddess distributed at the inauguration ceremonies for the St. Fergus refinery in May 1978 emphasized Frigg’s association with maternity, fertility, and creativity. For more on Frigg in Norse myth, see Tamra Andrews, Dictionary of Nature Myths: Legends of the Earth, Sea, and Sky (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 75; Christopher R. Fee, Gods, Heroes, and Kings: The Battle for Mythic Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 82.

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15 Brian R. Jacobson, “On the Red Carpet in Rouen: Industrial Film Festivals and a World Community of Filmmakers,” in Vinzenz Hediger, Florian Hoof, and Yvonne Zimmerman (eds.), Films That Work II (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, forthcoming). 16 “La diffusion des films non commerciaux,” Le Technicien du Film et le Cahier de l’Exploitation 4, no. 42 (September 15, 1958): 9; “La diffusion des films d’information économique et industrielle,” Le Technicien du Film 7, no. 74 (July 15, 1961): 11; “Distribution commerciale du Film Industriel,” Le Technicien du Film 12, no. 127 (May 15, 1966): 10; “Cefilm debordé par les demandes des utilisateurs,” Le Technicien du Film 16, no. 168 (February 15, 1970): 11. 17 For more about short film distribution, see Nathalie Mary, “Diffusion,” in Jacky Evrard and Jacques Kermabon (eds.), Une encyclopédie du court métrage français (Pantin, France: Festival Côté court, 2004), 133–7; JeanPierre Jeancolas, “Structures du court métrage français, 1945-1958,” in Dominique Bluher and François Thomas (eds.), Le Court Métrage français: De l’âge d’or aux contrebandiers (Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2005), 29–46. 18 As an industrial film genre, the “prestige” film was codified in France in the 1950s in trade press coverage and in the competition categories at industrial film festivals. In his 1965 book about short French film, François Porcile offered, as examples of the typical “film de prestige” subjects, “la noblesse du plastique, la puissance de l’énergie hydraulique, [or] la fanstastique beauté des horizons pétrolifères. ” See François Porcile, Défense du court métrage français (Paris: Les Éditions du Cerf, 1965), 215. 19 Leduc’s short credits notably included a film about Haussmannization, Haussmann et la transformation de Paris (1951), produced for the Comité Parisien des Oeuvres Universitaires with Pierre Mignot and special effects by Alain Resnais. 20 On de Roubaix’s first company see Porcile, Défense du court métrage français, 33. See also Christophe Chauville, “Paul de Roubaix,” in Jacky Evrard and Jacques Kermabon (eds.), Une encyclopédie du court métrage français (Paris: Editions Yellow Now, 2004), 338. On the French Ministry of Agriculture’s film work, see Brian R. Jacobson, “Midcentury Rural Modern: French Agricultural Cinema and the Art of Persuasion,” Screen 58, no. 2 (Summer 2017): 141–62. 21 For a particularly glowing account of La rivière du hibou published in the 1970s, see Charles Ford, Histoire du cinéma français contemporain, 19451977 (Paris: Éditions France-Empire, 1977), 207. In June 1962 Variety reported that director Robert Hossein hoped to convince Enrico to develop two additional shorts based on the Ambrose Bierce story to fill out a feature film. See “Ask Director of ‘Owl’ to do Civil War Pic,” Variety 227, no. 4 (June 20, 1962): 12. 22 For more on Enrico, see Porcile, Défense du court métrage français, 263; Georges Pessis, Film et Vidéo: miroirs de l’entreprise (Paris: Les Éditions d’Organisation, 1989), 17; Susan Hayward, French National Cinema, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 2005), 236.

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23 Arcady Brachlianoff immigrated to France from Bulgaria and formed an important animation company, Les Films de Saturne, that trained a number of important French animators, especially in the industrial film community, including Henri Gruel. Porcile emphasized Arcady’s talent by noting that “he could have been a new Méliès” if he had had more poetry. See Porcile, Défense du court métrage français, 251, 268; Michel Roudevitch, “Arcady,” in Jacky Evrard and Jacques Kermabon (eds.), Une encyclopédie du court métrage français (Pantin, France: Festival Côté court, 2004), 31–2. 24 Robert Enrico, Au cœur de ma vie (Saint-Cyr-sur-Loire: Christian Pirot, 2005), 246. 25 Ibid. According to Enrico, this dramatic footage was released in theaters on its own as a 10-minute short before the additional ten minutes—the “more classic” sections—were added for projection in institutional settings. 26 Segments about Frigg appeared on May 8 on Antenne 2 during the 8:00 p.m. and 11:00 p.m. broadcasts of “Les Nouvelles.” On France 3, a longer, eightminute segment appeared during the 8:00pm episode of “Le Journal” on May 9. This longer segment featured footage of the inauguration ceremonies on the Frigg platforms with Norwegian King Olav V and at the St. Fergus pipeline terminus in Scotland with Queen Elizabeth as well as interviews with workers and footage likely provided by Total from Les Sept Iles de Frigg.

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PART THREE

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8 “In India’s Life and Part of It” Film and Visual Publicity at Burmah-Shell from the 1920s to the 1950s Ravi Vasudevan

“In India’s Life and Part of It” Burmah-Shell has adopted this phrase, when describing its widespread organisation, for a sensible reason. It is because the products the company sells touch the life of the people at all points; lighting their homes, moving their goods, carrying them on pleasure or business, driving and lubricating the machinery of industrial production, surfacing their roads, providing chemicals for crop protection and control of pests, and many other industrial and agricultural investments.1 This chapter undertakes a mapping of the Burmah-Shell Oil Company’s promotional and advertising practices in the Indian subcontinent. From its origins in 1928, the company, whose remit was to retail petroleum products and market agricultural equipment, invested in advertising, publicity, and promotional material in print and audiovisual media, including advertising film. Over time, it expanded its repertoire, pitching its work in the public educational

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arena, and, in 1954, after India’s independence from British colonial rule, set up a filmmaking unit under the direction of James Beveridge, of Canada’s National Film Board. The company’s track record in the area of filmmaking is significant for a number of reasons. As a film sponsor, it charted a space shared by other corporate firms in using film to promote company product. But it exceeded a purely instrumental relation to film production, producing along with advertising and promotional films, instructional and educational films, and films promoting postcolonial state planning. Further, it commissioned work from a number of independent filmmaking units, facilitating a space outside the control of the government’s film unit, Films Division, and its monopolistic control of theatrical exhibition of short films. The Burmah-Shell film company’s key architect, Beveridge, was to be an important ideologue on media policy at key moments in independent India’s history, and the firm’s investment in industrial art and advertising attracted several generations of an arts-oriented professional intelligentsia. These included filmmakers who became part of an emerging critical discourse on the public obligations of industrial enterprise, and the aesthetics and politics of documentary forms.2 Finally, the spectrum of film produced under the sponsorship of Burmah-Shell points to an important database of the industrial, material, and cultural life of the subcontinent. This layered architecture invites us to locate documentary film practice in a complex genealogy of institutions and functions—including an overlap of government, industry, market-driven, civil/educational, and aesthetic engagements.

Oil in South Asia Let me first summarize available information about the history of the commodity as it played out in the South Asian region. There are several questions involved in tracking the business history of oil. These include the complicated ways in which the longer history of modern oil extraction and consumption relates nation-states, transnational empires, corporations, and regional oil cartels. While the corporation developed oil extraction, transportation, refining, and marketing through treaties, informal arrangements, and military force, negotiations with the territorial state were critical too. A sketch of the operation of oil economies in India under colonialism and after will suggest the issues at stake. Burmah, then part of Britain’s Indian empire, was a key site of oil extraction, and the British colonial government warded off bids by oil majors such as Standard Oil and Shell to enter the field of oil production, thus privileging Burmah Oil, the Glasgow-based firm. This was partly because of the reputation of the majors

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for acquiring concessions in order to stall rather than develop oil production and thus ensure the dominance of their own lines of crude oil supply. The colonial government also used tariffs to protect Burmah kerosene supply to an Indian market, which was otherwise dominated by Russia, and in which Shell also had a presence. Apart from kerosene, Burmah became key to the development of fuel oil in collaboration with Britain’s naval ministry as ships transited from coal to fuel oil; it was considered crucial to have fuel oil resources within Britain’s imperial territories, a priority heightened with the advent of war in 1914. All of this indicates the strongly imperial functions served by the colonial government’s oil policies. There was a shift after the First World War, with Burmah entering into a long-term pattern of decline in oil extraction, shifting focus again to supply of crude oil from outside the subcontinent. Nevertheless, trade tariffs continued to be maintained, and Shell circumvented these by entering into a merger with Burmah Oil, specifically as an “oil storage and distribution” agency.3 Even as other sites of oil extraction emerged, it is arguably from this point that a longerterm pattern would emerge: the oil majors’ crude oil would become the main source of supply for the subcontinent. Even after transfer of power in 1947 an independent Indian government did not immediately go into the oil sector; instead, it allowed private companies to carry on and also entered agreements with Burmah-Shell and other companies such as Caltex and Standard Vacuum to set up refineries. Burmah-Shell negotiated and finally won favorable terms through which it could control pricing of crude oil and petroleum products in setting up its Trombay refinery, inaugurated in 1955. It also accommodated government push to excavate for oil, entering an agreement to set up an oil exploration company in collaboration with the Indian government, Oil India, in 1957.4 As economic historians have shown, much of the profits of the major oil companies derived from maneuvering the price difference between crude oil imports, which their companies controlled, and refined oil product. This privileged situation changed toward the end of the 1950s, with the government going to countries such as Russia and Romania to supply cheaper crude oil. When Burmah-Shell refused to process this oil in its refineries and market the resulting oil product, the government set up its own refineries and distributed product through the Indian Oil Corporation. By 1964, the government had refineries at Noonmati, Koyali, and Barauni and this was the beginning of the end for Burmah-Shell’s domination of the Indian market. By the early 1970s, the Indian government nationalized the oil industry, taking over companies such as Burmah-Shell, Caltex, and Standard, but on the basis of a substantial compensation to these firms.5 We may observe in this historical sketch the shifting political contexts that determined Burmah-Shell’s situation and the forms of publicity it used. In the

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colonial period the company had a particularly strong relationship with the government during the Second World War, where its significance to the British war campaign was highlighted. However, the more general focus in the firm’s advertising was to engage local networks, appropriate for a firm dealing in a mass commodity like kerosene. While there was a mass level of advertising to draw in lower-income groups, Burmah-Shell operated a wider field of publicity, which included the higher end of the market, seeking to capture the attention of the industrial investor, plantation manager, and the potential middle-class home and car owner. With Indian independence, we see the clear articulation of a national-developmental drive in the publicity. Here the transnational oil company, having to negotiate with the new state, sought to make itself into a national entity—in India’s life and part of it, to recall BurmahShell’s resonant advertising pitch—throwing in its lot with the new state, and building its publicity armature as one that echoed and supported nationaldevelopmental schema. Some initiatives were not long-lived. It is possible to speculate that certain types of publicity work such as the cinema unit, which ran from 1954 to 1959, came to an end once there was a reduction in how much profit the company could earn from differentials in the rates of crude oil processing. Timothy Mitchell and others have dwelt on the way oil economies have politically, materially, and culturally changed the world, and how such an epoch may already be on the anvil of dire conclusion as the planet runs out of the fossil fuels it has so profligately used over the last two centuries.6 He argues that oil decisively shifted not only the patterns of energy and consumption but also the networks of labor, transportation, and delivery characteristic of coal. Mines, collieries, railways, and dockyards were interlinked points in the process of production and supply and labor stoppages at any of these points threatened interruption, which could be leveraged for democratic advancement. In counterpoint, the channeling of oil through pipelines abstracted it from the registers of energy production and circulation. Such a separating out of oil transportation made it possible for energy companies, often backed by military arrangements, to restrict flow in order to raise prices or to privilege particular supply chains.7

Promoting Consumption: Economies, Aesthetics, Archives Mitchell primarily focuses on the politics and economics of production and distribution. In this chapter, I want to look at intermediary infrastructures,

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such as the refinery, and, more broadly, infrastructures that facilitated the marketing and circulation of petroleum goods. While the refinery was to be a significant object of publicity, an offshore entity projected as the source of a remarkable circulation of energy, the economy of consumption was obviously as crucial. I attend to the publicity, advertising, information, instruction, and education, deployed by the oil companies to draw people into understanding and using the new products that Burmah-Shell retailed. Such publicity was pitched ambitiously, and was used to communicate a material and civilizational transformation, and to more generally extol the transformative impact of oil in industry (for machinery), transportation (fuel oil, road surfacing material such as bitumen), agricultural improvement (pesticide), domestic use (preeminently kerosene, but also, for middle-class consumers, material like furniture polish). While film use is the main focus of this chapter, I want to place it in the wider field of media forms. My suggestion is that such a transmedial engagement offers a sense of how an imagination of material transformation flows across surfaces and screens, suffusing the world with a sense of the extensive presence of oil. Here I have found Adrian Ivakhiv’s ecocriticism thought-provoking. In this approach, the work of film may be construed at three levels: the material, including both the materiality of the world and the materiality of film, that is, the profilmic, that which is put in front of the camera, and the filmic, here referring both to formal and textual organization and to film’s own materiality as celluloid; the social, preeminently about the constitution of the human as opposed to the nonhuman, in which the human institutes itself, separates itself ontologically by subjecting the nonhuman to subordination, instrumentalization, and outright elimination; and the perceptual, which may traverse such boundaries, offering affective networks and ties that blur distinctions among human, nonhuman, subjects, objects, and environments.8 It is with a view to unsettling or complicating distinctions that I will track the worlding activity of media forms, including print and posters, photographs and films. Such a transmedial focus relates not only to the oil itself, and the world of its consumption, but also the worlds of labor and production it evokes, from road work gangs laying surfaces, to agrarian labor flitting stagnant ponds with pesticide, to the world of industrial labor based on fuel-powered machinery. And, as I shall argue, such publicity critically turned on highlighting a world of objects, such as kerosene storage tins, lanterns, and stoves that were key to a mise-en-scène of oil’s transformation of the everyday. In this tracking of how perception was reordered through the interplay of media, I also consider the disposition of the body as a form resting in determinate relationship to the material environments, of factory, field, on the river, in the village in which it is situated.

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The wider field of printed visual culture I draw on comes from newspaper advertisements, journals such as the 1950s Indian Documentary, and from Burmah-Shell publicity material held at the British Petroleum archive. It is not always clear who composed this material, and whether professional advertising agencies and commercial art studios were involved, at least in the early phase. This is because available archives do not have any documentation about the commissioning of publicity. However, by the 1940s, the company was one of the prime movers to cultivate commercial art for the promotion of industry, captured in the Art in Industry exhibition, which started in 1940, and the journal Art in Industry, started in 1946.9 And they were using professional filmmakers, including those working for famous contemporary studios such as Bengal’s New Theatres, to make film publicity.

Print Publicity Publicity material included cheap advertising flyers to cultivate the rural market, photographs of industrial processes, as well as photographs and postcards, most probably for clients.10 From this material we will observe that Burmah-Shell, as retailer of petroleum products acquired a strong presence in the imaging of the countryside alongside its plotting of modern urban imaginaries. For example, in an area such as transportation, there was advertising on tractors.11 and their role in enhancing agrarian production, as well as promotion of motorcar, motorbike, and aircraft. As we can see from the images relating to early Burmah-Shell publicity, cheap print advertising targeted the merchandise in kerosene, including a highly differentiated sense of the buyers for this product. These might, according to their purchasing capacity, use Shell, Water Lilly, Anchor, Lion, Chukker and Rising Sun (these last two for “those who need a cheaper grade than the above brands”), Red Sun, and Owl Victoria, “a cheap grade for which there is a great demand amongst the poorer class of people” (Figure 8.1). “Prominent amongst the few essentials of life with which an Indian peasant returns from the market is the BURMAH-SHELL KEROSENE with which his simple home, like those of millions of others, is illuminated,” remarks an advertisement that shows a Rajasthani peasant, with his wife walking behind, kerosene lamp in hand. Cheap flyers were printed in multiple language versions, including Marathi, Punjabi, Tamil, Telugu, and Hindi, as well as English. Overall, they tended to use a lithographed image rather than a photograph, as in images we see in these advertisements of a kerosene tin, a key object and image of portability in the new agrarian-industrial complex of these times.

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FIGURE 8.1  Kerosene ad. On the other hand, product placement targeting the merchant and potential investor, as in advertising with the periodicals Capital or the Calcutta Commercial Gazette, uses photographs, the latter highlighting the importance of road surface materials for the cultivator’s access to the market and in getting better returns. What is distinctive about these last two is not only their address to the merchant-investor in kerosene or road surfacing material but also the shift from a relatively anodyne ethnic portraiture of the peasant to a photorealist presentation of workers, part of a Burmah-Shell road surface laying gang, as they engage in hot, draining work. Perhaps the difference lay precisely in the evocation of worker, work, and material form as something to be captured indexically, as they appear in the world, for the consideration of an addressee, the commercial agent, and investor rather than consumer. As Stefan Tetzlaff has shown, it was in these years that substantial investments were being made by tire companies such as Goodyear and Dunlop, along with road sur-

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facing companies like Burmah-Shell, to refashion the material world of transportation.12 This was done by fitting pneumatic tires to bullock cart wheels, and the building up of road surfaces in an expanding rural network to facilitate the movement of labor and goods. The shift in the regime of transportation is signaled in photographs that document the use of a modified bullock cart to carry kerosene barrels along with vehicles such as river craft and lorries. This starker, photographic version of the presentation of laborers was not the norm, and workers were often represented as ideal types in the commodity world’s scenic composition. Thus, building on the work of the orientalist photographic company, Bourne and Shephard,13 there is an illustration of the “Assam tea garden coolies” in the form of two women tea laborers picturesquely involved in picking leaves. The image does not directly advertise the commodities mentioned in the margins of the photograph, except that we may hazard that road surfaces, insecticide, kerosene, industrial lubricants, and household products, the Burmah-Shell commodities being promoted, would be part of the plantation’s material world, including its factories and the residences of plantation managers. Another advertisement for malariol presents a drawing of the worker/coolie in cheerful and vigorous mode as he discharges pesticide into the undergrowth, even as we may now reflect on how such activity would have affected the worker’s health. A pesticide advertisement for Shelltox uses a very different figuration, evoking the machine age, the worker abstracted as a bundle of muscles, a heroic figure bearing resemblance to contemporary German representations of the body as continuous with the world of instruments, furnaces, and industrial emissions. We will notice such abstractions working in the object world, as petrol cans for motor cycles fuse with aircraft to claim advances in speed and power for the more quotidian vehicle. In another advertisement, a promotional and expositional film on lubrication showcases a machine-man impresario, made up of oil canisters, nuts, and bolts, swirling a top hat as he invites the audience to view “a film performance on lubrication.”

Film Publicity Film use covered all these topics, and in some cases campaigns simultaneously developed across media formats. The company’s commissions ranged from the industrial and instructional film to the documentary and cultural film. Key to this publicity arc was the commissioning of independent film companies. Burmah-Shell’s relationship to film was best known in terms of film sponsorship, but a host of companies commissioned films from independent

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producers. An advertisement for Hari S. Dasgupta Productions of 1956 lists commissions from the Government of India, Burmah-Shell, Tata Iron and Steel, Imperial Tobacco, Dunlop, Lipton, Imperial Chemical Industries, and Martin McConachie Productions, New York.14 But Burmah-Shell’s work came to be privileged in discourses about the sponsored documentary film, perhaps because it had the most sustained program for making films about the nationstate project. A 1957 article “The Burmah-Shell Film Programme” in the key documentary magazine, Indian Documentary, provides an outline of the recent history of the unit.15 The article noted that by 1957, the company had sponsored fortyfive films, running into over forty-five reels, and could hold a nonstop twentyfour-hour show of the film material it had generated, “a grand spectacle of the new India that is emerging.” The article goes on to detail the major series produced by the company, including major industries, small-scale industries, the Life in India series (with most films devoted to village life in several Indian regional states, including Bengal, Travancore, Bihar, and East Punjab villages, and on families in Andhra, Kashmir, and Bangalore), and Folk Dances (referred to as “entertainers”). The article noted the company was also in the business of making some training films, instructional films, and compilations (how to keep oil engines clean, how best to spray insecticides, on lubrication oil for motor cars, “Shellubrication,” etc.). According to the author, the “real” beginnings of the film program emerged with the initiatives of P. G. Rose, former chief of Burmah-Shell publicity, who urged that Indian Burmah-Shell could emulate the internationally renowned film work of the Shell Film Unit. Shell’s well-known British documentarist Stuart Legg visited to form a blueprint for the film unit. It was Rose who then brought James Beveridge over from the National Film Board of Canada. Beveridge like Legg was associated with John Grierson, a key architect of the documentary in its international form. On arrival, Beveridge started work on the compilation film, Trombay, about Burmah-Shell’s offshore refinery; he then initiated the Major Industries series, the Small Scale Industries series, and Life in India. The article noted that Beveridge placed considerable emphasis on the film script, and figures such as Atma Ram (renowned Hindi film director Guru Dutt’s brother) emerged as a key figure in this department. According to this account, the film company’s emphasis was on combining factual and human content and in commissioning films from experienced film units who made a mix of advertising, public health, instructional, and educational films. Among these were noncommercial projects supported by a mixture of government and international agencies, including UNESCO. The film companies included Bhavnani, Hunnar, Art Films of Asia, and Hari S. Dasgupta films. The sponsor

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gave these units autonomy in the filmmaking process, with Beveridge only stepping in at the end, to help with final editing. The Burmah-Shell film company had a good distribution network through which to circulate their films. Beveridge’s assistant, B. K. Shrivastava, worked with Burmah-Shell publicity officers in the major cities, with four film libraries in their major branches in Calcutta, Bombay, Madras, and Delhi and another set of film libraries in “division” branches at Secunderabad, Bangalore, Patna, and Puri. The libraries offered films on rent in 16 and 35 mm format, and also arranged screening by mobile vans. The target institutions included “schools, colleges, clubs, business and professional groups, community centres and associations [. . .] most films were dubbed in major languages.” The article noted that in 1954, the inaugural year of the Burmah-Shell Film Unit, BurmahShell films were screened in 4,354 shows and showed to some twenty lakh (two million) viewers. Of these a significant portion was shown in villages by mobile vans, which had to travel 76,469 miles. It noted that these figures did not give indication of the many shows given to staff members, government officials, and “well-wishers,” presumably indicating a wider arts and journalist society, as the company was considered a creative enterprise, attracting bright young people. Burmah-Shell films were also being bought by government and other agencies. One hundred prints of the Weavers of Maindargi, Iron and Steel and Kabauliram: A Village in West Bengal were purchased by the Government of India and other state governments, and nongovernment organizations had also started showing interest. The company’s films were also exhibited at international festivals, such as the Edinburgh Film Festival, and had won awards at Cork. The article concluded by paraphrasing the company slogan, “If Burmah-Shell is in India’s Life and Part of It, then BurmahShell films are in India’s film industry and part of it.” Beveridge was delegated by the National Film Board of Canada to be head of Burmah-Shell’s film unit. On the face of it, Beveridge’s views at this time frame film use in a rather instrumental, developmentalist way, in keeping with government goals. As Rosaleen Smythe has shown, this might reflect a change in the Griersonian perspective in the postwar epoch.16 This was a time when, through UNESCO, Grierson and his cohort were taking the “third world” in particular as a way of framing documentary discourse. While Grierson had always mixed promotion of experiment and creative talent with a bid to channel their energies to publicly purposeful and effective ends, in this period he seems to have promoted a more instrumental use: film should be used to impart information in as simple and direct a way about health, sanitation, nutrition, and technological improvement to colonial and ex-colonial populations. Smythe argues that in this sense Grierson echoed the work of

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the often criticized colonial film units initiated by the Nigerian civil servant, William Sellers.17 Whatever the accuracy of this shift in perspective, in the case of Beveridge we may note that his practice as producer often exceeded his instrumentalist agenda. The latter is captured in his emphasis on the importance of specialized, carefully made films to be used functionally in a precise teaching context—a very different thing from release in commercial cinemas to audiences gathered solely for entertainment . . . the production of specialized films in India, for functional and specific uses, has just begun. Ahead, there lies a whole range of trial-and-error experiences, of testing, audience sampling, evaluating, and comparing various production techniques to assess their effectiveness in reaching audiences of different kinds.18 In practice, Beveridge was open to a more complex agenda of sponsorship, including documentaries and cultural films along with clear-cut instructional works. Perhaps it was for the latter that he identified a much more limited, “specialized” use. I want to disaggregate accounts of Burmah-Shell film work to consider several specific dimensions to the unit’s work. The first relates directly to the promotion of oil and oil products, including focuses on Burmah-Shell’s own offshore plant in Trombay, on fuel oil and how it works in motorized transportation, and how oil products including fuel oil and kerosene were stored, distributed, and delivered. The second considers not only oil and oil products but also the forms that might be powered by oil, as in a mapping of major industries such as textiles, iron and steel, and agriculture (with a particular focus on mechanization and the use of tractors). The third relates to a certain imaging of the world now inflected by the intervention of oil and oil products, through a set of new relations and object fields. Finally, films devoted to everyday life and cultural practices, including the small-scale industries, folk dances, and Life in India series, might entirely circumvent the world of oil, though some of the “Life” films do engage industry and, by extension, oil.19

Sponsored Film and Film Companies What is suggestive is how alliances between sponsoring agencies and filmmakers not only fulfilled informational imperatives but also generated aesthetic affects and material and sociological imaginaries. I will focus on certain key films and biographies to convey the complexity of what was emerging through the film work. The films include Tins for India (Bimal Roy, New Theatres, 1941), Destination Konkan (Clement Baptista, Hunnar films,

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1955), A Family in Bangalore (Paul Zils, Art Films of Asia, 1955), Martial Arts of Malabar (Paul Zils, Art Films of Asia, 1958), The Vanishing Tribe (Paul Zils, Art Films of Asia, 1959), and A Village in Travancore (Fali Billimoria, Art Films of Asia, 1956). The careers I cite are those of Paul Zils, the German filmmaker who spent over a decade making documentary films in India after the Second World War; V. Vijaykar and Clement Baptista, who started their film career in an army film unit in the Second World War, and then started their short film company, Hunnar Films; and Hari Sadan Dasgupta, who set up the Calcutta Film Society with, among others, Satyajit Ray, and who also ran a successful short film company, Hari S. Dasgupta Productions.

The Affective Force of Objects: Burmah-Shell’s Tins As the advertisement about lubrication oil indicates, Burmah-Shell’s use of film dates to the late 1930s, though it is possible that more films will come to light. Bimal Roy’s eight-minute film, Tins for India, (New Theatres, 1941)20 opens with graphics for the credit titles, combining images of steamship, train, derrick, lorry, coal, bullock cart, palms, a refinery, and, on the top righthand corner, a kerosene lamp. It is of the genre of the “industrial film,” a film made to show how a product is assembled, and therefore conceived of both for the industrial firm, its employees and workers, and for a general public, to acquaint them with the nature of industrial activity.21 The film shows with careful detail how the tins are assembled, showing the pile of tin plates, the process of cutting and assembling from point to point in the production process (Figure 8.2). The film has a voice-over providing statistical information that 30,000 tins are produced every day from 16,000 tons of tin plate, and that they are made in a standardized, 1/80th inch thickness. However, the industrial film nests

FIGURE 8.2  Tins for India.

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within a social film, in the sense that Latour defines the social as something actively produced by the association of actants, including a medley of humans, objects, technologies, and environments. The key driver here is the tin itself, an object for which the film captures a substantial afterlife. The voice-over notes the most common features associated with “rural India, real India” are the palm tree, the bullock cart, and the kerosene tin, with the last there “in nearly every home and 600,000 villages.” It then goes onto show images of the tin’s dispersal across a number of practices and sites: on a boat as it moves under a bamboo bridge, a characteristic image observable across a number of films, combining images of storage and water-borne portability; how the tin “starts a long and arduous life in service for the village,” carrying water, flattened out to make roofs to provide a home, imaged in a woman and child under a tinned roof, cut up to be made into a lamp, as containers, for rice, lentils, sugar, salt, and other needs. Here a grocer measures out grain, the voice-over informing the viewer that it is “retailed like this in every Indian bazaar.” Rather than a limited, commodity-driven logic, the film develops a broader outlook, addressing publics about a new set of relations and object fields introduced by but exceeding the originating material. This arises from the capture of the object as sensuous everyday material, the itinerary of its afterlife, and its penetration into various spaces of village life. Not only is the social framed through the object, but there is also interdependence involved here that traduces the bid to separate the human from the nonhuman. Such promotional film work also has links to a realist, iconic rendering of village life familiar to viewers of the social genre of entertainment films of the time. New Theatres, the studio at which Tins for India was made, and where Roy was an employee, made many emblematic films of village life, including the iconic Devdas (1935) on which Roy was cinematographer. However, in the village fiction film, the hierarchies are clearer, the material dimensions are in the background, serving the functions of the anthropological machine’s distinction between the human and the nonhuman. This is arguably not true of Tins for India. To follow Ivakhiv’s ecocritical logic, not only are the material and the social entangled through perceptual registers that unsettle hierarchies, the perceptual also gives rise to startlingly expressive features. The luminous textures of the object, in the tin-making process, are captured by light reflecting off its surface to render it, in the voice-over’s words, “smooth bright and shiny.” Here, the sponsored film, made on an oil promotional platform, extends itself, through a distinctive object into the registers of the everyday, not only of the village as a set of material forms but also as composed in cinematic fiction. The originating object of the film does not recede from view, but becomes the facilitator of a network, with various elements, human and nonhuman, drawn into an associational logic to constitute the social. Bruno Latour’s

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work captures what this film discloses about the object, how it constitutes and is constituted by other things and people in a world that exceeds the originating element, kerosene, for which it is a container.22 The object as container invites reflection on several other features and metaphorical functions. Energy, its storage, its portability, and deferred use are key here. These are features that parallel the cinema that also stores the kinetic and psychic energy of motor functions and emotional dynamics, through techniques of movement and montage, and is available for portability and retrieval; it also shares material content, in celluloid’s photochemical relationship to petroleum.23 We can see a similar associational logic in Destination Konkan. This film deals with the subject of monsoon stocking, how oil products are stored in advance to deal with the disruptive effects of the monsoon on the circulation of people and goods. As in the Burmah-Shell kerosene advertisements and Tins for India, the kerosene oil tin is a key element of the mise-en-scène: director Clement Baptista does strong imagistic work to capture the movement of tins on the small country crafts that carry commodities on the sea and through inland rivers. Here, the oil film comes together with the travelogue, a genre favored both by colonial and nation-states. The colonial government made films displaying the railway’s infrastructural power in traversing spaces and offering the spectator/traveler new vistas for engagement; the national government’s film unit, along with film companies that saw themselves as part of the nation-building project, sought to use short film and newsreel similarly, to relay images of regions and spaces to cultivate a territorial imaginary for a film spectator addressed as an Indian citizen. Here the sea and seaport, the inland tributaries, and local village stores run by merchants who stock oil for Burmah-Shell draw the spectator into an exploration of the geographical and material imaginary of the nation. Such geographical genres were part of the routine work produced by the Indian government’s state unit, Films Division. It required a skilled filmmaker like Baptista to infuse a certain luminosity to the genre. The film also displays a cinephiliac register, with the father and son who carry the oil on the country craft echoing Bicycle Thief (Vittorio De Sica, 1948) and also its Indian counterpart, Do Bigha Zameen (Bimal Roy, 1952). Bicycle Thief had been screened with much success at the First International Film Festival exhibited across the metropolitan cities of India in 1951. Such echoes and crossovers were not incidental. Baptista, a graduate of the JJ School of Art in Bombay (interview with Shyam Benegal), became part of the Army Film Unit (AFU) established during the Second World War. It was during this stint that he and his AFU colleague V. M. Vijaykar, along with the Oxford University Press publisher Rober Hawkins,

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inaugurated the Bombay Film Society in 1943. In the account of Film Society activist H. Narahari Rao, the “main objective of the Bombay Film Society was to learn the technique of filmmaking, watching documentaries from abroad.”24 Baptista was part of a generation of intelligentsia who became involved in the media, communicational, and performance arts, and were involved in journalism, advertising, academics, theater work, and cinema. Those interested in film as a career would often take to short films, and bring some of their aesthetic engagements to bear on promotional documentaries like Destination Konkan. There was also a longer tradition of dedicated short filmmaking, and this often overlapped with amateur film societies who took as one of their objectives the viewing and appreciation of films.25 In general, the short filmmaker had to develop a varied commercial profile to make a living. At this time, there did not appear to be a pronounced cultural hierarchy about where to place this kind of film work. Burmah-Shell certainly acquired a reputation for being one of the better firms to work with, both in terms of careers such as advertising and in supported areas like filmmaking.26 A retrospective view on the advertising profession done sometime in the 2000s recalled how a career with Burmah-Shell was considered very attractive for young people with an appetite for creative work.27 Paul Zils’s biography captures the complex weave within which BurmahShell’s productions took place. In Zils’s own account his career started in Düsseldorf, where he was involved in making city films.28 He cited Nicholas Kaufman, who was head of the Kulturfilm department of UFA, Germany’s dominant film company, as a key influence. From its inception at the end of the First World War, Kulturfilm at UFA was devoted to educational, nature, and science films. It came to be known for evocations of German landscape and, in its most famous work, Ways to Strength and Beauty (1925), it sought to develop an image of a “modern body culture.” To quote a critic: “The production consciously forged links with the past, showing scenes of athletic games that recalled the cultural ideal of classical antiquity and the harmony between (the naked) body and spirit. Both principles were portrayed as part of a stereotypical ideal of beauty.” Nicholaus Kaufmann, who codirected the film with Wilhelm Prager, explained that the production was “based on the clear recognition that, after disbanding the army, people in Germany have good reason to compensate for the loss of the valuable training given to male youth during their military service—and, beyond this, to encourage female youth, through ideal images of a strong, beautiful mankind, to train their bodies.”29 It would appear that the Kulturfilm of this sort made a bid to retrieve an organic sense of a people ravaged by war, involving elements of a racial imaginary. I will suggest that there are some echoes of this inspiration in Zils’s work, most prominently in a strand of folk imagery in his documentary work. He

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recounts how he traveled to exotic lands, including Java and Japan, to capture local cultures, was interned in a POW camp as a German national in Bali, and then brought to India where he was interned in Bihar. Here, his background in filmmaking encouraged the British to employ him in the government film unit, Information Films of India, to make films for foreign circulation. Zils became a key figure in postwar and postindependence documentary cinema. Through his company, Art Films of Asia, and in partnership with Fali Billimoria, he made a variety of works, including health films for the United Nations, an important film for the rehabilitation ministry about people displaced by the Partition of British India, New Life of a Displaced Person (1957), and a collaboration with left-wing artists entitled Our India, which adapted Minoo Masani’s book of the same name to show India from ancient times down to the modern world. He was also important in developing an associational life for documentary film, organizing meetings and lobbying the government for exhibition time in the cinema hall programs for nongovernmental producers, and writing extensively on documentary film in Indian Documentary and in the key arts/architecture journal Marg. He made films in the Major Industries, Life in India, and Folk Dances series of Burmah-Shell. In this section I will primarily focus some of the films produced by Zils and Fali Billimoria’s Art Films of Asia to track certain narrative and aesthetic concerns. The first of these is Family in Bangalore, part of the Life in India series. This significant film captures the working spaces of new industries in Bangalore—Hindustan Machine Tools, Hindustan Aircraft, and Hindustan Telephones. The narrative is organized, as in other Life films, around a family, where a Brahmin (Iyengar) power loom owner has sons working in these different industries. As we transit from space to space, we get a sense both of the scale of operations, through top-angled shots, and how instruments such as the telephone are fabricated. This is not an industrial or process film, for it provides only an impression of material forms rather than a detailed description of a production process. It also highlights certain sociological features, such as the mixed gender work in places like the telephone factory. But perhaps its key sociological dimension lies in its holding our narrative understanding of the new industries within the orbit of the high-caste Iyengar family. This sociology extends into the address to culture, as when we see one of our three protagonists go from his workplace to pick up his daughter and take her for bharatanatyam (classical dance) class. There are other, less sociologically narrow representations of this new world of work. As workers leave the factory, we see one of the brothers wend his way home to immediately immerse himself in amateur radio, not paying attention to his animated wife who is eager to chat. Engagement, indeed, obsession with technology has seeped from workplace into domestic life. Does the sight-

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ing of a bharatanatyam doll in the background signal droll reflection on the fetishistic destiny of daughters of this world, caught between dancing class and domestic service? Janaki Nair has pointed out how these new industries carved out spaces for work and residence in the city that separated well-educated workers in these factories from the wider swathe of working-class life in the city.30 We get a sense of this separated living in the employee colonies constructed near the factories. We are also offered a sense of new horizons of space and time in technologized landscapes, with the dream-like scene of a child running to school against the background of a tree-lined runway holding a solitary plane. This brief description of one of the Life films indicates certain features: a narrative strategy to personalize experience, whether of village life or of industrial and work cultures through the prism of the family; a bid to provide a sense impression of the industry for a general public, rather than the more intricate detailing of industrial process characteristic of the industrial film; and a tendency to represent a work culture as defined by caste and its reproduction, something also in evidence in Zils’s film on Textiles. However, in the case of Family in Bangalore, not everything runs to type, and I have suggested that there are aspects of humor and distancing in the way the film has been composed. If the Burmah-Shell print media advertisements of the 1930s had iconized a certain worker type and environment as a key context for the circulation of products, the films refer to a wider spectrum of work. However, they also deploy a system of typage as certain social groups tend to be fixed, imaginatively and in terms of projection, to certain work profiles. This constitutes another level of the film ecology formulated by Ivakhiv. This is the constitution of the social, here through the filter of caste rigidity, as it is reproduced in environments composed of workplace, landscape, domestic space, and cultural practice. Does this suggest a contradictory impulse within the projects of postcolonial modernity? While a filmmaker such as Zils worked fulsomely with the projects of industrial advancement characteristic of new states after the Second World War, he and others did not seem to see or even aspire to a dynamic in the social composition of labor, and of labor mobility. If “traditional” social arrangements were yoked to new industrial forms, there were others that could not adapt and might verge on extinction. Zils also made The Vanishing Tribe (Paul Zils, 1959) about the Todas, the tribe situated in the Nilgiri Hills of Tamil Nadu of South India, composed in the manner of an elegy to a disappearing world. Tribal formation and the ancient headman are paraded for a view as they seem to dissipate into the space between earth and sky. There is romanticism at work here, even if one lacking in sociological acuteness, as the tribe survives and reinvents itself in various forms today. But this

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fatalistic invocation of dying archaic forms may be the corollary to embracing the modern, even if this is a modernity framed by the reproduction of social hierarchies and ascriptive identities. There are spaces in between, where the traditional may be revived and nurtured as discrete cultural practice or part of certain persistent work rhythms, as with the fisherfolk of Bombay, subject of one of the Folk Dance film series or, again going to Zils, his work on the Martial Dances of Malabar. This rather beautifully made black and white film not only captures the costumed and masked figures of ornate performance but also goes into the cut and thrust of bodies and sharp implements as they weave in rhythmic contest. Is the fascination here a throwback to the days of kulturfilm in its evocation of the beautiful body whose imaging restores the dwindling traditions to the armature of the newly fashioned nation? The folk dance films, referred to as entertainers, occupy a different position from the films about industry but overlap with the cultural functions of the Life in India series. I would suggest that we need to see documentary genres such as films of industrial publicity and promotion, and cultural films, not only in terms of their separate logic of address but also in combination, and this will mean looking with greater attention to the disposition of bodies in relationship to work and cultural practices, in figurations of caste, and in imaginations of race. This is something that may lie in the background of Zils preoccupation with new ethnographic sites, articulated, in the Indian case, with agendas of nationhood. In juxtaposing different types of film work, a suggestive ecological montage emerges. To take an instance, another of Burmah-Shell’s Life in India series, A Village in Travancore, looks at the life of a fisherman’s family, composed of a boatman, his wife who runs a tea shop, their son who is studying, and a teenage daughter. The film dwells on a variety of activities and spaces, some with startling aesthetic engagement: the wife’s tea shop is shown using depth of field, layering space to capture several planes, of the kiosk counter, a line of bottles, two customers, and the husband arriving from the distance; the boatman is dwarfed by the large bundles of coir material he collects on a jetty for onward dispatch, a modernist framing and composition observable from Second World War propaganda films promoting a new sense of volume and density in the processing of natural materials for the market; the camera captures sweat and sinew on an oarsman as he participates in a boat race; an awkward and voyeuristic episode relays the daughter’s sensuous enjoyment of bathing with her girlfriends; another composition from above frames elephants alongside a boat in the public tank below; later, there is urgent rush of the boy and his classmates as they run to find out exam results, embodying their hopes and aspirations, and the sense of a future; and there is an abiding

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FIGURE 8.3  Kerosene tins on the river. sense of a peculiarly inward, melancholic aspect to the boatman father, as if, apart from the difficulties of everyday life, indicated in a visit to a moneylender to borrow money for his daughter’s marriage, he is, like his profession, defined by a drifting relationship to the world he inhabits. The film invites us to reflect on its poetics, primarily governed by a compositional strategy framing figures against the sky, sea, and river, sharing here elements with Destination Konkan and Martial Arts of Malabar. The juxtaposition of different media forms extends this montage of meaning effects, suggesting a logic of indirect or potential meaning only gestured to by the images we look at. Here I refer to postcards and publicity photographs, or photographs of record, relating to the backwaters of Kerala. In one photograph showing kerosene cans being loaded onto a boat, we have the impression of boat and river being prepared as the space for the carriage of stored energy (Figure 8.3); another postcard, at once commonplace, is also more abstract in its meaning-making, its title declaring “oil in the backwaters,” but its image only displays the palm-fringed bank, a fishing net, and a dhow whose sail provides a line of light falling over the water (Figure 8.4). This noncorrespondence of meaning between text and image captures what I am suggesting, that the medley of postcards, publicity photographs, photographs of record, and films provide a media ecology to think about oil’s

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FIGURE 8.4  Postcard: Oil in the backwaters. suffusion of the environment without it necessarily being specified as content. Metonymy, drawing upon a relationship of contiguity and material connection, operates here, the liquidity of the backwaters moving across the field of media forms. Oil does not have to be shown or seen, it now suffuses the space of media form and scenic environment; while it is only physically present in the image of the kerosene tins being loaded onto a boat, such a suffusion perhaps foreshadows the building of a refinery in Cochin in 1963. Cultural films such as Martial Dances of Malabar and, to a degree, A Village in Travancore seek to represent the space and address the viewer in terms of a certain archaism of traditions; in such settings it would appear that oil, in its very nonpresence, its metonymic invocation, has not altered the older and more durable formations of this ecology, and can provide a platform for their imaging and replenishment. I want to conclude with another montage that emerges from the oeuvre of the oil company, this time not from a film but a brochure. This was a document that sometimes addressed Burmah-Shell’s own staff, introducing them to the company, sometimes provided a public audit, and was also publicity medium for more general audiences. One particularly striking brochure was issued to celebrate the launch of Burmah-Shell’s oil refinery at Trombay in 1955.31 Describing the construction of the refinery, the write-up invokes the image of the skyscraper city to capture the effect it was striving for:

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Skyscraper City As the various units went up one by one, the site took on the appearance of a building lot for blocks of skyscrapers, with 200-foot stacks and columns of 100 feet and more looming up into position one after another. The pace at which the work was going through may be judged from the fact that a steel-framed stores building 23,600 square feet in area, comprising 140 tons of structural steel-work, was completed in the span of 30 working days from the time materials were received on site. The brochure is striking for a particular montage it produces. An image extends across the front and back cover of the brochure. On the left there is a village dwelling, though it might also be an urban basti or hutment. In the hut, there are cooking vessels, earthen and metal pots, something that looks like a spinning wheel or a cotton carding machine, and, nested in the space, a kerosene stove. On the right side, we are presented with the shimmering image of the skyscraper city, Trombay, also referred to in Burmah-Shell publicity as “silver city.” Emerging from the spine of the brochure and thus at the center of the image, as it extends, stands a young woman, perhaps the young wife of the household, who holds a kerosene lamp (Figure 8.5). The montage of two spaces invites mythic dissection, suggestive as it is of the figure of a Lakshmi bringing auspiciousness and light into the household. Perhaps she is also welcoming and propitiating a new force, the remote

FIGURE 8.5  Brochure: peasant household and refinery.

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FIGURE 8.6  Pather Panchali tremor of modernity. source of the energy she can now tap into, the oil refinery that produces the kerosene that she uses. The photographic composition places her act as lying in the direction of Trombay. And yet her look is inward and local, as if she is unaware of the circuit she is tapping into. This is both myth and technological parable then, with the production and portability of energy setting up a circuit that links two extremes in the imaginative and lived practices of India. The image also highlights the coordinates of an underlying modernist aesthetic, in which the production of the traditional is produced as discrete, having a separate existence from the world of modern technology. The montage effect breaks such discreteness to open up a discourse of connectedness, comparison, and displacement. It is suggestive that in the very year that Trombay was being launched, Satyajit Ray should be making his landmark film, Pather Panchali/Song of the Road (1955), resolutely placed within the poetry and tragedy of village life. The sources of power and energy are remote, captured in iconic scenes related to the sighting of the train and the arrival of the bioscope. It is suggestive that Ray’s own oeuvre may, however, be placed within a modernist aesthetic, not only on the basis of the Apu trilogy’s own strategies of distancing the spectator from the register of the rural but also for the copresence of film genres, documentary and fictional, within his work.32 The key reference point here is The Story of Steel, (1956) directed by Hari Sadan Dasgupta, scripted by Ray, and shot by Claude Renoir, who had earlier shot Jean Renoir’s The River (1951), which also featured Dasgupta as an assistant director. There was in fact a report circulating that it was Ray who was directing this project, a story Dasgupta contradicted in an account run by Indian Documentary.33 When we put this particular montage, of Pather Panchali and Story of Steel, two films made in close simultaneity, together, we will observe parallels with the montage of

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the Burmah-Shell brochure, infrastructural monumentality, that of the steel mill and the oil refinery’s “skyscraper city,” posed alongside village simplicity. We may also capture a tension within Indian modernism: the separation out of two different registers of experience, urban/rural, modern/traditional, where the former through its technologies of representation and communication produces the latter as a discrete entity. The sponsoring agencies of modern energy, consumer forms, and documentary film penetrate into wider and wider circuits of the population, and into small towns and the countryside. It is the informational products of such agencies, with their own distinct aesthetic registers, which assert the connection. The parallels evoke strange perceptual effects: it is as if Ray’s Durga, the child-woman consigned to unfulfilled destiny and premature death in the fateful fiction of Pather Panchali (Figure 8.6), has been reanimated, the wall between her and the modern world dissolved through circuits of energy. But as the inbred skepticism of our postcolonial intelligence tells us, and the inward look of the young village woman corroborates, such circuits are also mired in a long history of lack and unequal distribution. But the montage itself startles and strikes in its ambitions, showcasing connections facilitated by the montage of oil and breaking open divisions in the world we have historically inherited.

Notes 1 Background to Burmah-Shell. Brochure, Archive reference 30886, 1956, British Petroleum archive, Warwick. 2 For a sense of the committed nation-building orientation of documentarists, many of whom received substantial support from Burmah-Shell, see, for example, Fali Bilimoria, Industry and the Film, Indian Documentary 1(1), 1949, 9; Mulk Raj Anand, On the Need of the Documentary in India, ibid, 11. 3 This account is summarized from G. G. Jones, “The State and Economic Development in India: The Case of Oil, 1890–1947,” Modern Asian Studies 13, no. 3 (1979): 353–75. 4 S. Verma and N. Abdelrehim, “Oil Multinationals and Governments in PostColonial Transitions: Burmah-Shell, the Burmah Oil Company and the Indian State, 1947–1970,” Business History 59, no. 3 (2016): 342–61. 5 Saumitra Chaudhury, “Nationalisation of Oil Companies in India,” Economic and Political Weekly 12, no. 10 (March 5, 1997): 439–44. 6 Timothy Mitchell, Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil (New York: Verso, 2011). 7 “Controlling Carbon Channels,” 18–21; “Oil Flows,” 36–9, in Mitchell, 2011. 8 Adrian Ivakhiv, “The Anthrobiogeomorphic Machine: Stalking the Zone of Cinema,” Film Philosophy 15, no. 1 (2011): 120–1..

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9 See History of the Exhibition, Art in Industry Annual, 1942, 6–7, held at Visual Archives, Centre for Studies in Social Sciences Calcutta. This volume and the journal of the same name highlight the role of Burmah Shell as key sponsor for the exhibition. Also see Tapati Guha-Thakurta, “From Craftsmanship to Commercial Art: The New Dispensations of ‘Art in Industry,’” Marg, special issue on The Story of Early Indian Advertising, March–June, 2017, 23–33. 10 The material assembled here comes from the British Petroleum Archive held at Warwick University. 11 C. P. G. Wade, Mechanical Cultivation in India; A History of the Large-Scale Experiments Carried Out by the Burmah-Shell Oil Storage and Distributing Company of India. Ltd. (Delhi: The Imperial Council for Agriculture, 1935). 12 Stefan Tetzlaff, “The Motorisation of the ‘Mofussil’: Automobile Traffic and Social Change in Rural and Small-Town India c. 1915–1940,” Unpublished D.Phil., University of Gottingen, 2015 13 Christopher Pinney, Camera Indica: The Social Life of Photographs (London: Reaktion Books, 2008 [1997]). The Coming of Photography in India (London: British Library). 14 Indian Documentary, 2 (2), Oct–Dec. 1955. 15 Indian Documentary, Annual Number 1957, 41–2. 16 Rosaleen Grierson Smythe, “The British Documentary Movement and Colonial Cinema in British Colonial Africa,” Film History 25, no. 4 (2013): 82–113. 17 For Sellers, James Flickering Burns, Shadows: Cinema and National Identity in Colonial Zimbabwe (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2002) and Tom Rice, Films for the Colonies: Cinema and the Preservation of the British Empire (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2019). 18 James Beveridge, “The Film in India; First Impressions,” Indian Documentary, 2, no. 1 (1955): 5. 19 Unless, of course, we consider that it is celluloid that brings these features into light and circulation, and that cinema as a register of material representation partakes of the world of petroleum as a by-product. 20 The film is now accessible through a special package of films provided online by the British Film Institute, to celebrate seventy years of Indian independence. 21 Vinzenz Hediger and Patrick Vondereau, Films That Work (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2009). 22 Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor Network Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). 23 Nadia Boziak, The Cinematic Footprint: Lights, Camera, Natural Resources (Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2012). 24 N. H. N. Rao (Compiled and Ed.), The Film Society Movement in India (Mumbai: The Asian Film Foundation Mumbai, 2009). 25 The Amateur Cine Society of India was the best known of these. Set up under the film industry’s Motion Picture Society of India, it was inaugurated

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in April 1937, and included the following members: the Illustrated Weekly editor Stanley Jepson, documentarist P. V. Pathy, A. J. Patel, camera dealer and later educational filmmaker and head of the key postproduction unit Film Centre, and equipment dealers Y. A. Fazalbhoy and V. G. Motwane, the latter also involved in short filmmaking. This lineup indicates the close ties between the film equipment trade and the cultivation of an amateur and documentary filmmaking orientation. Times of India, April 23, 1937. 26 In those years most “England-returned” went into Burmah-Shell or advertising, recalled theater director Waris Hussain of the1950s. “A Trio of Faces: Writer Atia Hosain and Her Children Waris Hussain and Shama Habibullah,” Times of India, June 18, 1995, p. 11. Shama Habibullah would have a substantial career in advertising and publicity films. Interview with Shama Habibullah by Ravi Vasudevan and Kanika Makhija, Mumbai, 2019. 27 “The Memorable Ones,” Times of India, September 22, 1991. 28 Paul Zils, “Ten Years: Documentary-Making in India – 1,” Indian Documentary, 2 (2), October–December 1955, 5–8, especially 5–6 for his stint in Germany; also T.D., Profile of a Documentary Director: Paul Zils, Indian Documentary, 4 (1) (Annual 1957): 48. 29 The Kulturfilm, http:​/​/www​​.film​​porta​​l​.de/​​en​/to​​pic​/t​​he​-ku​​​lturf​​i lm, accessed on August 14, 2015. 30 Janaki Nair, The Promise of the Metropolis: Bangalore’s Twentieth Century (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2005), 81–2. 31 In India’s Life and Part of It, Burmah-Shell brochure, Archive reference 195760, 1955, BP Archives. 32 For reflections on the modernist components of the trilogy’s film style, see Ravi Vasudevan, “The Double-Take of Modernism in the Work of Ray,” in Moinak Biswas (ed.), Apu and After (Kolkata: Sage, 2007). 33 Indian Documentary, 4 (1) Annual number, 1957, 47.

9 Creating Partners in Progress Shell Communicating Oil during Nigeria’s Independence Rudmer Canjels

T

he search for oil on the territory of what was later to become Nigeria started in 1903. From that time onward several international oil companies tried to locate and exploit mineral oil, largely to no avail. Nigerian oil is of good quality and in high demand for cheap processing into gasoline and high-quality diesel; however, it lies underneath an area of mangroves, swamps, and tropical forests, making production and transport difficult. Only in 1956 were commercially viable quantities of oil found by a joint venture of Royal Dutch Shell and British Petroleum, at that time the sole remaining oil company in Nigeria. The 1950s was a period of intense flux and political change, leading to an increase of countries that became independent from colonial rule. As a result, international operating companies were forced to change their operations in many (former) colonial countries, ranging from commercial strategies, staffing policy, or local and global public relations and advertisement strategies. Making use of local film production was seen as a useful and powerful instrument in these changing times. This chapter will focus on the difficult transitional period around the time of the independence of Nigeria (October 1960).1 The films not only were meant for a local Nigerian audience but were distributed by Shell’s own international film distribution network as well. This chapter will thus open up perspectives

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on the complex international, national, and local construction of a corporate image, especially in the transition to a postcolonial setting.

The Shell Film Unit Shell management recognized film as an ideal medium for reaching out and building public support for its activities and started the Shell Film Unit (SFU) in London in 1933 after consulting John Grierson. For several decades, Shell would produce hundreds of documentaries, often dealing with scientific and technological subjects, distributing them mainly nontheatrically in cooperation with educational and cultural organizations.2 There were differences in the use for local, national, and international handling of various films. Some films were more intended for local exhibition and limited distribution for specialized audiences, such as Venezuela Looks Ahead (1950) or Plant Pests and Diseases: Raspberry Beetle (1955); others were productions that were intended to get a wide release for a general audience from the start, such as Song of the Clouds (1955) or The River Must Live (1966). With some exceptions until the late 1970s, overall, prestige was to be obtained through association instead of by clear propaganda. The company name appeared in international productions only in the credit titles. As the company’s global reach expanded, additional film units were set up around the world. The Australian SFU was established in 1948 and Venezuela followed in 1952. Other units were set up in Egypt, Nigeria, India, and Southeast Asia. In these regions the films were often shown in a theatrical setting, but mobile units were sometimes used. Though the films of the national units were made for local consumption, some were distributed internationally, gaining fame and winning international film awards. With so much activity going on, it is perhaps no wonder that during the 1950s more than 130 Shell documentary films were made worldwide (Figure 9.1). In 1951, there were almost 160,000 screenings around the world with an audience of more than 8.5 million. In 1960, the international audience for the company’s films had grown to 45 million, with films showing on a regular basis in around thirty countries.3 Unfortunately, these audience numbers are according to Shell’s own public relations research at the time, so it is difficult to verify their accuracy. The Nigerian SFU was set up in 1959, initially for two years, but it would last for four, centered in Lagos. Douglas Gordon had joined the SFU as a trainee in 1954 and had been assistant director to Bert Haanstra’s The Rival World (1955) before directing several Shell films himself, such as The Ruthless One (1956) and Oil in Asia (1958). Gordon was sent with a small crew to

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FIGURE 9.1  An advertisement for the Shell Film Library and its films. The library contained over 120 films in 1956. Science and Film, June 1956, 2. Nigeria to train Nigerian technicians, mostly students, and act as manager and producer.4 The films would be made by a self-contained unit in Nigeria. Only the final stages of the film postproduction and sound editing would, together with adding the commentary and music recording, be done in London.5 The unit would consist of an expatriate producer as well as a director, cameraman, and editor, each having a Nigerian assistant (among them later accomplished film producer and documentary maker Levi Ezeasor). The expatriate staff would train the assistants in directing, camera work, and editing. Originally it was thought that Nigerian assistants might eventually take over their jobs, but it never seems to have gotten that far. Other staff members were a projectionist/handyman, a clerk, and a driver, all from Africa.6 For ­Shell-BP

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it was a hectic time; prospecting and mining licenses had to be secured and rentals, royalties, and profit taxes coming from oil had to be negotiated with the government. This while the company needed to spent millions of pounds per year to continue the search and production of oil as other foreign competition arrived as well. The cost of the Nigerian film unit was estimated at around £50,000 a year, around £750,000 in today’s money.7 The unit was set up to secure and propel Shell-BP’s image as a benefactor that brought vital economic assets to the country and had a wealth of experience, which, according to the company, were both needed by Nigeria. As Douglas Gordon wrote, “The successful ‘projection’ of this image may well prove an essential factor in the Company’s unhampered prosecution of its business.”8 The fact that Nigerians were working on these films was seen as beneficial to Shell-BP’s public image as well. Film was, according to Gordon, particularly suited for this job. The first films would be made “to win general approval rather than detailed understanding. [. . .] The emphasis should be on movement, drama, human interest and technical intricacies [should be] studiously avoided.”9 For this reason Gordon choose the feature director Frank Nesbitt as he “was not in the Shell vein or in the classic documentary vein because we knew we had to make films for African audiences in a different way.”10 The films had to be made in English, but spoken by a Nigerian, avoiding “detailed technical exposition and concentrate rather on dramatic action and human interest, but otherwise make no special allowances which might give the appearance of condescension.”11 The fact that there were diverse ethnic groups and linguistic diversity present in Nigeria (such as belonging to Igbo, Hausa, Fulani, and Yoruba) was not addressed. This personal touch and dramatic focus was rather different from the traditional Shell film made by the unit in London, which were indeed more technical overall. The Nigerian unit was set up in Lagos, instead of the oil town Port Harcourt, as Gordon said, “no, if I’m going to do a public relations job with the Nigerian public, I mustn’t become an oil field man.” Thereby Gordon imitated Grierson’s notion of detachment, as could also be seen in the arrangement between the Film Centre and Shell, set up by Grierson to function as a liaison between documentary filmmakers and sponsors. In its four years of existence, the Nigerian unit would make around ten films.12

Filming Oil The first two films, made by the same team of a British director, cameraman, and editor, each having a Nigerian assistant, were The Search for Oil in

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Nigeria and Oilman’s Move, both released in 1961. The two films were shown, according to Gordon, first at several Independence Festival celebrations in Nigeria.13 Both films made clear to Nigerian audiences the difficulties of searching for oil and showing Shell as having the skills and knowledge to pull it off. The films could be rented for free by educational institutions and were used by the mobile cinema vans touring the country shown to educationalists, students, and politicians, to “further economic, social and educational progress”14 (Figure 9.2). In The Search for Oil in Nigeria both Nigerian and Europeans work together, though those in overall charge are European and mostly British. The first persons to be shown in the film are those from an expedition in a jungle, sitting upfront in a boat on the river. As the boat arrives from afar the voice-over tells us that the expedition’s leaders are in the boat. The first person to receive a close-up is a white man in charge of the surveying, followed by a close-up of his white partner, the head of the exploration party, who is sitting next to him. They wear clean white shirts and sunglasses. Both are introduced by name, after which their Nigerian assistant who is sitting behind them (and doesn’t get an individual close-up) is introduced as well. The authority of the group is thus made very clear, being presented as the source of planning know-how and oversight, working together closely with Nigerians.

FIGURE 9.2 Shell-BP’s “cinerovers” would tour various districts and regions of Nigeria with a 16 mm projector, a generator, speakers, and a collapsible screen on the roof. “More Requests for Films,” Shell-BP Bulletin, May 1963, no. 1, 3.

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The racial differences and cross-cultural cooperation are elements of the film, which were, indeed, seen as important by Shell, as the promotional film pamphlet mentioned it was thought especially suitable for screenings “to students both from an educational and recruitment point of view, particularly in countries where there is a colour as well as a white population.”15 Other onscreen workers, reporting under the British managers, are also introduced by name by the voice-over, though they are not seen working together within the frame. The idea of black and white cooperation is however exemplified by the brochure that accompanied the film. On the front side, a Nigerian employer is looking at the recording of a seismographic echo print and points to something; on the back, a white Shell employer holds the other end of the print and looks at where his colleague is pointing. As could also be seen in advertisements by other expatriate companies at the time, the message was that through technology and tools the colonizer and colonized would come together. In the film, however, it is clear that the roles are reversed. The Nigerian merely helps to hold the long end of the echo print and has no active part in analyzing it. Only the white employer seems to study it, and the Nigerian employer is not pointing anything out. During the early 1950s European enterprises were encouraged to adopt Africanization policies (actively increasing the number of Africans working in a company); there was, however, no official governmental policy to guide this process. Consequently, the Nigerianization of European companies tended to proceed at a snail’s pace. Shell-BP was no exception. By 1954 the company listed only three Nigerians as occupying senior-level positions out of a total workforce of over two thousand. African environmental historian Phia Steyn suggests the slow tempo was the result of a deliberate decision to train only a few senior-grade Nigerians for integration with the European staff.16 Unlike The Search for Oil in Nigeria, the brochure for the next film, Oilman’s Move, does not focus on working together but shows many Nigerians working. On this brochure almost only Nigerians are seen. The whiteness comes mostly from their shirts, which in the film is a sign of more important job functions as manager or coordinator—those who do not get very dirty. The film is about the moving of a drilling platform to a new drilling site, with the main characters of Guy Mayes, manager in charge of the rig, who works together with petroleum engineer Onyeabor Ogodazi. This film’s intended focus was the company’s Africanization policy. For according to the film’s pamphlet it showed “very clearly that Nigerians are employed in responsible and senior positions. This should be very helpful in promoting the ‘partners in progress’ theme.”17 Since 1959 Shell had been promoting this theme in advertisements meant for Nigerian newspapers and magazines, as they pointed out that through

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Shell the benefits of modernization came to Nigeria as a result of the products needed to keep the country literally running but also because they enabled the extraction of oil through its technical and scientific resources.18 It was a promotion that also was linked with a different Nigerian ad campaign, called Shell People. Ability and Experience, which focused on Shell employees’ personal experiences and educational histories before they became, say, an aviation superintendent, a public relations spokesperson, or manager of distribution and supplies. A large photograph of the person was featured in these series of advertisements, thus focusing on the personal (Figure 9.3). This way of presenting Nigerians who assumed senior positions or received overseas training within Shell-BP was quite common within the Shell-BP’s Nigerian monthly magazine, Shell-BP Bulletin (later renamed Oil Search Bulletin). These magazines were produced for the general public, presenting news of the company’s operations, explaining techniques and problems of oil exploration, and having a circulation of around 10,000 copies. Often on the front page,

FIGURE 9.3 The personal experience and history of Mr. Badejo was part of the Shell People advertisement campaign. West African Review, Oct. 1959, 640.

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photographic portraits of employees were printed with a short biography of their lives and where they worked within Shell-BP.19 Thus, together these campaigns could promote the company’s technological resources, their contribution to the country by actively hiring Nigerians while creating a sense of community among Shell people. Compared to UAC’s (Unilever’s subsidiary) Men of Tomorrow campaign (printed in the same magazine, only two pages away from that of Shell), with their drawn Nigerians in important active and responsible positions, “the manager,” “the sales manager,” “the accountant,” and “the technician,” Shell’s seems more down to earth, belonging to an exciting time already taking place (instead of a possible tomorrow) and more personal.20

Working for the Oil Industry As noted, the Nigerianization of European companies tended to proceed slowly during the 1950s. Oil companies with prospecting licenses were obligated by government law to train Nigerians as skilled labor, and technical and administrative staff. According to Ludwig Schätzl, this was done to prevent additional strain on the Nigerian labor market that had a scarcity of skilled workers. However, the law only gave general directions to train skilled workers and did not define the extent of this obligation.21 In January 1959 Shell proudly claimed to have forty Nigerians in senior staff positions. Considering that over five thousand people worked for the company in Nigeria, this was not that impressive. Shell complained, however, that the training schools had difficulty attracting students as those “with the right qualifications and aptitude have not been forthcoming in sufficient number.”22 Presumably after The Search for Oil in Nigeria, Shell-BP made a Nigerianspecific film that targeted this potential, yet underdeveloped, labor market: Nigeria’s Oilmen (1962). This color film functioned as an advertisement and promotion to show the employment opportunities and training schemes for Nigerians who wanted to assume responsible positions within Shell-BP, rather than a film with an educational or informational interest at its basis. From the beginning Shell-BP’s name is mentioned, logos are shown, and the Shell-BP center in Port Harcourt and Shell-BP people are introduced. As Nigeria’s Oilmen was set up as an advertisement to gather a Nigerian workforce that would improve productivity, the film clearly was not meant to be seen outside its Nigerian context. It indeed seems never to have been released in the UK or any other country.23 After mentioning that the oil in Nigeria was found by the men of ShellBP, the Nigerian voice-over asks what skills are necessary to bring this oil

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successfully onto the world market. Nigeria’s Oilmen then follows loosely a group of apprentices who have just arrived at the Shell-BP trade school in Port Harcourt, supposedly chosen out of twenty thousand applicants. They are first welcomed by the Dutch principal of the Shell-BP trade school. Through the group of apprentices, the film illustrates the various skills and jobs needed by the company and the training courses they offer to Nigerians. In a fourminute sequence set to only upbeat music, the apprentices are shown being taught theory and practice by several white (presumably Dutch) lecturers. The sequence ends with them playing soccer together. Then, the voice-over returns and introduces specialized skills, each receiving a short explanation, mostly related to new equipment and mechanization processes (from punch card machines, radios, microscopic research, to drilling equipment). These instructors (such as a drill pipe handler, a petroleum engineer, a telecommunication engineer, or a transport supervisor) are introduced by name. For those from Nigeria, and during this section most of them are black, usually a short background history is given, underlining their growth within the company, reminiscent of the Shell-BP Bulletin. Walter Okala, also seen in Oilman’s Move, is thus introduced as: “He has come a long way in the Company’s service since he joined in 1948. Then he was clerk to an exploration party. Now he is transport supervisor—a specialist with experience of land vehicles, aircraft, and water transport.” Interestingly, the voice-over in Nigeria’s Oilmen was by the Nigerian Yemi Lijadu, producer at the Nigerian Broadcasting Service and actor in several plays by Nigerian poet and playwright Wole Soyinka.

Voices and Music Like all Shell films from that period there is usually no synchronized speech within the frame and commentators are only heard, not seen. This might have been a consequence of the many international language versions that were needed, making it much easier to change the language of the unseen voice-overs. Most Shell commentaries explained scientific and technological advances to the audience by using a voice-over in “received pronunciation,” the standard English accent spoken in the South of England. These commentators were never given credit in the titles, even though some of the voice talent in those Shell films made and released in Britain must have been known to the audience, such as Stephen Murray, Michael Goodliffe, Andrew Faulds, James McKechnie, or Gary Watson, who worked in theater, television, or for BBC radio. However, most of the voices used during the 1950s–1960s era are not known.

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It is possible that colleagues from the production team were employed to read voice-overs, as was also the standard practice with the films produced by the General Post Office (GPO).24 Thus, for the English versions of the Venezuelan Shell films, the director R. K. Neilson Baxter was asked to provide a voice-over for Caracas (1956), and Stuart Legg did the commentary for Land of Grace (Rostros de Venezuela, 1964). For the Nigerian films, however, a different strategy was used, one that also underlined the production talent’s collaboration with Nigerians. The Search for Oil in Nigeria is not narrated by a native British speaker but by the writer and political activist Wole Soyinka (who later received the Nobel Prize in Literature).25 Using local voice talent for internationally released films was a very recent development. In local Shell unit films that were internationally released, like Caracas, Lake Pipeline (1958), or Oil in Asia (made by Gordon), British voice-over talent was still used.26 From the early 1960s, however, it became common practice within Shell to use local voice-over talent for at least the English version (as several other language versions also existed), communicating for viewers that they were seeing an authentic portrayal of Nigerians working in the oil industry. The local voice-over also lessened the colonial feel many of the colonial film units and federal film units still had. The international Shell version for The Search for Oil in Nigeria left the credit sequence of the original Shell-BP version intact, stating the name of the narrator. For Oilman’s Move there was a shorter international version made. These credits were adjusted and moved to the beginning of the film, with it the narrator Adamu Mohammed and calypso singer Sammy (Samuel) Akpabot lost their credits.27 Like the voice-over, the music used in these Shell films was related to Nigeria. With The Search for Oil in Nigeria, Shell used music by the Nigerianborn Akin Euba, whom in the early 1950s had studied piano and composition at the Trinity College of Music, London. Euba returned to Nigeria in 1957 and started working for the Nigerian Broadcasting Corporation while composing music. Throughout the film, drums and flute are mostly used, especially when Nigerians are shown working, making musical linkages to more traditional and tribal music for the Western viewer. The music for Oilman’s Move used a more varied musical palette, performed by the highlife bands of Ambrose Campbell and Fitzroy Coleman.28 Highlife music is characterized by jazzy horns and multiple guitars that lead the band. The term came into use when prestige entertainment bands blended traditional West African rhythms and Caribbean calypso melodies with European musical elements, and thus transcended class and cultural markers. Ambrose Campbell was born in Nigeria and arrived in London during the war. There, he became the leader of the West

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African Rhythm Brothers, associated with Caribbean musicians, and had a great influence on London’s Highlife and Jazz community in the 1950s. Fitzroy Coleman came originally from Trinidad and played guitar on many West Indian records made in London in the 1950s. The highlife music Campbell and Coleman played developed in the 1920s and 1930s, first in Ghana then in Lagos and western Nigeria, where it had a long-lasting impact on popular music. In Nigeria the very popular highlife music symbolized progress, modernity, internationalism, and the independence, thereby making it an interesting, but fitting choice for Shell to use in their promotional campaign.29 In Oilman’s Move, the music (percussions and trumpet, backed by singing) starts during the opening credits and continues as the relocation of an oilrig and its destination are explained by the voice-over. During the film uptempo music with its rhythmic jazz motifs returns every now and then, mostly when showing the slow-moving transport of trucks, making the work seem more flowing. When the oil rig tower is raised, a trumpet mimics the raising by playing ever-higher notes. In the middle of the film the Nigerian-born Sammy Akpabot sings a calypso song and explains the troubles the trucks have traveling on the watery roads, and even getting stuck. A calypso is a type of music that originated in the West Indies, notably in Trinidad, having their origins in the West African griot tradition (an oral historian, storyteller, poet) and is characterized by improvised lyrics on topical, political, or broadly humorous subjects.30 Like Campbell and Coleman, Akpabot had studied and played in London. Virtually all of his work is typified by a recurring approach in which elements of highlife music are combined with those of his traditional culture.31 It seems likely that the use of highlife and calypso music in Oilman’s Move was influenced by the use of Akpabot’s extremely popular song in the Ghanaian short Barclay bank commercial Put Una Money for There (1956).32 The Barclay commercial won first prize at the Cannes film festival for advertising. Akpabot would continue to make calypsos for industry.33 The music in The Search for Oil in Nigeria and Oilman’s Move thus weaves the sounds and music of immigrants together with those influenced by British and Western culture, tapping into a rich cultural mixture of high and low, the old and new, urban progress and the rural, the local and the foreign. The use of nonreceived pronunciation, using dialects, even the heavy accents in the calypso, must also have related to the idea of intimacy and authenticity, qualities Grierson advocated as the ideal aim of a good commentary.34 Thus just by listening to the commentary track and music, Nigerian Shell films signaled they were not something from the typical Shell mold, which most commonly had a voice-over narrated by a native British speaker, used a contemporary Western score, while not avoiding technical details.35

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Versions and Release There exist two versions for The Search for Oil in Nigeria, a Shell-BP version as well as a slightly adjusted Shell version for international release. The voiceover in the international version does not mention Shell-BP anymore (originally four times). This elision of branding was common for many international Shell films at the time, so it is logical they would also adjust the original Shell-BP version. Additionally, in the main title Shell-BP is replaced by Shell and the film ends with a Shell logo. Apparently, Shell did not have any obligations toward BP as the film’s international distributor, as BP is thus completely excluded in this international version. For the international release of Oilman’s Move, the original version was reedited and shortened, trimming several extended shots and reducing scenes. Originally thirty minutes, the international version of Oilman’s Move was eight minutes shorter. The original Shell-BP film is much more clear about its sponsorship, mentioning Shell-BP several times in the voice-over as well in the calypso song. It even mentions the name of the Dutch drilling contractor from whom the rig belonged. Besides the use of branding and references to specific well-known locations in Nigeria (in order to explain the depth being drilled), the longer version also incorporates more children and villagers watching in awe at the rig’s construction and transport, Walter Okala receives a longer and earlier introduction, and several Nigerian lorry drivers get more screen time. Similar to the international version of The Search for Oil in Nigeria, in the international version of Oilman’s Move only Shell is mentioned in the credits. So, there was a clear distinction between the use of and the rhetoric attached to the films for national and international distribution. Both The Search for Oil in Nigeria and Oilman’s Move had a long international distribution history; in 1971 they were still listed in Shell’s international film catalog. Unfortunately, little is known about the initial release of the first three Shell-BP films in Nigeria, but it is safe to assume that they traveled on mobile cinema vans and were offered for distribution. Shell-BP or regional Nigerian newspapers contain no advertisements for these films, and they are barely mentioned. According to a newspaper article both Shell and BP started to use separate mobile cinema vans in 1961. Shell gave their first show for an audience of 350 in Ebute-Metta (a suburb of Lagos) on May 10, 1961, with many educationalists, students, and politicians present. The Shell cinema van would tour the surrounding districts and western region of Nigeria, to “further economic, social and educational progress.” BP had two land rovers, one equipped with a 16 mm projector, a generator, and a collapsible screen on the roof, the other to carry the camping equipment and the gear for the ­operator

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and the two drivers. It also would tow “a trailer which can be opened up to make a display stand for BP products.”36 The BP mobile film unit would be used “to show the films about the oil industry in Nigeria to the people.” The film van would, according to the BP public relations manager, tour all the remote parts of the country, especially those areas where there was no electricity.37 It seems likely that the Shell-BP films were also shown with both these mobile film units. Mobile cinemas remained popular for a long time, drawing crowds well into in the 1960s.38 In the UK, Shell used Nigeria in their public relations material aimed at schools. In June 1960, just prior to the release of the films and Nigerian independence, a new program within their “Aids for Teachers” campaign was advertised, which would present “the country of Nigeria through the eyes of people working in the pioneer oil industry there.”39 For the cost of ten pence, schools would receive nine illustrated newsletters throughout the school year with topical information on Nigeria as told by a helicopter pilot who gets in contact with different people throughout the country. An additional folder would contain more background information, maps, a geological clock, and a blueprint of a drilling rig. Notes for teachers and other aids, such as an eyewitness account of Independence Day, would be used as well. The advertisement for this campaign used a drawn image that is similar to the final image of Oilman’s Move. A helicopter hovers above a forest where a road is cut out of endless rows of trees, leading to an open spot where some houses, oil storage tankers, and a tall rig is standing. No people or other villages can be seen. The image shows the human-altered landscape, accessed through technology, which Shell is controlling from the land and from above. The films from the Nigerian SFU were not advertised within a special Nigerian program in the UK, but were seen as fit for a general audience and could be used according to the film’s brochure in schools, as a supplementary aid in geography teaching. The films could also be used in relation to other booklets and charts on oil drilling and oil in general.40 The Search for Oil in Nigeria was advertised in specialized film magazines, with ads showing a drawing of a Shell tour operator inviting everybody to see the world with Shell, highlighting three stills from exotic-looking films made by various local SFUs.41 The advertisement thus position the locally made films within an exotic framework, suggesting that they allow the viewer to travel in the cinema to experience unknown cultures and different people. The films themselves hardly were given any reviews. In the film magazines geared to industrial and nontheatrical film, The Search for Oil in Nigeria received only a few general comments, rather than extended reviews. Industrial Screen thought the film was not for Western audiences but would be successful in Nigeria.42 Film User also thought the film would be more suitable in Nigeria. “While the film is p ­ resumably of considerable value for Nigerian audiences it adds nothing to the information

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non-specialist audiences here possess of such work. However the impressive picture of the delta conditions, and some local atmosphere which it captures, makes this useful material for the geography teacher.”43

Conclusion Corporations are very sensitive when it comes to their public image and carefully control media representations. In early 1998 Shell reportedly planned to spend $160 million on “post-crisis advertising,” at a time when the managing director of Royal Dutch Shell claimed it was “in danger of losing the communications battle.”44 Nowadays this “communications battle” is rarely done through the production of films. But before the 1970s, when films without a clear “hard sell” would become increasingly difficult to produce and corporations would start to make and distribute fewer industrial films, film was a very common method to communicate a positive image of the company to a broader audience. Though nowhere near present-day advertising budgets, Shell-BP spent several millions of pounds in today’s currency making films that were produced in Nigeria and intended primarily for local use. Though it remains unclear how much these films contributed to achieving Shell’s goal of seamless continued operations in Nigeria, my research has shown how invested Shell was in creating a corporate image while the political and cultural landscape was shifting. From my research, it becomes clear that Shell-BP was much more than a passive observer during the decolonization process. Shell’s industrial films were planned and executed with explicit public relations objectives in mind and reveal a strong desire to forge a close bond between multinational corporations and the (post) colonial government and their citizens. Rather than focus on the technical exposition that had been perfected by the SFU in London Shell, the film unit in Nigeria also more explicitly showcased human interest stories and created a dramatic focus to underline the connection of the company with Nigerians. Local voice talent and music with a connection to Africa and Nigeria were intended to authenticate the corporate image and support the claims of cooperation and joint growth made in the films. For Shell, the rhetoric framing and distribution strategies vary accordingly for national and international distribution. Some films were only meant for distribution in Nigeria, while others were produced in several different versions and launched with a different advertising campaign for international distribution. Through film Shell could present themselves to local and worldwide ­audiences as a stable, forward-looking, technology-advanced trading partner that played an important positive role in Nigerian economic and social development and

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progress. This chapter thus also underlines the significance of the processes and dynamics of industrial film. While serving as an advertisement or promotional spot for a product, process, or company, industrial films also transmitted important technical, political, cultural, and social discourses.

Notes 1 For more information on the Nigerian industrial films from Shell as well as Unilever in this period, see Canjels, The Dynamics of Celluloid on the Road to Independence: Unilever and Shell in Nigeria (Hilversum: Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision, 2017). 2 For a historical overview of the SFU, see Canjels, “From Oil to Celluloid: A History of Shell Films,” in A History of Royal Dutch Shell. Vol. 4, ed. Jan Luiten van Zanden (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). 3 John Drummond, Shell Film Operations, December 16, 1960. Shell Film & Video Unit archive (SFVU), PAC 21 B SFU 14. 4 His initial crew was editor Roy Ayton, director Frank Nesbitt, and cameraman Maurice Picot. Director Richard Taylor and Philip Owtram came later. 5 Douglas Gordon, “Films in Shell-BP. Interim Report,” June 1959, 5. Bert Haanstra archive, EYE Filmmuseum Amsterdam, 136/A 6-4 6 Ibid., 6. 7 “Minutes of 18th meeting, Group Film Committee,” The Hague, July 2, 1959, 6. Haanstra archive. 8 “There is, in fact good reason to believe that a fruitful and harmonious relationship will develop [between the company and the leaders of Nigerian opinion], but this is by no means inevitable. The pressures to which their relationship could be subjected are many and varied; they form a part of the great question mark which is the future of Africa and its place in the world.” Gordon, “Films in Shell-BP,” 5. 9 Ibid., 2–3. 10 Gordon, Transcript interview recorded May 18, 1983, 8. SFVU, PAC/21 B SFU 11. 11 Gordon, “Films in Shell-BP,” 2–3. 12 Gordon thinks there were eleven or twelve films produced. I have not been able to identify all of them: The Search for Oil in Nigeria (1961), Oilman’s Move (1961), Nigeria’s Oilmen (1962), Nigerian Harvest (1962/63), The World—Our Market (1963), and Framework for a Nation (1963). There were also at least four Shell-BP Cinemagazines. Announced in 1963 was a production called Nigeria’s Natural Resources, though perhaps this was later retitled into Framework for a Nation. 13 Gordon, Transcript, 8. 14 Brian Larkin discusses the fascinating use of media technologies and the use of mobile cinema in colonial and postcolonial Nigeria. Commercial

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cinema was for instance seen by mainstream Hausa society as a lowerclass and un-Islamic activity; mobile cinema was accepted, however. Brian Larkin, Signal and Noise: Media, Infrastructure, and Urban Culture in Nigeria (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), 123–4. 15 Film pamphlet, The Search for Oil in Nigeria. 16 Unfortunately, sources are very limited on this subject. Phia Steyn, “Oil Exploration in Colonial Nigeria, C. 1903–58,” The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 37, no. 2 (2009): 265. 17 Film pamphlet, Oilman’s Move. 18 The same slogan “Partners in Progress” was also used in the early 1990s, when Shell was getting more negative publicity for the environmental damage done in the Niger Delta and its treatment of the Ogoni people. Advertisement, West African Review, December 1959, 864. 19 “More Nigerians Assume Senior Positions in Shell-BP,” Shell-BP Bulletin, no. 14 (April 1965): 1. 20 The first Shell advertisement uses a drawn image, the later three use photographs. Advertisement, West African Review, October 1959, 638. 21 Ludwig H. Schätzl, Petroleum in Nigeria (Ibadan: Oxford University Press, 1969), 78–82. 22 “Training Nigeria’s Own Oilmen,” Oil Search Bulletin (January 1959): 2. “Growing Up with Nigeria,” Shell-BP Bulletin, no. 5 (October 1963): 1. 23 The film thus falls within the category of rationalization for improving organizational performance, one of the three main areas of purpose that Vinzenz Hediger and Patrick Vonderau argue industrial film can fall into (record and rhetoric being the other two). Hediger and Vonderau. “Record, Rhetoric, Rationalization. Industrial Organization and Film,” in Films That Work: Industrial Film and the Productivity of Media, ed. Vinzenz Hediger and Patrick Vonderau (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2009), 40. 24 Martin Stollery, “Voiceover/Commentary,” in The Projection of Britain: A History of the GPO Film Unit, ed. Scott Anthony and James G. Mansell (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 170. 25 African Awakening (1962) from UAC would also use Soyinka’s voice as well as show scenes from one of his plays performed in Ibadan. Soyinka lived and worked in London during 1954–9. 26 One exception is the films from Shell-Burmah. This local unit used in the 1950s Indian voice talent and showed their names in the credits, such as with The Weavers of Maindargi (1956) or Maharajah Meets a Challenge (1959). These were not released internationally. 27 There are no local Nigerian-language versions known for the Shell films, so translation by a commentator would sometimes have been necessary, creating the risk of transforming a film. 28 The music was conducted by composers Edward Williams and Marcus Dodd. Williams came in to the Film Unit by way of Lionel Cole, whom he knew from university. His first scoring was for How an Aeroplane Flies, Part 4: Thrust (1947).

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29 John Collins and Paul Richards, “Popular Music in West Africa,” in World Music, Politics and Social Change, ed. Simon Frith (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1991), 26. 30 E. M. Edet, “Music in Nigeria,” African Music 3, no. 3 (1964): 111–13. 31 In 1954 a scholarship enabled Akpabot to travel to England and enroll in the Royal College of Music in London. Akpabot returned to Nigeria in 1959 to become broadcaster at the Nigerian Broadcasting Corporation, while continuing his compositional career. Bode Omojola, Nigerian Art Music (Ibadan: Institut Français de Recherche en Afrique, 1995), 38–9. 32 Stephanie Decker, “Corporate Legitimacy and Advertising: British Companies and the Rhetoric of Development in West Africa, 1950–1970,” Business History Review 81, no. 1 (2007): 66. Another influence for the use of highlife might be the success of the feature film The Boy Kumasenu (1952), made by the colonial Gold Coast Film Unit from Ghana, in which highlife (instrumental) music played an important role. Emma Sandon, “Cinema and Highlife in the Gold Coast: The Boy Kumasenu (1952),” Social Dynamics 39, no. 3 (2013): 496–519. 33 In UAC’s The New Traders (1962), Akpabot’s prominently placed calypso comments (at times humorously) on the new opportunities of trading in West Africa. 34 Stollery, “Voiceover/Commentary,” 172. 35 The two parts of Getting Down to Oil (1964) by the SFU (which reused footage from the Nigerian film unit) did away with the local connections, added used music by Edward Williams and choose the voice of Patrick Wymark for the voice-over. 36 “All about Mobile Cinema. Shell and BP,” Daily Express, June 14, 1961: 6. 37 “Alake sees B.P. Film,” Daily Times, June 12, 1961: 2. 38 “Films on British Life Shown in Lagos,” Daily Times, June 22, 1961: 2. 39 Advertisement, Visual Education, June 1960. Unfortunately, this campaign material could not be found. Shell (like other international companies) had in various countries an educational service with specially designed aids for teachers, which could contain diagrams, filmstrips, models, drawings, wall charts, booklets, and films on various subjects. 40 Film pamphlet, Oilman’s Move. Suggested were for instance a booklet called Oil for Everybody and charts called Where Can Oil Be Found? and Drilling for Oil, presumably all produced by Shell as well. 41 Advertisement. Film User (November 1962): 567. 42 “The Search for Oil in Nigeria,” Industrial Screen (January/February 1962): 282. 43 “The Search for Oil in Nigeria,” Film User (September 1961): 487. 44 John Vidal, “Eco Soundings,” The Guardian (March 25, 1998): B4. In comparison, in 1971 six of the largest firms (Exxon, Shell, Amoco, Gulf, Mobil, and Texaco) collectively spent more than $110 million on advertising. Robert J. Samuelson, “The Oil Companies and the Press,” Columbia Journalism Review 12, no. 5 (1974): 13.

10 “Fueling Apartheid” Documentary Film in the Service of Apartheid Jacqueline Maingard

S

outh Africa’s Life Line is a short documentary film produced in South Africa in the 1950s, after the South African National Party was elected by the white electorate in 1948 and established an apartheid state. The film both propagates the central importance of oil to life in South Africa in the midtwentieth century and promotes Caltex oil and its by-products, including Caltex petrol. Caltex had been established in the United States in 1936 as the California Texas Oil Company, a combined business venture between the Texas Company (later known as Texaco) and Standard Oil (later the Chevron Corporation), that expanded globally including to South Africa. The film was produced by the powerful Schlesinger Organisation’s production company, African Film Productions (AFP), that held a virtual monopoly over the production of nonfiction films in South Africa up to the late 1950s.1 This was due in large measure to the relationship that I. W. Schlesinger had forged and sustained with successive governments since he had first entered the entertainment industry in 1913. Moreover, his organization, and AFP in particular, had a long-standing reputation in the production of nonfiction in both English and Afrikaans. Apart from international award-winning and government-sponsored documentary films, the Schlesinger Organisation had pioneered what became the longest-running newsreel in the world, African Mirror.2 AFP was thus well poised from 1948 through the 1950s for the continued award of commissions

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from industry and the South African government after the National Party came to power. Research into South Africa’s Life Line confirms that it was exhibited as an educational film as the only catalog in which it appears is that of the Western Cape Provincial Library in South Africa, formerly the Cape Provincial Library, which distributed 16 mm films to schools and universities across the country. The catalog lists the film as a Caltex production, made by AFP. The Schlesinger Organisation was vertically integrated, thereby facilitating the exhibition of sponsored films that AFP made. It is possible therefore that the film was distributed for exhibition in the programmed lineup of newsreel and short documentaries prior to the main feature screened in commercial cinemas in South Africa. There is no evidence that it was screened internationally nor are there any critical reviews. The film itself does not include details of sponsorship and the credits identify AFP as the film’s single producer but the prevalence of the Caltex logo throughout the film underscores Caltex’s role in sponsoring it. Caltex prided itself on unobtrusively incorporating its brand images and explicitly avoided crediting its sponsorship in its films.3 It therefore fits the category of “sponsored film.”4 I would argue however that it was not the type of sponsored film that focused singularly on the “process” of manufacture. It certainly devotes large segments of the film to “process” information that includes the shipping of oil to South Africa, its transport across the country, and its deployment in, and importance for, a vast range of other manufacturing processes, all within the context of modernity. But it elides Caltex oil not only with oil per se, in other words countering other oil companies such as Shell, but also with the making and sustaining of a modern South Africa. In doing so, it submits a proposition of an imagined South Africa without oil that feeds into wider concerns at the time about possible future economic sanctions against apartheid. It is thus a sponsored film with a difference, ideologically pinned to the hegemony of apartheid. South Africa’s Life Line has been lodged in an educational lending library since its production in the 1950s and would therefore have been seen primarily by (white) schoolboys and girls during apartheid. It is a curious object however, in that very little is known about it and virtually nothing is written on it. In this chapter I revive the film’s production contexts and discuss how the film articulates a vision of South Africa under threat of economic sanctions, before they had been advanced as a viable political proposition. I locate the film in the political context of the first calls for sanctions in the early 1950s and discuss the strategies that the film’s cowriter and director, Donald Swanson, employs to convey a perspective that promotes a modern South Africa. A close textual analysis of the film shows how the combination of an omnipotent voice-over narration with a musical soundtrack that provides emphasis in key moments,

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and illustrated by visuals, describes the significance of oil to South Africa’s continuing prosperity. As a Caltex-sponsored film, produced two years before a further film, South Africa—Land of Endeavour (1957), was made as part of the Caltex International Film Series. I also briefly compare the two films in the light of South Africa’s Life Line and its propagandistic tone.

Production Contexts It is worthwhile to consider South Africa’s Life Line within the context of AFP’s production of nonfiction films, which had become its mainstay from the 1920s when competition from the United States in the production of fiction films had become too steep and it was cheaper for local exhibitors to lease popular entertainment films than to support local product.5 Schlesinger’s winning formula for dominating the film industry was not only to establish a dedicated film studio as early as 1915 (in Killarney, Johannesburg) and to invite skilled directors to South Africa to work with AFP but also to court favor with successive governments as well as with the ministries and officials of departments such as agriculture, commerce, and industry over more than three decades. AFP undertook commissions from the state, government departments, provincial and municipal bodies, large industrial conglomerates such as the Chamber of Mines, as well as bodies like the South African Police, and other parastatals such as the South African Wool Board. Some of the films AFP produced were therefore significant for the claims they made regarding national histories and identities.6 Although Schlesinger died in 1949, his son, John, inherited the organization and its assets, and his father’s strategic positioning with government continued through the 1950s under his chairmanship. In 1956, 20th Century Fox began deliberations with the organization to purchase its film-related companies and assets, culminating in 1959. On first viewing the film, South Africa’s Life Line, it is particularly striking that the voice-over narration incorporates a challenge in the form of direct address, when the viewer is asked to imagine what South Africa would be like without oil. This comes at a point when the film has carefully elaborated the importance of sea routes, as the means by which oil arrives in South Africa’s harbors, from whence it is transported by rail to other parts of the country. The idea of South Africa without oil is given visual emphasis when movement within the image is brought to a halt as the narrator describes the catastrophic effects of this occurrence. The film thereby asserts that without oil, modernity and civilization itself would come to an end. The question thus arises concurrently as to the influence of the calls for sanctions against South Africa in the

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period following the National Party’s victory in 1948. Specifically, could it hold true that the film acts as a riposte to those with sway in international political arenas who were protesting against apartheid in the early 1950s and arguing the case for international action against South Africa? The film itself is undated, but the catalog lists it as being produced sometime in the 1950s. Judging by the images of ships, cars, trains, people, clothing, and the like, it was most probably produced toward the mid-1950s, coinciding with the very first calls for economic sanctions against apartheid. But before extending the discussion of the politics of the 1950s linked to this likely timing of the film’s production, it would be useful first to describe more fully the film’s production contexts. The script for South Africa’s Life Line is credited to both Swanson and Frank Secker. Photography is credited to Ronnie Shears (with two others).7 Swanson and Shears had worked together on several commissions for Gaumont-British International (GBI) in the 1940s, as well as independent features, and Swanson and Secker had worked together on AFP commissions. Although there is no directorial credit in the film, it would clearly have been down to Swanson, particularly since he had cowritten the script and worked regularly as writerdirector, with Shears and Secker. Secker is also this film’s narrator. He was the narrator on AFP’s newsreel African Mirror and on many other AFP documentaries, and his voice was well-known to both South African and international film audiences. Swanson was one of AFP’s stalwart writer-directors in the late 1940s up to the mid-1950s. His credits for AFP include the commentary for South African Cavalcade (Suid Afrikaanse Kavalkade, 1952) and More Precious than Gold (Kosbaarder as Goud, 1953), both produced by AFP for the South African State Information Office; the direction of The 1820 Settlers (1954), sponsored by the South African State Information Services; and the script (with Emil Nofal) for The Call of the Karroo (1954), for the South African Wool Board.8 He was thus well-versed in both the requirements of films made for the apartheid state and AFP’s production protocols. Swanson’s career had begun in Britain, in 1946, when he had worked for GBI on its British Railways educational series, as scriptwriter for two of the three films in the series, Down to the Sea in Trucks (1947) and Thirty Million Acres (1947). The series celebrates modernity and Britain’s role in its progress, in the form and style of the British documentary tradition initially established by John Grierson through the GPO film unit.9 Swanson’s subsequent documentary work continued to display his abiding interest in processes of industrialization and the means of modern transportation. He emulated the documentary strategies he had learned in GBI on the British Railways series, including the use of an omnipotent voice-over narration and its accompanying, illustrative visual track.

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Swanson accepted his first “African assignment” (the title of his memoirs) in 1949, after GBI opened offices in Johannesburg in 1946, which led to the production of a drama-documentary, Chisoko the African (1949).10 This film celebrates Britain’s civilizing mission in Africa through the story of a young man, Chisoko, who leaves his village to find work on the mines on the (then) Northern Rhodesian Copperbelt.11 The film posits the proposed values of civilization against the perceived primitivism of premodern village life, thereby promoting the worthy prospects of working in the Copperbelt mines. Swanson subsequently settled in Johannesburg where he took up further commissions for both GBI and AFP. He now extended the formula he had learned and adopted in GBI to promoting South African industry and the apartheid state, using the same strategic documentary approaches. It is important to note that Swanson is best known for two independent films African Jim (1949) and The Magic Garden (1951) that he wrote and directed, centralizing black protagonists and showcasing black performers and jazz musicians that were specifically aimed at black audiences. These films’ popularity at the time, and since, endows them with a key place in the history of cinema in South Africa. Notwithstanding the power of these films for black South African audiences, Swanson’s involvement in both film productions was aimed at expediently tapping into the local, urban, black entertainment market. This market had previously been virtually ignored by local film producers. Circumstances militated against his further exploitation of this short-lived market, not only due to the quashing of black cultural expression under apartheid but, more particularly, in the form of his own conservative politics that led to frictions and fractures with, for example, his producer for African Jim.12 Ultimately, Swanson was more comfortable sustaining a working relationship with AFP, particularly since the company was not short of production work. By 1954, when the AFP office in Nairobi was commissioned by the Kenyan colonial authority to produce a propaganda film, Mau Mau (1954), about the anti-colonial uprising against the British led by the Mau Mau in Kenya in the 1950s, Swanson was positioned to be AFP’s writer-director of choice. Reactions to the film reflect the (white) politics of the times. It was reported that Mau Mau had been seen by the South African prime minister, D. F. Malan, and that it had “created a very deep impression in the union.”13 This was not the case in Britain however. Opposition to colonial rule was growing and British reviews of the film were highly critical of its political rhetoric. Monthly Film Bulletin noted its “hysterical approach reflected in the haranguing commentary and the rather obviously staged scenes,” two staples of Swanson’s style and aesthetics. Mau Mau, this critic proposed, “ignores the wider problems of nationalism and colonialism” and its conclusions are “glib” and “not convincing.”14

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South Africa’s Life Line and the Threat of Economic Sanctions The production of South Africa’s Life Line suggests that the international economic sanctions against apartheid that were being proposed from 1953 posed a significant threat both to capital and the state. The question of the political imaginaries driving the film’s broad propagandistic thrust needs further elaboration. The film industry was not at this stage facing the international economic sanctions or boycotts that were to affect it in subsequent decades. It was however in the process of transformation with the coming of apartheid, and dealing with the impact of Schlesinger’s death and the end of his monopolistic grip. Although AFP continued its production for the government and industry under John Schlesinger, it was soon to be bought up by 20th Century Fox. Within a couple of years of the apartheid government coming to power, a raft of legislation had been promulgated that set the course for the apartheid state, racially determining how people were to relate to each other as well as determining matters of labor, education, and politics based on race, and ensuring widely framed state powers for quashing resistance. The African National Congress (ANC) launched its Campaign for the Defiance of Unjust Laws, known as the “Defiance Campaign,” in 1952. In the course of its activities, including mass rallies and acts of defiance, over eight thousand people were arrested.15 Rev Trevor Huddleston, who had been sent to South Africa by his religious order in 1943, the Anglican Community of the Resurrection, lived and worked in Sophiatown, a freehold area of Johannesburg, where Africans were historically able to purchase title to property. He was vehemently and publicly opposed to apartheid.16 As a member of the Johannesburg Joint Council in the 1940s he had been involved in protesting against the “Western Areas Removal Scheme,” the “removal” of Sophiatown, Martindale, and Newclare.17 This battle was lost when the apartheid government declared these areas “white” under the Group Areas Act of 1954, and finally demolished them and removed their residents to Soweto (and other areas on racial and ethnic lines). Huddleston’s opposition to apartheid and its influence is evident in his correspondence with his superiors and first encapsulated in a letter he wrote to Canon Collins on February 3, 1953.18 It followed the state’s proposed introduction of new legislation that included punishment for civil disobedience. Huddleston expressed his view that “intervention in a big way from outside will be the only hope for South Africa,”19 a point he reiterated in a further letter just over two weeks later on February 20. “I believe,” he wrote, “that the

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only thing which might shake our Government is determined hostility from the rest of the world.”20 The question of “native rights” was firmly on the anti-apartheid agenda not only of Africans themselves but now also of churchrelated figures with public profiles, including Huddleston. Huddleston used every opportunity to promote his anti-apartheid views. In correspondence with the Archbishop of Cape Town, Geoffrey Clayton, on October 31, 1953, Huddleston “remained ‘convinced that only world opinion can shake this government.’”21 He was “clearly beginning to think beyond shaping public attitudes” and also “had begun to consider the potential material effects of his criticism of South Africa.”22 This, Huddleston thought, might have “‘some effect at least on the flow of capital’ to the country.”23 In correspondence between Huddleston and Rev Michael Scott, a “pioneer of antiapartheid,”24 in the same period, Huddleston had suggested to him in October 1953 that on his next visit to New York “he should urge that the United Nations impose economic sanctions on South Africa.”25 This was a far-reaching proposal that did not bear much fruit on the world stage. Canon Collins visited South Africa in June and July 1954. He too raised the matter of international economic sanctions against South Africa, writing in a newspaper article, for example, that “the British public may have to consider a personal boycott of South African goods.”26 Huddleston’s and others’ views on apartheid and the public attitudes that they were arousing in Britain and beyond, coupled with the ANC’s political protests within South Africa against apartheid and the legislation promulgated by the National Party government, represent an important marker of growing anti-apartheid sentiment. Huddleston’s proposals for sanctions were not however taken up in 1953/4 for complex reasons, which Skinner and others have elaborated in detail. Nevertheless, the international outcry against apartheid that humanitarian figures like Huddleston and Collins were fostering was enough, it would seem, to advance the production of a film promoting a positive view of South Africa as a modernizing country as well as the values of the oil industry and its manufacture of petrol. While South Africa’s Life Line is an important film to examine both in its own right and within the wider body of films that expose “modern imaginaries” in the oil industry worldwide, the political contexts are revelatory. They explain to some degree why the film was produced in the 1950s especially in relation to its powerful anticipation of the economic sanctions that were on the future horizon. As Stevens asserts, it is certain that between 1950 and 1954 [. . .] foreigners in several parts of the world who wanted to support the struggle against apartheid considered a variety of forms of external economic action against South Africa, including unilateral

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and multilateral trade sanctions, consumer boycotts, industrial boycotts, and cutting off loans to the National Party government.27 It is thus not a mere coincidence that AFP commissioned Swanson to write (and direct) this film at the same time as Huddleston and others were creating a public stir both locally and internationally against apartheid. South Africa’s Life Line was in effect “speaking to” the possibility of full economic sanctions that would seriously affect the flow of oil from oil-producing countries to South Africa, particularly Caltex’s global operations. At that point in time the ANC was not particularly in favor of international, economic sanctions against South Africa and neither was the Africa Bureau, a leading anti-apartheid organization established by Scott in London in 1952. From the perspective of the ANC, economic sanctions were potentially increasing African unemployment and also further alienating whites who might have been encouraged to support them.28 It was only later in the 1950s that there was a shift toward economic sanctions within the ANC. This was publicly announced in a statement by the president of the ANC, Albert Luthuli (issued jointly with G. M. Naicker, president of the South African Indian Congress, and Peter Brown, the national chairman of the Liberal Party of South Africa) in December 1959. It noted that “[e]conomic boycott is one way in which the world at large can bring home to the South African authorities that they must either mend their ways or suffer for them.”29 Issued by the London Boycott Movement the statement indicated that a month-long boycott of South African goods was being planned in the UK. It was after the Sharpeville Massacre on March 21, 1960, when police fired on protestors against the pass laws, killing 67 and injuring 186 as they were fleeing police bullets, that the ANC made its first “explicit” call for full economic sanctions. A statement from the ANC’s Emergency Committee on April 1, 1960, called upon the United Nations “to quarantine the racialist Verwoerd government by imposing full economic sanctions against the Union of South Africa.”30 At the time of the film’s production these widely developing contexts were yet to be fully advanced.

The Film South Africa’s Life Line is a short, black and white documentary, just under ten minutes long. A close examination of the film reveals its powerful, rhetorical strategies that position oil, and specifically Caltex oil, as key to South Africa’s continued prosperity. The film’s overall style falls into the conventional approaches of British documentary, recognizably similar to the

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earlier documentaries Swanson scripted and directed, in which voice-over narration and the accompanying musical soundtrack lead the film’s assertions. Secker’s voice-over narration assumes the confident and knowledgeable tone of a white, English-speaking male, and may be described in the vein of the “voice-of-God,” omnipotent narrator who is never visible within the film, but who nevertheless navigates the audience’s journey through it.31 The images, and their combination into a moving visual stream, serve to illustrate Secker’s commentary. But as with Swanson’s earlier films, the musical soundscape plays an important, affective role in that there are strategic points when the narration is held back and the music dominates. It variously swells and drops, thereby providing added meaning to key moments of the narration over certain images or sequences. The music therefore acts as a form of dramatic commentary in its own right that performs as an additional persuasive device. The voice-over narration also purposefully engages the audience through direct address with the question it poses at the start of the film: “Have you ever looked out over a great city and asked yourself what makes a city?” This is followed by the answer: “People and buildings, yes. Traffic, offices, factories, transport, oh a million things.” But, the next sentence crucially aligns the audience’s now sparked imagination with a more specific question—and its answer—that proposes the importance of oil, not only to South Africa, but to all of civilization. Over a sequence of bird’s-eye view images of Johannesburg, the narrator enquires: “what if we ask what makes a city go, or South Africa, or civilisation for that matter? The answer,” he asserts, “in one word is oil.” At this point the camera is positioned above the Queen Elizabeth bridge in Johannesburg with cars and buses streaming over it in both directions and tall, city buildings visible in the background. The narrator’s direct address continues with a provocation that challenges the audience to imagine what would happen if “every pint of petrol, every drop of oil, every particle of grease suddenly vanished” and provides a clear answer that “within a few seconds the whole of South Africa would grind to a stop.” This is visually matched with the image of moving cars and buses on the bridge suddenly going still for the duration of three seconds of screen time and the sound of orchestral music playing in the background simultaneously stopping. This renders sound altogether absent and the meanings to be derived from the visuals heavily overdetermined. The next sequence provides various examples of what could happen without lubrication both through the voice-over and through visualizations, chief among these being the description of cities. Here, the script deploys hyperbole to render the imaginings of a world without oil in most dramatic terms: “starvation would stalk the streets of the cities as they slumped into the silence of impotence and finally, deserted, rotted into decay” (Figure 10.1).

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FIGURE 10.1 Cars and buses “grind to a stop” on Queen Elizabeth Bridge, Johannesburg. Courtesy of Western Cape Provincial Library Service, Cape Town. This part of the voice-over is illustrated with three low-angle shots of equal length of a tree-lined city street from different vantage points showing buildings but no people, cars, or movement other than leaves blowing in a light breeze. Following the voice-over comment about cities in decay, the final shot of this sequence has no sound whatever, which creates an eerie sense of the city space, once more providing a pause that cinematically ramps up the consequences of a world without oil. This pause is abruptly rent through with the sound of a ship’s horn accompanied by a low-angle close-up shot of the funnel of an oil tanker, on which part of the Caltex logo’s star shape can be seen. The hyperbole continues in the next part of the narration, which adopts the ship’s sound as a metaphor for a “warning note [that] would wail throughout the land if ever the steady flow of petroleum products brought into our ports from the world’s oil-producing areas should be interrupted.” The next sequence provides images of tankers in Cape Town harbor, showing Table Mountain in the distance, while the narration provides factual detail of South Africa’s oil needs with light orchestral music playing in the background. This indicates that while Southern Africa consumes millions of tons of oil annually it produces “a mere thirty thousand tons.” This introductory section of the film thus establishes two significant points of seeming “truth:” one, that South Africa is reliant upon oil for the maintenance of all aspects of life and two, that it has no means of producing oil itself. This is reinforced with an image of the funnel of a tanker, this time with the Caltex logo fully visible. The voice-over commentary and the timing of the image are aligned

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so that as this shot appears, the voice-over commentary states that should the seaborne supply of oil be cut, so would South Africa’s lifeline be cut. The words “lifeline” (on the soundtrack) and “Caltex” (on the image) are audiovisually synced thus asserting Caltex as synonymous with this lifeline. This strategy thus also asserts the symbiotic intertwining of oil per se with Caltex oil. At the end of the film, the importance of sea routes is reiterated, again using illustrative images of tankers coming in to the Cape Town harbor, with the voice-over repeating the view presented in the earlier harbor sequence: “South Africa will prosper and flourish as long as the sea routes and channels are kept open for oil [. . .] for oil is indeed the lifeline of South Africa.” A wide shot of a tanker parallel to Table Mountain in the background, with the Caltex logo visible on its funnel, accompanies this last part of the commentary, before cutting to another, closer shot of the funnel and logo. The orchestral music builds to a crescendo over a further wide shot of a Caltex tanker at sea. This reiteration of the earlier sequence in the closing section of the film underscores the significance not only of oil and of Caltex—and of these combined as South Africa’s “lifeline”—but also of the sea routes that make possible the passage of oil across the world to South Africa.

“On Course” with Caltex Between the introductory sequences and the final sequence, the film elaborates how oil moves from the tankers that carry oil into the harbor into various forms of containers, then onto trains and trucks and ultimately as petroleum into cars. All the while the voice-over retains its dramatic intensity, for example, claiming that “every cargo that is unloaded at our ports sends new strength and power surging into our everyday lives.” It shows the importance of oil and related products for various industries as well as for farming, for medicine, and for everyday life. The “medical metaphor,” as the narration calls it, is extended through the voice-over to naming various mechanisms used for oil’s journeys, the tankers being the arteries, and the coastal terminals being the heart whose “job” it is to “start pump[ing] the oil along the veins of distribution.” For most of the remaining half of the film the focus is on distribution, chiefly through the film’s exposition of the significance of the South African railways that the narrator declares is “by far the most important and significant vein.” The first part of this extended set of sequences begins with a shot of a railroad tanker leaving a terminal with Table Mountain and Signal Hill filling the background. Two further shots of fast-moving trains with diegetic sound

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FIGURE 10.2  The importance of the railways for distribution. Courtesy of Western Cape Provincial Library Service, Cape Town. r­ einforce the importance of trains to the distribution of oil across the country from coastal terminals to “inland depots” in different forms and quantities. This is where the “process of distribution starts all over again,” according to the narration, which goes on to explain the “continuous” nature of this process since petrol is stored for only a few days (Figure 10.2). The narration readopts the mode of direct speech in explaining Johannesburg and the Reef’s needs for 6 million gallons of petrol per month, which means in effect that this has to be transported to South Africa, then to Johannesburg, and “finally to where you buy it.” The consumer of petrol is thus incorporated into the chain of supply and demand, thereby directly aligning the viewer of the film with the importance of oil and its related product, petrol, for consumers. In many instances the consumer and the viewer would in fact be one and the same person. The film’s references to the importance of oil in “everyday life” are thereby exemplified. This is illustrated with a top shot of a petrol truck as it pulls out of its dock, on the back of which is an advertisement for Caltex in Afrikaans “Hou Koers met Caltex!” (“Stay on course with Caltex!”). The voice-over continues in rhetorical tone: “Now perhaps you can appreciate the organisation that lies behind the petrol pump that fills your car, an organization so good that you take it for granted.” This is matched with a close-up of the side of a car showing a hand opening the lid of the petrol tank. This cuts to a further shot showing a close-up of a hand putting a petrol pump nozzle into the tank and starting to fill it. This short scene reinforces the everyday importance of petrol

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to the (white, male) consumer, who, as the film implies, is also the viewer of the film. The significance of the railways is reinforced toward the end of this extended sequence on distribution, where the narration contends that it is oil that keeps progress on the move; it is oil that has opened the gates to high speed travel; it is oil that has allowed us to enter a mechanical age; and it is oil that keeps the wheels of every industry turning in the service of man. This summarizes the film’s ideological thrust linking back to the beginning of the film that starkly illustrates a world that grinds to a halt without oil. The essential proposition of that sequence is that without oil, modernity, and modern South Africa too, would be destroyed. As if to push this point home in the latter part of the film, the narrational commentary on oil and progress is illustrated with a series of three closeup shots of train wheels turning faster and faster from one shot to another until they become an unfocused blur. This cuts to a further series of nineteen shots, which acts as a montage of round mechanisms of various sorts turning at high speed, including the wheels of a car and a bicycle. These shots are of equal length of three seconds each, except for the tenth shot, in other words a shot positioned more or less in the middle of the montage sequence. This shot specifically advertises Caltex, and runs for six seconds, thus purposefully increasing its screen time to double that of the other shots. The shot is carefully composed to display the Caltex name and logo. In the foreground, an arm extends across the frame pouring oil from a bottle with the Caltex logo in its center. In the background, there is the top of a petrol dispenser that has the word “Caltex” across the top edge and a circular advertising plaque above it with the star logo and name. Alongside that in the further distance is the edge of a rectangular advertising board showing part of the strapline “Hou Koers met Caltex!” The frame is thus literally filled with the word “Caltex” and forms of advertising oil-related products. Inserted into this montage of images illustrating modernity, the incorporation of the word itself strategically creates an elision between not only oil and modernity generally, but Caltex oil and its related products specifically (Figure 10.3). This sequence also utilizes sound as a means of reinforcing its focus on the wheels of modernity. Once the narration has summarized the relationship between oil and modernity there is no further voice-over narration over the montage sequence and orchestral music dominates. The swirling violins and violas in the background accompanied by wind instruments that create short sounds resembling a train’s horn onomatopoeically suggest a train moving at

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FIGURE 10.3  The image strategically advertising Caltex. Courtesy of Western Cape Provincial Library Service, Cape Town. high speed. This adds a further layer to the film’s purposeful representational strategies that in turn reinforces the meanings it perpetuates about the inextricable conjunction of oil and modernity, and not simply any oil, but Caltex oil. The music itself is not new to films in which Swanson had been involved. Exactly the same orchestral music is first incorporated into one of the GBI British Railways films, Thirty Million Acres (1947), for which Swanson had written the script. In this film, the music plays over the image of the train that illustrates the transition from horse-and-cart transport to the modern train. This makes possible the movement of important goods across Britain, especially for agricultural purposes that are vital for feeding the population. GBI had a large music department under the directorship of Louis Levy and a vast library of musical soundtrack. Levy himself reported that “our ‘Railway’ section [had] about 200 different sound-tracks.”32 In Swanson’s African Jim the same music is used over the train sequence when Jim migrates from his rural, village life to the city of Johannesburg first by horse-and-cart and then by train. In South Africa’s Life Line, this self-same music performs a similar function to its inclusion in the two earlier films. In both instances the music track strategically combines with the fast-paced images of the speeding train both visually and audially, thus doubling

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the work that the film accomplishes to cement the importance of modernity into the viewer’s mind. And it simultaneously reinforces modernity’s reliance on oil as the means to its lubrication, both literally and figuratively. In the latter half of the 1950s Caltex established an International Film Series that included South Africa—Land of Endeavour, also an AFP production, one of thirty-seven films produced in the series before 1970.33 A longer, more lavish production, than South Africa’s Life Line, and filmed in color, it takes a much wider purview of South Africa, in which apartheid’s categorization of groups of people (“population groups” in apartheid legislation) by race and ethnicity is naturalized. The film interprets these categories as whites, Bantu, Cape Coloureds with a subgrouping of Cape Malays, and Indians. It was directed by Jan Perold, not Swanson. Edward Howes is credited with sound (as he is in South Africa’s Life Line), and even though Swanson is ostensibly not involved in this production, the film repeats the music that first appears onomatopoeically in GBI’s Thirty Million Acres and is also incorporated into African Jim over the train sequence. This time the motif of the increasingly speedy, high tones of the violas and violins serves to reinforce the “pace” of “development” of South Africa’s “industrial future” that the film asserts. There are other similar aspects between the two films. Like the earlier film, in which the name “Caltex” is strategically placed, South Africa—Land of Endeavour uses a similar tactic, which is exemplified by a short sequence of a Caltex petrol station that maximizes the number of times “Caltex” appears. It opens with a low-angle shot that incorporates a petrol pump with an African attendant sporting a cap with the Caltex star-shaped logo on it, while in the background the pump itself in the Caltex colors of red and white has the logo on top of it and the name “Caltex” clearly visible across the top of the pump. The white building in the background has the name “Caltex” in red letters on top of it. If it were not perceptibly a later time period, albeit still the 1950s, it could be an image—this time in color—taken from the earlier South Africa’s Life Line. South Africa—Land of Endeavour is less concerned with driving a political argument and the threat of a catastrophic future and is far more interested in situating Caltex within an exposition that can be categorized more readily as a travelogue that appeals to international (American and British) audiences as potential tourists and settlers.

Conclusion The December 1958 issue of The Caltex Way includes an article on South Africa—Land of Endeavour, which it describes as “an outstanding film.”34 The

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film is presented as part of a “growing list of films which forms part of the Caltex International Public Relations series.” Curiously however, South Africa’s Life Line receives no mention, not even as a precedent for the later film. In the light of the mixed reactions to Swanson’s aggressively propagandistic film, Mau Mau, released in the same period, one wonders as to both local and international responses to South Africa’s Life Line, with its prophetic prediction of the international economic sanctions that were soon after to be publicly announced by the ANC president, Luthuli. The fact that Swanson was not commissioned to direct South Africa—Land of Endeavour suggests that the tone of South Africa’s Life Line did not fit with the image Caltex wished to project in its new international series. Caltex presented the series as “public service” films “designed to promote international understanding and goodwill between the nations with which the company trades.”35 Moreover, Swanson is not listed on any further AFP productions and it would appear that he had also fallen from favor with AFP. The two film projects that Caltex sponsored in the 1950s, South Africa’s Life Line and subsequently South Africa—Land of Endeavour, inserted Caltex into the wider story of South Africa’s pasts and futures.36 Where the second film was released as one of a slate of international films, the first film was specifically focused on the political predictions of a country without oil. Antiapartheid spokespersons had begun strategically to articulate this prospect as early as 1953 as a form of international protest against apartheid. Swanson and Secker’s script visualized the threat of sanctions to oil and in doing so literally “fuelled” apartheid and influenced the hearts and minds of those schoolchildren for whom the film was screened.37 It was however much later that economic sanctions became a reality but this was less a threat toward modern South Africa as such, and far more a threat to apartheid South Africa. The oil embargo and the efforts to which the ANC went to sustain it are clear in the establishment of the Shipping Research Bureau that monitored the shipment of oil across sea routes to South Africa and sanctions-breaking strategies of countries signed up to the embargo.38 Beyond this, the fact that the ANC’s military wing, Umkhonto we Sizwe (Spear of the Nation), targeted Sasol oil refinery sites on several occasions in the 1980s underscores the strategic importance of oil that South Africa’s Life Line had predicted.39 In 1984, Umkhonto we Sizwe targeted the Mobil oil refinery in Durban, once more showing the strategic importance of oil to the maintenance of apartheid. By then, apartheid South Africa was embattled on all fronts. It was to be some forty years after, and contrary to, the predictions of South Africa’s Life Line that democratic elections would be held in 1994 for the first time in South African history.

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Acknowledgments Grateful thanks to Marina Dahlquist, Freddy Ogterop, Sue Ogterop, Rob Skinner, Patrick Vonderau, Leslie Witz, and especially to Emma Sandon.

Notes 1 Emma Sandon, “Preserving a Heritage? South African Archive Documentary: 1910-1940,” Revue Canadienne d’Études cinématographiques/Canadian Journal of Film Studies 16, no. 1 (Spring 2007): 51–62. 2 Emma Sandon, “African Mirror: The Life and Times of the South African Newsreel from 1910 to 1948,” Journal of Southern African Studies 39, no. 3 (September 2013): 161. 3 Arthur Delaney, “Caltex on Film…From (To) the Ends of the Earth,” Business Screen 31, no. 7 (July 1970): 26–8. 4 On “sponsored” films, see Vinzenz Hediger and Patrick Vonderau, eds., Films That Work: Industrial Film and the Productivity of the Media (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2009); Rick Prelinger, The Field Guide to Sponsored Films (San Francisco: National Film Preservation Foundation, 2006). 5 On AFP’s history, see Thelma Gutsche, The History and Social Significance of Motion Pictures in South Africa, 1895-1940 (Cape Town: Howard Timmins, 1972); Jacqueline Maingard, South African National Cinema (Oxon and New York: Routledge, 2007); Jacqueline Maingard, “‘Lost Classics’ in Context: Film Production in South Africa,” in Lizelle Bisschoff and David Murphy (eds.), Africa’s Lost Classics: New Histories of African Cinema (Oxford: Legenda, 2014), 35–49; Jacqueline Maingard, “Film Production in South Africa: Histories, Practices, Policies,” in Kenneth Harrow (ed.), African Filmmaking: Five Formations (East Lansing, MI: Michigan State University Press, 2017), 241–80. 6 For example, the commission from the Publicity and Travel Department of South African Railways and Harbours (SAR&H), for the production of Die Bou van’n Nasie/They Built a Nation (1938), initially in English but later also in an Afrikaans version. For a discussion of this and other films that AFP produced before 1940, see Gutsche, Motion Pictures in South Africa. 7 Others credited are: Ken Sara and Peter Lang for photography, Edward Howes for sound recording, and Jack Murphy for editing. Ken Sara was an AFP stalwart, having started work for AFP in 1920. Peter Lang and Edward Howes were involved in the production of several AFP films in the 1950s. The open-access website Encyclopaedia of South African Theatre, Film, Media and Performance (ESAT), is a useful historical archive for identifying biographical details of individuals working in film in South Africa, https​:/​/es​​at​ .su​​n​.ac.​​za​/in​​dex​.p​​hp​/​Ma​​in​_Pa​​ge.

242 PETROCINEMA

8 The State Information Office and the State Information Services were ostensibly one and the same entity. This was attached to the Department of External Affairs, which thus suggests that these films (and others they commissioned) were distributed and exhibited internationally. 9 See Ian Aitken, Film and Reform: John Grierson and the Documentary Film Movement (London and New York: Routledge, 1992); Scott Anthony and James Mansell, eds., The Projection of Britain: A History of the GPO Film Unit (London: British Film Institute, 2017); Zoe Druick and Deane Williams, eds., The Grierson Effect: Tracing Documentary’s International Movement (London: British Film Institute, 2014). 10 See Jacqueline Maingard, “‘Assignment Africa’: Donald Swanson’s Colonial Imaginary and Chisoko the African (1949),” Journal of Southern African Studies 39, no. 3 (September 2013): 701–19. 11 On colonial film and the British civilizing mission, see Tom Rice, Films for the Colonies: Cinema and the Preservation of the British Empire (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2019); Rosaleen Smyth, “Grierson, the British Documentary Movement, and Colonial Cinema in British Colonial Africa,” Film History 25, no. 4 (2013): 82–113. See also the website “Colonial Film: Moving Images of the British Empire,” which has detailed entries on many films, some of which are streamed, http://www​.colonialfilm​.org​.uk/. 12 For a personal account of the relationship between Swanson and African Jim’s producer, see Erica Rutherford, Nine Lives: The Autobiography of Erica Rutherford (Prince Edward Island, Canada: Ragweed Press, 1993). 13 “Africans May See Film on Terrorism: Kenya Documentary Sent to London,” East African Standard, September 17, 1954: 29; Tom Rice, “Mau Mau,” accessed June 19, 2012, http:​/​/www​​.colo​​nialf​​i lm​.o​​rg​.uk​​/nod​e​​/3233​. 14 “MAU MAU, South Africa, c.1954,” Monthly Film Bulletin 22, no. 256 (May 1955): 77–8. 15 Saul Dubow, The African National Congress (Johannesburg: Jonathan Ball, 2000), 42. 16 On the period he lived and worked in South Africa, see Trevor Huddleston, Naught for Your Comfort (Glasgow: Collins, [1956] 1985). 17 Rob Skinner, The Foundations of Anti-Apartheid: Liberal Humanitarians and Transnational Activists in Britain and the United States, c.1919-64 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 67. 18 Lewis John Collins was appointed as Canon at St. Paul’s Cathedral, London, in 1948. He established the Defence and Aid Fund, later the International Defence and Aid Fund (IDAF), in 1956 to support the 156 South Africans charged with treason. They were all acquitted. The Fund was banned in South Africa in 1966 but continued under other guises to the end of apartheid. 19 Skinner, Foundations of Anti-Apartheid, 132. 20 Ibid., 133. 21 Ibid., 135. 22 Ibid.

“Fueling Apartheid”

243

23 Ibid. 24 Ibid., 77. 25 Simon Stevens, “Boycotts and Sanctions against South Africa: An International History, 1946-1970” (PhD diss., Columbia University, 2016), 68–9. Scott lobbied the United Nations on behalf of the Bechuanaland Regent, Tshekedi Khama, and the chief of the Herero, Frederick Mahereru, against the incorporation of South-West Africa (later Namibia) into South Africa. 26 Lewis John Collins, “The Disgrace We Must Stamp Out,” Daily Herald, July 29, 1954: 4. It was part of a series he wrote for this newspaper in 1954. See Skinner, Foundations of Anti-Apartheid, 116, 122; and Ibid., 71. 27 Stevens, “Boycotts and Sanctions,” 71. 28 For details of the ANC’s view on sanctions at that time, see Ibid., 74–5; on the Africa Bureau, see Skinner, Foundations of Anti-Apartheid, 157–8. 29 South African History Online, “Statement (Jointly with Chief A. J. Luthuli and Peter Brown) Appealing to the British People to Boycott South Africa, December 1959,” accessed September 15, 2015, https​:/​/ww​​w​.sah​​istor​​y​.org​​ .za​/a​​rchiv​​e​/sta​​temen​​t​-joi​​ntly-​​chief​​-j​-lu​​thuli​​-and-​​peter​​-brow​​n​-app​​ealin​​g​-bri​​tish-​​​ peopl​​e​-boy​​cott-​​south​​-afr.​ 30 Thomas Karis, Gwendolen Carter and Gail Gerhart, eds., From Protest to Challenge: A Documentary History of African Politics in South Africa 1882–1964, Volume 3: Challenge and Violence 1953–64 (Stanford: Hoover Institution Press, 1977), 574. 31 The “voice-of-God” narrator is central to the expository mode of documentary. See Bill Nichols, Introduction to Documentary (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, Third Edition, 2017), 122–5. 32 Louis Levy, Music for the Movies (London: Sampson Low, Marston and Co., 1948), 39. 33 Delaney, “Caltex on Film,” 26. The film is available at: https​:/​/ww​​w​.you​​tube.​​ com​/w​​atch?​​v​=udh​​​e0U14​_-Y 34 In 1955, Caltex began production of The Caltex Way, described as “a quarterly journal for the Caltex dealer.” 35 Delaney, “Caltex on Film,” 26. 36 Just a few years later, Caltex sponsored an even more explicit project in the form of five booklets entitled South Africa’s Heritage: How Our Forefathers Lived, Worked and Played, dedicated “to the youth of South Africa by Caltex as part of its contribution to the commemoration of the Union’s Jubilee” in 1960. 37 The ANC’s Frene Ginwala (who became the first parliamentary speaker of the new democratic state in 1994) wrote a paper entitled “Fuelling Apartheid,” promoting the international oil embargo on South Africa. It was first presented at the International Seminar on an Oil Embargo against South Africa, Amsterdam, March 14–16, 1980. See Richard Hengeveld and Jaap Rodenburg, eds., Embargo: Apartheid’s Oil Secrets Revealed (Amsterdam:

244 PETROCINEMA

Amsterdam University Press, 1995). I have adopted this phrase for naming this chapter. 38 Hengeveld and Rodenburg, Embargo, provides a detailed history of the oil embargo against South Africa and the anti-apartheid Shipping Research Bureau’s findings in tracking embargo-breaking shipments of oil to South Africa. 39 Sasol (South African Coal, Oil and Gas Corporation Ltd.) was South Africa’s alternative to fuel manufacturing through an oil-from-coal process.

Contributors Rudmer Canjels is an independent media researcher fascinated with seriality, ephemeral media, fandom, and industrial film. He is the author of Distributing Silent Film Serials (2011), a study on the international distribution and cultural transformation of silent film serials. He has collaborated on the production of several documentaries for A History of Royal Dutch Shell (2007) as well as researched Shell’s own cinematic history in Films that Work (2009). His monograph The Dynamics of Celluloid (2017) deals with the industrial films by Unilever and Shell made in Nigeria while it became an independent country.  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 and Joel Frykholm, 2019), Exporting Perilous Pauline: Pearl White and the Serial Film Craze (2013), and she is a recipient of a research grant from Riksbankens Jubileumsfond (The Swedish Foundation for Humanities and Social Sciences) (2020–3) with the project Modern Media and the Oil Industry. Mona Damluji is Assistant Professor of Film and Media Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her research interests include critical energy studies, cinema history, urban studies, and Middle East studies. She is the recipient of a faculty fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities for her book project, Pipeline Cinema, about the nexus of cinema culture and the oil industry in Iraq. Steve Foxon is a curator of nonfiction at the BFI National Archive. He has lead on the conservation and reappraisal of major British documentary works such as the GPO Film Unit and the British Transport Film Unit collections, as well as renowned individual documentary practitioners such as Humphrey Jennings and Geoffrey Jones. He also actively cares for the film collections of Shell and

246 CONTRIBUTORS

BP held within the BFI National Archive. Steve has contributed to numerous published works on documentary film for over twenty years. Jeremy W. Groskopf  is Instructor of Communication Studies/Journalism at Averett University, working on issues related to the silent era intersection of motion pictures and the advertising industry. His publications include articles in  Film History and various anthologies. His first book, Profit Margins: The American Silent Cinema and the Marginalization of Advertising, is forthcoming.  Brian R. Jacobson is Professor of Visual Culture at the California Institute of Technology. He is the author of Studios Before the System: Architecture, Technology, and the Emergence of Cinematic Space (2015) and editor of In the Studio: Visual Creation and Its Material Environments (2020). Jacqueline Maingard is Reader in Film at the University of Bristol and Honorary Research Associate in the Archive and Public Culture Research Initiative, University of Cape Town. She is a member of the History of Moviegoing, Exhibition and Reception (HoMER) Network. Author of South African National Cinema (2007), she has published on film and history in Africa in various journals and volumes, including Journal of Southern African Studies, Memory Studies, and Screen. She is currently completing a monograph on black cinema audiences in South Africa, 1920s to 1960s. She is also leading a research project on colonial film archives in Britain. Susan Ohmer is the William T. and Helen Kuhn Carey associate professor of Modern Communication in the Department of Film, Television, and Theatre at the University of Notre Dame in South Bend, Indiana. She is the author of George Gallup in Hollywood (2006) and is completing a book on the Disney studio during the 1940s. Her research focuses on the industrial and organizational aspects of media companies and has appeared in journals including Film History and the Quarterly Review of Film and Video and the anthologies Funny Pictures: Animation and Comedy in Studio-Era Hollywood and American Cinema of the 1930s. As an administrator at Notre Dame, she has served as Assistant Provost, Interim Director of the Hesburgh Libraries, and from 2011 to 2013 led Digital ND, a campus-wide initiative to streamline and strengthen digital work at Notre Dame. Patrick Russell is Senior Curator (Non-Fiction), BFI National Archive, and has been involved in several major curatorial projects focused on the expanding history of non-fiction film in the UK. He is the author of 100 British Documentaries

Contributors

247

(2007), coeditor of The Lost World of Mitchell and Kenyon (2004), coeditor of Shadows of Progress: Documentary Film in Post-War Britain (2010), which focused on sponsored (including oil industry) documentaries, and coeditor of the forthcoming  British Screen Stories. Ravi Vasudevan is a film historian working at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies Delhi (CSDS). With Ravi Sundaram, he directs Sarai, the CSDS media research program, and is Guest Faculty at Jawaharlal Nehru University, Jadavpur University, and Ambedkar University Delhi. His publications include Making Meaning in Indian Cinema (ed., 2000), the coedited Sarai Reader series, the Marg special issue, Documentary Now (guest editor, 2018), and The Melodramatic Public: Film Form and Spectatorship in Indian Cinema (2010, 2016). Vasudevan cofounded and edits the journal BioScope: South Asian Screen Studies. He is also associated with the CSDS partnered German-Indian International Centre for Advanced Studies: Metamorphoses of the Political (ICAS: MP) in its history and media research modules. He is currently working on nonfiction film infrastructures, the film archives, and questions of historiography; post-cinema media artifacts and political imaginaries; and the media histories of advertising, publicity, and public relations. Patrick Vonderau  is Professor in Media and Communication Studies at the University of Halle, Germany. His most recent book publications include the coauthored Advertising and the Transformation of Screen Cultures (2020) and Films that Sell: Moving Pictures and Advertising (2016, coedited with Bo Florin and Nico de Klerk). He is a member of the Editorial Board of Media Industries Journal and a cofounder of NECS—European Network for Cinema and Media Studies.  Gregory A. Waller teaches in the Cinema and Media Studies program at Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana. He is editor in chief of the quarterly journal, Film History. His publications include Main Street Amusements: Movies and Commercial Entertainment in a Southern City, 1896–1930 (1995), which won the Theatre Library Association Award and the Katherine Singer Kovacs Award from the Society for Cinema Studies. His most recent publications have focused on the history of nontheatrical cinema.

Index 20th Century Fox  227, 230 24 Hours of Progress (1950)  151 1820 Settlers, The (1954)  228 Academy Awards (1932)  93 Acland, Charles  5 Adressat  5, 20, 34 advertising and advertisements  8, 34, 37, 38, 40, 43, 45, 46, 47 n.17, 55, 91, 94–7, 100, 119, 120, 123–5, 127–30, 184, 186, 188, 190, 197, 213–15, 220–2 campaign  82, 83, 85, 86, 90, 92, 110, 124, 128, 146 film  183 institutional  154 strategies  208 aesthetics  184, 186–8, 204 Affiliated Film Production  151, 153 Africa Bureau  232 African Film Productions (AFP)  9, 225–9, 232, 239, 240 Africanization  9, 213 African Jim (1949)  229, 238, 239 African Mirror  225, 228 African National Congress (ANC)  230–2, 240, 243 n.37 “Aids for Teachers” campaign  220 Air is for Breathing  67 Airport (1934)  62 Akerman, James  105, 106 Akpabot, Sammy (Samuel)  217, 218 Albright, Horace  105 Alice in Cartoonland (1923)  90 Amateur Cine Society of India  206 n.25 American Association of Petroleum Geologists  143, 157 n.31 American Bankers Association  151

American Cancer Society  151 American Frontier (1953)  151, 153, 154 American Gas Association  151 American Magazine  124 American Museum of Natural History  140 American Petroleum Institute (API)  2, 8, 46, 123, 137–8, 150, 154 American Petroleum Institute Quarterly  142, 143, 148, 150 American Statistical Association  138 American Weekly  94 Anchor  188 And Then There Were Four (1950)  130 Anglican Community of the Resurrection  230 Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (AIOC). See British Petroleum (BP) Anglo-Persian Oil Company. See British Petroleum (BP) Anlass  5, 20, 34 Anstey, Edgar  59 Antarctic Crossing (1958)  62 Antenne 2  167, 175, 179 n.26 Anthony Gilkison Associates  66 apartheid state  225, 226, 228–31, 240 Apex Film Corporation  151 Appel, Hannah  23 Applegate, Oliver  88 Arabian American Oil Company  147 “Archives and Archaeologies” (Elsaesser)  27, 34 Archive Stories (Burton)  17 Arlen, Richard  125 Armstrong, Jerry  60

INDEX  249

Armstrong, John  62, 66, 69, 70 Army Film Unit (AFU)  196 Arnold, Malcolm  59, 66 Art Films of Asia  191, 194, 198 Art in Industry (exhibition, 940)  188 Art in Industry (journal)  188 Art Not Oil  25 Association of National Advertisers  150 Atomisation (1948)  57 Audio Visual Center, Indiana University  150 Auftraggeber  5, 20, 34 “The Automobile. Symbol of American Social and Economic Progress”  123 Bain, H. Foster  43 Baker, Joseph B.  37 Bamberg, James H.  19 Baptista, Clement  194, 196 Barrel Number One (1952– 1986)  151–2 Barry, Andrew  7, 16, 18, 19, 23 Batchelor, Joy  57 Battle of Midway  143 Baxter, R. K. Neilson  217 Baxter, Rod  60 Bay Bridge  87 BBC  175, 216 Bellamy, Ralph  127 Benegal, Shyam  196 Beniger, James  6 Benny, Jack  128 Beveridge, James  184, 191–3 BFI National Archive  21, 52 Bhavnani  191 Bicycle Thief (1948)  196 Big Bad Wolf  93, 95, 98, 99, 101 “Big Inch” pipeline  143 Big Oil  154 Bill Burns  146 Billimoria, Fali  194, 198 Blanton, Thomas L.  43 Blizzards Be Darned (1934)  119, 125, 128 Bombay Film Society  197 Born Free (1965)  62

Born in Freedom: The Story of Colonel Drake  151 Born to Be Bad (1934)  127 Bourne and Shephard  190 Bozak, Nadia  3, 32 n.38 BP Archive  2, 15–25, 27, 30 n.14, 188 BP Press and Public Affairs  66 BP Video Library (BPVL)  15–17, 20–8 Brachlianoff, Arcady  171, 179 n.23 branding  21, 37, 39, 40, 44, 46, 219 Bricken, Jules  153 Bring ‘Em Back Alive (Buck)  129 British Film Institute (BFI)  15, 21 British Museum  25 British Pathé  57, 58 British Petroleum (BP)  2, 7, 15–21, 23–5, 27, 28, 51–76, 166, 176, 219, 220 British Railways  228, 238 Broadcasting  146 Broadway  41, 49 n.39 Brown, Peter  232 Brundle, Ian  69, 73 Brunet, Philippe  167 Bryn Mawr College  153 Buck, Frank  129 Bureau of Commercial Economics  38 Bureau of Mines  7 “The Burmah-Shell Film Programme”  191 Burmah-Shell Film Unit  192, 223 n.26 Burmah-Shell Oil Company  8, 183–203, 205, 207 n.26 Burton, Antoinette  17 Burton Holmes/Famous PlayersLasky  38 Business Screen  136, 154 Butterfield, Alfred  148 Calcutta Commercial Gazette  189 Calcutta Film Society  194 California Star Oil Works Company  84 California Texas Oil Company  225 Call of the Karroo, The (1954)  228

250 INDEX

Caltex  185, 225–7, 232, 234–40 Caltex International Film Series  227 Caltex International Public Relations  240 Caltex Way, The  239 calypso  218, 219 Camel Film Company  38, 129 Cameo Theater  40, 41, 48–9 n.39 Campaign for the Defiance of Unjust Laws  230 Campbell, Ambrose  217, 218 Cantor, Eddie  129 Cape Provincial Library. See Western Cape Provincial Library Capital  189 capitalism  29, 73, 84, 140 Captain Singrid (1968)  170 Caracas (1956)  217 Careers in Petroleum (1954)  146 Carson, Rachael  66 Cartwright, Lisa  6 Cattle Carters, The (1962)  65 “Cavalcade of the Golden West”  109 censorship  27 César  171 Chamber of Mines  227 Chemicals from Petroleum series: Cast in a New Mould (1964)  65 Chevron Corporation. See Standard Oil Chicago Fair (1950)  149, 150 Chisoko the African (1949)  229 Chukker  188 cinema/movies. See film(s) cinematheque  169 Cinematic Footprint: Lights, Camera, Natural Resources, The (Bozak)  3, 32 n.38 Cinerama theatres  66 Cinétest  168 Circus Queen Murder, The (1933)  126 City, The (1939)  153 Civil War  85 Clarke, Geoffrey  65 Clarke, Michael  61

Clayton, Geoffrey  231 Clean Air Act (1970)  67 Coca-Cola  125, 144 COI  57 Colbert, Claudette  119, 125 Cold War  144, 151 Cole, Lionel  59, 60, 62 Coleman, Fitzroy  217, 218 Collier’s: The National Weekly  125, 127 Collins, Canon  230, 231 Collins, Lewis John  242 n.18 “The Colonel’s Lady and Judy O’Grady” (Kipling)  124 colonialism  184, 229 Columbia Pictures  126, 153 Commonwealth Antarctic expeditions  62 Connaissance de l’Economie par le Film (CEFILM)  169 Conseil National du Patronat Français (CNPF)  169 Control Revolution, The (Beniger)  6 Cooper, Gary  117, 119 Copper and Brass Research Association  129 Cornish Beam Engine (1948)  57 Corporate Social Responsibility  75 Courtot, Robert  168 Cousteau, Jacques-Yves  170 Cramton, Louis C.  43 Crossroads, U.S.A. (1952)  151, 153 Crown of Glass (1967)  65 crude oil  22, 56, 84, 139, 185 culture American  35, 105, 109 automobile  8, 121–3 media  4, 121 Culture Unstained  25 Dasgupta, Hari S.  191, 204 Daugherty, Harry M.  35 Davis, John A.  141 Deepwater Horizon disaster  162 “Defiance Campaign.” See Campaign for the Defiance of Unjust Laws de Gaulle, Charles  165 DeMille, Cecil B.  81, 119, 125

INDEX  251

Democratic National Committee (DNC)  42 de Normanville, Peter  57, 69, 73, 74 Deny, Louis  167, 175 Department of Agriculture  37 Department of Information  145 Department of the Interior  35, 36, 38, 43–5 Derek Stewart Productions  76 n.4 de Roubaix, François  171, 172 de Roubaix, Paul  170, 171, 176 De Sica, Vittorio  196 Design for Living (1933)  117–19 Destination Earth (1956)  151 Destination Konkan (1955)  193, 196, 197, 201 Devdas (1935)  195 Die Bou van’n Nasie/They Built a Nation (1938)  241 n.6 digital archiving  17, 20–5, 28, 29 digitization  17, 21, 24 Dillon, Diane  106 Disgraced (1933)  125 Disney, Walt  84 Disneyland  107, 109 Distant Neighbours (1956)  76 n.5 Divertimento (1968)  66 Division of Research and Statistics  138 Dixon Pencil Box Company  101 Do Bigha Zameen (1952)  196 Doctor Gets There, The  126 Doctorow, E. L.  82 Doheny, E. L.  36, 44 Dollars and Sense of Business Films, The  150 Donald Duck  83, 92–105, 107, 109 Double Anniversary  127 Down to the Sea in Trucks (1947)  228 Dressler, Marie  93 “Drilling through the Screen: Modern Imaginaries and the Oil Industry”  6 Drummond, John  65 Drury, Aubrey  108 “Dude Ranching’s the Life”  99

Dumez, Philippe  175 Dunlop  189, 191 Dutt, Guru  191 Earhart, Amelia  110 eco-criticism  4 economic sanctions  230–2, 240 Edinburgh Film Festival  192 Eldridge, Florence  117, 119 Elf Aquitaine  163 Elf Aquitaine Norge  166–75 Elgin platform  8, 162, 173, 176 Elsaesser, Thomas  5, 20, 27 Elton, Arthur  54, 56, 57, 59, 61, 65, 69, 73 Emergency Committee  232 Empire of Oil, The (1955)  154 Encyclopedia Britannica  148 End of the Road, The (1976)  70 Energy in Perspective (1976)  69 Engineering-North Sea (1976)  70 Enrico, Robert  170–3, 176, 178 n.21 Environmental Advisory Group (Sullom Voe Association)  76 n.13 Esso  70, 137, 147 Euba, Akin  217 European Conservation Year  67 Evolution of the Oil Industry, The (1933)  44–6, 50 n.54, 142 Evolution of the Oil Industry, The (1941)  142 Exhibitor’s Trade Review  41 Exxon Mobil Corporation  20, 122 ExxonMobil historical collection  121, 131 n.12 Ezeasor, Levi  210 Fabian, Alan  67 Fable Killer (1950)  146 Facebook  162 Facts about Oil  146 Fall, Albert B.  35, 36, 42 Family in Bangalore, A (1955)  194, 198, 199 Fanchon and Marco  92 Farrell, Charles  125 Fate of the Forests (1982)  71

252 INDEX

Faulds, Andrew  216 Fay, Frank  127 Federal Oil Conservation Board  139 Federal Trade Commission  145 Ferdinand (1938)  99 Ferrier, R. W.  19 Field Museum of Chicago  33 Film Centre  21, 55–7, 59, 60, 66, 69, 73, 211 Film Counselors, Inc.  150–1 Film Daily Year Book  140 Film History  4 Film Producers Guild  57, 58, 69 film(s) adventure  171 animated  89 companies  193–202, 230 corporate  7, 169 distribution  8, 25, 35 documentary  5, 20, 52, 55, 184, 191, 194, 198, 205, 225 educational  4, 7, 8, 36–41, 43, 130, 184, 191, 226 fiction  125, 195, 227 government-funded  37, 45, 46 industrial  3–6, 8, 19, 20, 27, 33, 34, 37–40, 51, 52, 57, 61, 64, 65, 67, 72, 142, 165, 166, 169–71, 178 n.18, 194, 220–2 magazines  220 making  5, 6, 8, 9, 27, 46, 51–4, 56, 57, 59, 66, 68, 75, 184, 192, 197 mobile  219, 220, 222 n.14 nonfiction  225, 227 nontheatrical  2, 4, 33, 41, 141, 220 “prestige”  64, 170, 178 n.18 production  5, 7–9, 33, 43–6, 53, 90, 119, 129, 137, 184, 208, 226, 229, 232 propaganda  9 public relations  150–4 (see also public relations) relation with petroleum  3, 4, 6, 17 sponsored  3–7, 15–17, 21–3, 28, 52, 59, 60, 136, 140, 141, 147–9, 151, 154, 191, 193–202, 225–7

useful  5 wartime  55 Films Division  184, 196 Films du Centaur  171 Films That Sell: Moving Pictures and Advertising  4 Films That Work: Industrial Film and the Productivity of Media (Hediger and Vonderau)  4, 19, 27 Film User  220 First International Film Festival  196 First to the Fire  125 First World War  35, 40, 138, 165, 185, 197 Folk Dances  198 Food or Famine (1962)  61–2 Foothold on Antarctica (1956)  62 Forages sous l’équateur (1963)  167 Forbes, Charles R.  35 Forbes, Ralph  127 Ford  108 Ford, John  110 Forming of Metals, The (1957)  57 For Want of Water (1983)  71 fossil fuels  4, 29, 32 n.39 Four Frightened People (1934)  119 France  164–7, 169, 171, 174–6, 178 n.18 Freeman, Howard  87 French petrocinema  165–6 Frigg: Le Grand rendez-vous  169–71, 176 Frigg platform  166, 167, 173, 175, 176, 179 n.26 “Frontiers of Freedom”  149 Frontiers of Friction (1962)  57 funding  45, 46, 89, 166 Gable, Clark  125, 126 Gallup, George  97 Gallup Poll  89 Gargoile Lubricating Oil  124 Gargoile Mobiloil  124 gas industry  166 Gaumont-British International (GBI)  9, 167, 228, 229, 238, 239 Gay, Ken  64, 71

INDEX  253

General Electric  3 General Foods  89 General Motors  108 General Post Office (GPO)  217, 228 Ginwala, Frene  243 n.37 Girl or the Car, The  125 Giuseppina (1959)  63–5, 68 Gleason, James  126 Gleason, Lucile  126 Golden Gate International Exposition (GGIE, 1939)  7, 82, 83, 86–89, 96, 100, 106, 109 “Good as Gold!”  95 Goodliffe, Michael  216 Goodyear  189 Gordon, Douglas  60, 209, 211, 212 Government of India  191, 192 Grand Prix (1949)  60 Grapes of Wrath, The (Steinbeck)  81, 110 Great Depression  82, 85, 121, 139, 142, 154 Greenpark Productions  58, 64–6, 68, 69 Grierson, John  55, 57, 58, 60, 191–2, 209, 211, 218, 228 Group Areas Act (1954)  230 Group’s Haguel  66 Gruel, Henri  179 n.23 Guide to Film Services of National Associations  161 n.78 Guild associates  66 Gulf Refining Company  140 Gysin, Francis  59 Haanstra, Bert  61, 209 Halas, John  57 Halliburton, Richard  110 Harcol Film Company  38 Harding, Warren G.  35, 37 Hari S. Dasgupta Productions  191, 194 Hawkins, Rober  196 Haynes, Harold J.  84 Hays, Will  36, 37 Heckford, Michael  65 Hediger, Vinzenz  19, 20, 194 hegemony  17, 18 Hein, Leonard  148

Hepworth, Thomas Cradock  1 Heyer, John  60 Hidden Power (1961)  76 n.4 Higgins, Mary  129 highlife music  217–18 High Speed Flight (1957)  57, 62 Hill, James  62, 64, 65, 73, 74 Hindustan Aircraft  198 Hindustan Machine Tools  198 Hindustan Telephones  198 History Movies (1928)  130 Hold Your Man (1933)  126 Hollywood glamour  124–9 Holmes, Helen  121 Holt, Jack  126 Home-Made Car, The (1963)  64, 65 Hopkins, Miriam  117, 119 Hopkinson, Peter  70 Hornsby, Stephen  101, 107 Horse Play (1933)  127 Hossein, Robert  178 n.21 How an Aeroplane Flies  57, 62 “How Betty Found Fame”  128 How Can Industry Return to Normal  140 Howes, Edward  239 Huddleston, Trevor  230–2 Huggins, Ted  87 Hunnar films  191, 194 Hussain, Waris  207 n.26 IBM  108 Ichac, Marcel  170 Illustrated Weekly  206 n.25 Imperial Chemical Industries  3, 191 Imperial Tobacco  191 Independence Festival  212 Indian Documentary  188, 191, 198, 204 Indian Oil Corporation  185 Industrial Screen  220 Information Films of India  198 infrastructures  164, 186–7 Institute des hautes études cinématographiques (IDHEC)  166 Institutionalization of Educational Cinema: North America and Europe, The  4

254 INDEX

International Air Traffic Association  62 International Defence and Aid Fund (IDAF)  242 n.18 International Film Series  239 International Oil Cartel  145 International Review of Educational Cinematography  139 International Silver  89 Internet Archive  21 Iraq Petroleum Company  16, 17, 27, 60, 165 Iron and Steel  192 Ivakhiv, Adrian  187 “Jack Benny and the Mystery Girl”  128 Jackson, Robin  70 Jacobson, Brian R.  8 James Hill Productions  63 JB Holmes  59 Jell-O Program  128 JJ School of Art  196 Johannesburg Joint Council  230 John Sutherland Productions  151 Jones, Glyn  70 “Journal de 20 heurs” (the eight o’clock news)  167 Journées internationales du film de court-métrage in Tours  170 Justice Department  143 Kabauliram: A Village in West Bengal  192 Kamen, Kay  89, 101 Kansas-Oklahoma Oil & Gas Association  140 Kaufman, Nicholas  197 kerosene  188–90, 193, 204 Kineto Company of America  38 Kipling, Rudyard  124 Kiwanis  149 Klare, Michael T.  164 Knott, Dudley  64, 73 Kodak, Eastman  1 Kroger  89 Krupp  3 Kulturfilm department  197

La Belle vie (1963)  170 Lady of the Night (1933)  126 Lake Pipeline (1958)  217 Lamp, The  122, 131 n.12 Land Must Provide, The (1968)  62 Land of Grace (1964)  217 Lantern: Being a Practical Guide to the Working of the Optical (Magical Lantern, Hepworth)  1 La Rivière du hibou/The Owl River (1962)  170 Larkin, Brian  222–3 n.14 Larkins Studio  58 Last Ten Feet, The (1949)  147–51, 154 Latour, Bruno  195 Laurel and Hardy  126 Learning with the Lights Off: Educational Film in the United States  4 Leduc, Jean  170, 171 Legg, Stuart  60–2, 66, 71, 73, 191, 217 Le Mans (1952)  60 LeMenager, Stephanie  164 Leopold, Morton F.  33, 36, 38–9, 44, 45, 141 Les Étoiles de midi/Stars at Noon (1959)  170 Les Films de Saturne  179 n.23 Les Films du Centaur  170, 171 Leslie’s Week  124 Les Requins associés  170 Les Sept Iles de Frigg (1978)  171–6, 179 n.26 “Let’s Drive Better Than Men!”  123 Le Vieux fusil (1975)  171 Levy, Louis  238 Liberal Party of South Africa  232 Liberate Tate  25 licensing agreement  89, 90 Life in India  191, 193, 198–200 Lijadu, Yemi  216 L’Ile d’Acier (1967)  168 Lion  188 Lions Club  149 Lipton  191 Liquid Gold in Texas (1921)  38

INDEX  255

Literary Digest  124 Livingstone, Mary  128 Lloyd, A. L.  76 n.5 Location North Sea (1974)  70 London Boycott Movement  232 Long, Pierre  169 Look  144 Los Angeles Times  94, 97 Louis de Rochemont Associates  151 Louvre  25 Lowe, Edmund  126 Lowe, George  62 Luthuli, Albert  232, 240 Lutyens, Elisabeth  59 McCann Erickson  89, 92 McCay, Winsor  92 McClure’s  85 Mackaill, Dorothy  126 McKechnie, James  216 “Made for Punishment”  94 Made for Speed  125 Magic Garden, The (1951)  229 Magnolia Petroleum Company  122, 130, 131 n.14 Magnus (1983)  70 Maine, Norman Riley  152 Maingard, Jacqueline  9 Major Industries  198 Malan, D. F.  229 Mammoth Oil  36 Manning, Van H.  138 Man on the Land (1951)  151 March, Frederic  93, 117, 119, 125 March of Time  148, 150 Marg  198 Marling, Karal Ann  107, 109 Marshall, Herbert  119 Martial Arts of Malabar (1958)  194, 201 Martial Dances of Malabar  200, 201 Martin McConachie Productions  191 Masani, Minoo  198 Mason, Arthur  23 Mason, Bill  60, 73, 74 Mau Mau (1954)  229, 240 Maxwell House Show Boat  128 media production companies  21, 23

Mekong (1964)  62 Ménégoz, Robert  168 Menjou, Adolphe  126 Men of Tomorrow campaign  215 Mental Health Film Board  153 Merkel, Una  125, 126 Merton Park Studios  57 Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM)  125– 6 Mexican Oil Fields (1921)  38 Mexico and Its Oil (1922)  39, 140 Meyers, Cynthia B.  128 “Mickey and Donald’s Race to Treasure Island”  100 Mickey Mouse  83, 93–5, 97–100, 102–5, 107 “Mickey Mouse Globe Trotters Promotion”  101 “Mickey Mouse Map of the United States”  101 micropolitical practices  2, 3 Mikhali (1960)  64 Miller, Harold Blaine  145 “mineral fever”  84 Mining and Oil Bulletin  138 Ministry of Agriculture  170, 171 Ministry of Information (MOI)  55, 57 MIT  33 Mitchell, Timothy  186 Mobil  2, 8, 240 Mobilgas  117–19 Mobiloil Arctic  117–19 Mobiloil Movies  8, 117, 119, 125–8 modernity  4, 17, 121, 125, 129, 130, 168, 200, 218, 227, 237–9 modernization  123, 124, 214 modern lifestyle  120, 121 Modern Records Centre  18 Modern Talking Picture Service  149 Mohammed, Adamu  217 montage  22, 39, 148, 196, 200–5 Monthly Film Bulletin  229 More Precious than Gold (Kosbaarder as Goud, 1953)  228 Morris, Hollingsworth  151–2 Motion Picture Herald  142 Motion Picture Society of India  206 n.25

256 INDEX

Motor Land  94 Movies on Oil: A Catalog of Motion Pictures of General Interest about Petroleum  146, 147 Mulvey, Laura  23 Murray, Stephen  216 Music Hall Theatre  92 Myer, Ken  51 Naicker, G. M.  232 Nair, Janaki  199 National Educational Association  153 National Film Board of Canada  60, 184, 191, 192 national identity  105, 106 National Park Service  37 National Petroleum War Service Committee  138 National Portrait Gallery, UK  25 national security  144, 164 Nesbitt, Frank  211 Newberry Library  105 New Explorers, The  62, 68 New Frontier, The (1983)  70 New Life of a Displaced Person (1957)  198 News Magazine of the Screen  148 New Theatres  188, 194, 195 New York World’s Fair  82 Nigeria  208–21 Nigerian Broadcasting Corporation  217 Nigerian Broadcasting Service  216 Nigerianization  213, 215 Nigeria’s Oilmen (1962)  215–16 Nofal, Emil  228 North Sea offshore drilling  8, 70, 162, 163, 166, 171, 173–5 North Slope-Alaska (1964)  65 Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation  175 “No Three Little Pig Pies Today!”  96 Nye, David  8 O’Connor, Harvey  154 Offshore (1977)  70 oil cinematic projections  1–2

companies/industries/corporations  3, 7, 15, 16, 18–21, 23–5, 27–9, 34, 37–9, 41, 42, 55, 70, 83, 84, 86, 92, 101, 108, 121–3, 125, 136, 139–44, 147, 149, 152–4, 163, 165, 169, 174, 185, 208, 215–16 consumption  3, 40, 88, 123, 124, 138, 186–8 drilling  5, 8, 38, 40 extraction  7 histories  28–9 marketing  124–9 ministries  21 Nigerian  208 operations  18, 19, 23 production  38–40, 86, 93 rhetorics  7, 20, 35, 45 in South Asia  184–6 Oil  123, 139 Oil! (Sinclair)  83 Oil and War  144 Oildom  138 Oil for the Twentieth Century (1951)  58 Oil for Victory: The Story of Petroleum in War and Peace (1946)  144 Oil for War (1943)  143 “Oil Goes to War”  143 Oil in Asia (1958)  209, 217 Oil India  185 Oil Industry, The (1921)  38 “The Oil Industry and the Screen” (1954)  136 Oil Industry Information Committee (OIIC)  8, 137, 145–53 Oil Industry Service Center  149 Oil Institute Information Committee  154 Oil in Your Engine (1975)  66 Oilman’s Move (1961)  212, 213, 216–20 oil media archives  7, 15–17, 21–5, 28, 29 and its limits  25–7 navigating  17–21 “Oil Newsletter”  146 Oil Progress Day  146

INDEX  257

Oil Progress Week  145–7, 149, 150, 154 Oil Review  58 Oil Search Bulletin. See Shell-BP Bulletin Oil’s Well That Ends Well  126 Oil Trade Journal  140 Okala, Walter  216, 219 Old Car Comes Through, The  126 Old Car to the Rescue  126 Olien, Diana  144 Olien, Roger M.  144 One Thousand and One: The Blue Book of Non-Theatrical Film  140 online video libraries  17, 19–23 open-access online film collection  20, 21 Opinion Research, Inc.  145 Optimist’s Club  149 Orphans Film Symposium  4 Our India (1950)  198 Owl Victoria  188 Oxford University Press  196 Pacific Coast Oil Company  84, 85 Paint (1967)  65 Panama-Pacific Exposition (1915)  86–7, 107 Pan-American Petroleum and Transport Company  36, 44, 140, 141 Parade of the Award Nominees (1932)  93 Paramount Pictures  119, 125, 126 Parks, Lisa  164 Partition of British India  198 Pathe News  148 Pather Panchali/Song of the Road (1955)  204, 205 “pattern speeches”  146 Pelican production  70 Pendry, Alan  66, 69, 71 Perold, Jan  239 Persian Story (1952)  15–16, 27, 58 Peter Pan (1953)  100 petroculture  2, 3, 120–4, 130

Petroleum  150 Petroleum (1947)  148 Petroleum, the Liquid Mineral (1934)  142 Petroleum, The Story of an American Industry  140 Petroleum Administration for War (PAW)  143 Petroleum Board  55 petroleum extraction  4–6 Petroleum Facts and Figures (1928)  138 Petroleum Films Bureau (PFB)  21, 55–6, 69, 75 Petroleum Industry Committee  144 petroleum industries/companies  2, 8, 82, 86, 108, 123, 136, 138, 141, 143, 148, 164, 165, 167 Petroleum Industry War Council  143, 144 Petroleum in Today’s Living (1952)  146 petroleum products  8, 85, 108, 123, 124, 149, 151, 183, 185, 188 Petroliers des sables (1957)  167 pictorial map  83, 101, 105, 107 Pierson, Arthur  152 Pinocchio  109 Pitcairn People, The (1962)  65 Plant Pests and Diseases: Raspberry Beetle (1955)  209 Plymouth Six  127 “politics of infrastructural visibility”  164 popular music  218 Porcile, François  178 n.18, 179 n.23 Power Farming (1952)  146 Prager, Wilhelm  197 Prelinger, Rick  121 Prelinger Archives  5, 21 Price, Vincent  152 Prix Jean Vigo  170 “process films”  122 promotion  3, 5, 7, 8, 20, 28, 93, 95–7, 100, 105, 106, 124, 125, 183, 184, 188, 190, 192, 193, 195, 213, 218, 222 Prospect for Plastics  65

258 INDEX

Public Affairs Communications Division  65 publicity  183, 186–8, 201–3 film  190–3 print  188–90 Publicity and Travel Department, South African Railways and Harbours (SAR&H)  241 n.6 public relations  8, 9, 17, 20, 37, 52, 54, 55, 57, 136–9, 142–8, 155, 162, 163, 165, 176, 208, 211, 214, 220, 221 Put Una Money for There (1956)  218 “Race Derby Extra”  105 “Race to Treasure Island” map  101, 102, 106 Radio City Music Hall  89 Ram, Atma  191 Rank Organisation Short Films Group  66 Rao, H. Narahari  197 rationalization  5, 20 Ray, Satyajit  194, 204 RCA Victor  89 records preserving and keeping  18– 20 Red Sun  188 Refining the Crude  140 Régie autonome des pétroles  165 Renoir, Claude  204 Renoir, Jean  204 Republic  152 Republican National Committee  37 Republican Party  37 reputation and repertoire  20, 24, 25, 28 “restless age”  120–4 RHR Productions  60 Rig 20 (1952)  58 Rig Move (1965)  66 Rising Sun  188 Ristow, Walter  101 Rival World, The (1955)  61, 63, 67, 68, 209 River, The (1938)  153 River, The (1951)  204 River Must Live, The (1966)  67, 209

RKO Pictures  89, 90, 93, 129 Rockefeller, Abigail  105 Rockefeller, John D.  84, 85, 89, 105, 122, 139 Rockefeller, John D., Jr.  89 Rockefeller, Nelson  89, 90 Rogers, Ginger  125 Roland Reed Productions  151 Romance of Oil (1952)  146 Roman Scandals (1933)  129 Roosevelt, Franklin  89 Roosevelt, Theodore  85 Rose, P. G.  191 Ross-Federal Research Corporation  89, 94 Rotary Club  149 Rothacker Company  141 Rothacker Film Manufacturing Company  38 Rothman, Hal  105 Roy, Bimal  193, 195, 196 Royal Dutch Shell. See Shell Royal Navy  55 Royal Opera House, UK  25 Royal Shakespeare Company, UK  25 RPM Motor Oil  86, 92, 94, 95 Ruthless One,The (1956)  209 SACONY  21 Saludos Amigos (1940s)  99 Samaritan Films/Balfour Films  66 Samuel Goldwyn Production  129 San Francisco Chronicle  87 San Francisco Memorial Opera House  92 San Francisco World’s Fair  8, 82 Saturday Evening Post  85, 118, 119, 124–8, 146 Schätzl, Ludwig  215 Schlesinger, I. W.  225, 227 Schlesinger, John  227, 230 Schlesinger Organisation  225, 226 Schlieren (1958)  57 Scientific American  124 Scofield, D. G.  84 Scott, Michael  231, 232 Screen Gems  151, 153 Sea Area Forties  70

INDEX  259

Seager, George  60 Search for Oil in Nigeria, The (1961)  211–13, 215, 217–20 Secker, Frank  228, 233, 240 Second World War  7, 52, 143, 144, 147, 148, 155, 186, 194, 196, 199, 200 “Seeing Arizona”  99, 105 “Seeing Death Valley”  98 “Seeing Hawaii”  102 “Seeing Hollywood”  100 “Seeing Lake Tahoe”  100 “Seeing Puget Sound”  98 “Seeing Treasure Island”  109 Segaller, Denis  57 Selco Pictures  41 Sellers, William  193 Selznick  40–2 Sentilles, Renée M.  16 Shadow of Progress, The (1970)  67, 68 Shaifee, Katayoun  18, 30 n.14 Sharpeville Massacre (1960)  232 Shearman, John  60 Shears, Ronnie  228 Shell  2, 7, 9, 20, 51–76, 92, 93, 137, 147, 166, 184, 185, 188, 191, 208, 212–21 Shellarama (1965)  66 Shell-BP  210, 211, 213–17, 219–21 Shell-BP Bulletin  214, 216 Shell Chemicals  61 Shell Cinemagazine  58 Shell Film Unit (SFU)  53, 55, 56, 66, 69, 191, 209–11, 217, 220, 221 Shell Fulmar field  70 Shell-Mex  55 Shell People. Ability and Experience  214 Shelltox  190 Sherman antitrust act  85 Shetland Experience, The (1977)  70 Shipping Research Bureau  240 Shrine Auditorium  92 Shrivastava, B. K.  192 Sign of the Cross, The  125 Silent Spring (Carson)  66 Sinclair, Harry  36, 43

Sinclair, Upton  83 Sinclair Consolidated Oil Corporation  7, 39, 140 Sinclair Oil Company  34, 35, 41–5 Sinclair Opaline Motor Oil  40 Sinclair Refining Company  142 Singer, Ben  121 Skyhook (1958)  62, 68 slidefilms  136, 148 Small Propeller, The (1967)  65 Smooth Performance (1934)  117, 127 Smythe, Rosaleen  192 Snow Man’s Tip (1933)  126 Snow White (1937)  89, 90, 93 Société national des pétroles d’Aquitaine  165 Socony-Vacuum Oil Company  122–4, 128, 130 “Soft Power”  76 Son et Lumière  169, 170 Song of the Clouds (1955)  209 Song of the Clouds (1957)  62 South Africa  225–31, 233–5, 239, 240 South Africa-Land of Endeavour (1957)  227, 239, 240 South African Cavalcade (Suid Afrikaanse Kavalkade, 1952)  228 South African Coal, Oil and Gas Corporation Ltd. (Sasol) oil refinery  240, 244 n.39 South African Indian Congress  232 South African National Party  225, 226, 228, 231, 232 South African Police  227 South African State Information Office  228, 242 n.8 South African State Information Services  9, 242 n.8 South African Wool Board  227, 228 South Africa’s Life Line (Die Slagaar van Suid-Afrika, 1950s)  9, 225–40 South East Asia Unit  62 Soyinka, Wole  216, 217 sponsorship  2, 17, 20, 21, 24, 25, 27, 28, 38, 46, 54, 58, 61, 72, 107,

260 INDEX

142, 150, 166, 184, 190, 193, 219, 226 Stafford, Roly  64–7, 69, 73 Stagecoach (1939)  81 Stamp, Shelley  121 Standard Oil Bulletin  93, 108, 110 Standard Oil Company  2, 3, 7–8, 20, 38, 94, 97–100, 102, 105, 106, 109–11, 122–3, 131 n.12, 137, 139, 140, 144, 147, 184, 225 Standard Oil Company of California (SoCal)  82–2, 95–8, 100, 101, 107–11 Standard Oil Company of New Jersey  122 Standard Oil Company of New York  122 Standard Oil monopoly case (1911)  34 Standard Oil of Indiana  140 Standard Oil of New Jersey  82, 84 Standard Oil Trust  85 Standard Parade, The (1939)  83 “The Standard Parade for 1939”  92, 94 Standard Parade of 1939, The  93, 101 Standard Touring Service  123 Standard Vacuum  185 Stanwyck, Barbara  127 Starosielski, Nicole  164 Steinbeck, John  81, 110 Stevens, Simon  231 Stevenson, Robert Louis  88 Stewart, James  130 Steyn, Phia  213 Story of a Mexican Oil Gusher, The (1922)  140 Story of Colonel Drake, The (1954)  151–3 Story of Gasoline, The  140 Story of Lubricating Oil, The  140 Story of Oil, The (1920)  122 Story of Oil, The (1946)  144 Story of Petroleum, The (1921)  39 Story of Petroleum, The (1926)  2, 3 Story of Petroleum, The (1928)  139, 140

Story of Steel, The (1956)  204 “Streets of the World”  109 “Stretches for Miles”  95 style and genre  150–4 Subterranean Estates: Lifeworlds of Oil and Gas (Appel, Mason and Watts)  23 Summerville, Slim  126, 127 Sunset  94–6 Suschitsky, Wolfgang  66 Swanson, Donald  9, 226, 228, 229, 232, 233, 238, 240 Swingler, Humphrey  69, 76 n.5 Tarbell, Ida  85 Tarot, Didier  172 Tata Iron and Steel  191 Teapot Dome scandal (1920s)  34–7, 40–3, 45, 138, 139 Tetzlaff, Stefan  189 Texaco/Texas Company  137, 147, 225 Textiles (1955)  199 Thaumetopoea (1960)  171 “Theater of the Atom”  149 Thirty Million Acres (1947)  228, 238, 239 Thomas, Dora  69, 73 Thomas, Hugh  92 Threat in the Water (1968)  62 “three As”  5, 6, 34 Three Caballeros, The (1940s)  99 Through Oil Lands of Europe and Africa (1925)  44, 141 Through the Oil Fields of Mexico (1922)  141 Time  97, 108 Tins for India (1941)  193–202 Total  8, 162, 163, 165 Total Oil Marine (TOM)  166, 167, 170–2, 174–6, 179 n.26 tourism  44, 106, 123 Towing Nellie Home  127 Town Called Charlie, A (1981)  70 “Trade Test” broadcasts  65 Traffic in Souls (1913)  121 Transit à Saigon/Incident in Saigon (1963)  170 transnational oil company  186

INDEX  261

transportation  85–7, 105, 119, 121, 123, 124, 129, 130, 139, 141, 147, 184, 186–8, 190, 193 Travel Tykes campaign  91, 108, 110 Travel Tykes Weekly  83, 97, 98, 100, 102, 103, 105, 106, 109 Tribute to Fangio (1954)  60 Tribute to Stirling Moss (1961)  60 Trinity College of Music  217 Tritton, Ronald  55–8, 64, 65, 73 Trombay  185, 193, 203–5 Trombay  191 Tucker, George Loane  121 Turkey-The Bridge (1966)  66 Twentieth Century  126, 127 UAC  215 UFA  197 Umkhonto we Sizwe (Spear of the Nation)  240 Underwater Search, The  66, 70 UNESCO  191, 192 Une torchère pour Frigg  169 Union of South Africa  232 Union Pacific  81 United Nations  166, 198 United Productions of America (UPA)  151 United States  3, 38, 45, 67, 86, 97, 100, 121, 123, 124, 136, 138–40, 143, 148, 225, 227 economy  85 western  82, 84, 88, 94, 99, 108 Universal  126, 127 University of Texas  21 University of Warwick  18, 19, 21 Unseen Enemies (1959)  61 US Bureau of Mines (USBM)  2, 33, 34, 39–45, 138–43, 150, 156 n.23 Useful Cinema (Acland and Wasson)  4, 5 US government  36, 37, 41, 105, 138 US State Department  153 Vacuum Oil Company  123, 124 Van Dyke, Willard  153 Vanishing Tribe, The (1959)  194, 199

Variety  41, 48 n.39, 178 n.21 Venezuela Looks Ahead (1950)  209 Verity Films  58, 66 Via Macau (1966)  170 Victory’s Oil (1944)  143, 144, 147 Victory through Air Power (1943)  107 Vijaykar, V. M.  194, 196 Village in Travancore, A (1956)  194, 200, 202 Villardebo, Carlos  167 visual culture  3, 6, 188 visual media  17, 53, 121 voice-over  130, 148, 152, 173, 194, 195, 212, 213, 215–19, 226–8, 233–7 Vonderau, Patrick  19, 20 Waiting on Weather (1975)  70 Walk in the Forest, A (1958)  62 Walt Disney Studio  7, 82–6, 88–91, 93, 94, 96–101, 104, 106–11 Warner Brothers  126, 147, 152 Warner News  147 Wasson, Haidee  5 Water Lilly  188 Watson, Gary  216 Watts, Michael  23, 30 n.13 Wayne, John  81 Ways to Strength and Beauty (1925)  197 Weavers of Maindargi  192 Welles, Orson  76 West African Rhythm Brothers  217–18 Western Advertising  89, 92, 94, 97 Western Areas Removal Scheme  230 Western Cape Provincial Library  226 Westinghouse Company  149 What Price Gasoline?  143 White, Pearl  121, 122 Williams, Derek  51, 62, 65, 68, 70, 72–4 Williams, Edward  59, 70 Williston Basin oil  154 Wingo, Otis  43 Wizard of Oz, The (1939)  81

262 INDEX

Woman I Stole, The (1933)  126 Work, Hubert  36, 37, 42 World’s Fair (1937)  87 World’s Fair (Doctorow)  82 world’s fairs and expositions  81, 82, 86, 88 World Struggle for Oil, The (1923)  34–5, 39–46, 142, 156 n.23 World Wide Pictures  57, 62, 65, 70

Wray, Fay  126 Yates, JoAnn  6 Yeast Foam Tablets  128–9 Yergin, Daniel  138 Young, Loretta  127 Young & Rubicam’s (Y&R)  128 YouTube  75, 162, 176 Zils, Paul  194, 197–200 Zion Evangelical Church Brotherhood  149