-- Patrick Russell, Shadows of Progress: Documentary Film in Post-War Britain
Summoning the popularity and prestige of cinema, the Iraq Petroleum Company (IPC) invented the image of Baghdad for Iraqi audiences as the sight/site of oil modernity in the 1950s. In other words, oil urbanization, or the modernization of the city as shaped by the petroleum industry and its revenues, in Iraq cannot be understood apart from the representation of Baghdad as visible evidence of petroleum’s promise to benefit the national population. The British-controlled oil company in Iraq produced a program of two-dozen sponsored films and cine-magazine episodes between 1951 and 1958, which this essay examines as an emblematic case of neo-colonial film, constituting an archive of media practices that bridge the categories of colonial film on one hand, and industrial film on the other.
After the Second World War, the Atlantic Charter reinforced the right to democratic self-rule as a global norm and the British state developed creative tactics to abet its continued control over strategic resources in its colonized territories. Oil above all became central to this story and, as this essay will show, British oil companies played a fundamental role in reinventing the imperial project in the postcolonial context of Iraq. Through a contextualized analysis of the IPC films, I argue that the company public relations office utilized the conventional approaches and standard formats of colonial and industrial film – including montage, scripted voiceover, and staged b-roll – to narrativize the association between neo-colonialist practices of oil extraction and national development as causal, inherent, and positive.
Following the invention of still and moving image technologies, industrial operations the world over have entailed the systematic production of massive image archives. Indeed, these corporate image worlds should not be dismissed as a subordinate function of industry, but rather recognized as a primary dimension of company operations. During the early twentieth century, as I show elsewhere, the petroleum industry in particular not only used film technologies for internal company needs, but also institutionalized new networks of production and distribution that were chiefly responsible for globalizing the British documentary film movement after World War II. At its peak in the 1950s, the IPC’s public relations media strategy included the bilingual production of annual reports and monthly periodicals, as well as in-house units for documentary photography and film. This IPC Medienverbund served as a critical discursive dimension of the postcolonial landscape of oil extraction in Iraq after World War II.
As we know from reading Melanie McAlister’s study of visual culture in relationship to foreign policy in the United States, cultural texts do not simply “reflect” or “reproduce” existing social realities but are “active producers of meaning” situated in precise historical contexts. Accordingly, this essay aims to better understand how oil companies used film and more specifically cinematic representations of the modern city as a strategic aspect of the neocolonial British project to control oil in the Middle East after the Second World War. In particular, this essay shows how its prestige films and cine-magazine worked to legitimate political acts of foreign exploitation and control of Iraqi oil, land and labor from 1951 to 1958 within a regional context of mounting anti-imperialist discourse and nationalist movement building.
The films included in this essay were the first moving images of modern Baghdad to be filmed on location and circulated widely among general audiences in Britain and, more significantly, to as many as two-thirds of the Iraqi population. This essay will focus on an historical and visual analysis of a selection of the known IPC sponsored film titles that were produced and distributed prior to the 1958 July Revolution that diminished Britain’s hegemony in Iraq. Since no comprehensive archive of IPC films exists today, this essay examines the small number of films that have been irregularly conserved and made available in the archives of the British Film Institute, British Petroleum Video Library, British Pathe and personal collections of former IPC employees. From this small but significant sample, this essay determines that irrespective of the distinct approaches that IPC employed in the production of the films The Third River (1951), Ageless Iraq (1954), and A More Beautiful Capital (1955) an underlying objective remained consistent throughout the oil company’s film use: to link the neo-colonial practice of oil extraction to the promise of postcolonial urban modernity.