"A More Beautiful Capital," Beladuna No. 10, 1955
1 2013-09-07T10:41:20-07:00 Mona Damluji 89c6177132ce9094bd19f4e5159eb300a76ef0df 255 2 Translation: (We remember) movies that we enjoyed in Cinema Ghazi, but it will disappear to be replaced by a spacious plaza. plain 2014-07-08T15:57:37-07:00 Mona Damluji 89c6177132ce9094bd19f4e5159eb300a76ef0dfThis page is referenced by:
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Oil Films in Context
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The dominance of British oil concessions encircling the Gulf region by the mid-twentieth century cannot be understood apart from the map of the Sykes-Picot Agreement that emerged after the fall of the Ottoman Empire. Britain and France divided the region into territories of influence and control, shaping the modern map of nation-states that exists until today. Thus, the geography of the borders and concessions negotiated by western states and petroleum companies after the First World War undergirds any understanding of the history of Iraqi oil and its representations.The colonized world witnessed a pivotal moment in British foreign policy after the First World War when the U.S. President Woodrow Wilson espoused the principle of self-determination in his infamous fourteen points declaration. Despite initial resistance to the notion that the language of self-determination could apply to its colonies, Britain changed its longstanding doctrine of direct colonial rule into a paternalistic posture of indirect rule that claimed to foster the governed territories towards political independence.The era of naked British imperialism, epitomized by its colonial policy of direct rule in India, was collapsing. Britain’s imperial claims to the resource rich and formerly Ottoman provinces in Palestine and Iraq were accordingly defined as “mandates” rather than “colonies”. Yet in practice the militarized British rule in Iraq operated with unchecked control over political and economic decisions. At the outset of World War II the British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and the U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued the Atlantic Charter in 1941 as a framework for more equitable objectives in postwar geo-politics. The Charter codified eight principles, including respect of all peoples’ right to self-government and a condemnation of territorial aggrandizement, which reinforced the need for Britain to reinvent its imperialist discourse.As this essay shows, the emergence of the public relations profession and rise of corporate power became essential in the British imperial strategy to maintain its control over petroleum resources in postwar geo-political landscape. The Iraq Petroleum Company and its public relations office was an active player in the production of the neo-colonial discourse on Iraqi oil in Britain and Iraq.Next - The Origins of Iraqi OilPrevious - Introduction
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Beladuna
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Beladuna was notably the most genuine effort among contemporaries in oil company media making to engage with the complexities of modernization in an oil-producing country. Several of the short films included the company cine-magazine Beladuna provide a relatively nuanced study of the challenges of nation building, from the destruction of old Baghdad neighbourhoods to make way for modern construction projects. Although Beladuna never came close to providing an explicit critique of the power wielded by the oil industry or government, a distinction in IPC’s approach to filmmaking is obvious in the specific nature of the film subjects and input of the Iraqi production crew members. In fact, the IPC cine-magazine consistently neglected to present any reference to the oil company in its stories about modern Iraq.Among the dozens of episodes made as part of the Beladuna series, a reoccurring theme that built on the central message in The Third River was the modernization of Baghdad. However, in these films the modernization of the city was only implicitly linked to the country’s increasing oil wealth. Oil and IPC are not mentioned. A More Beautiful Capital (Arabic: Assimatun Ajmel) is a short documentary made in 1955 as part of the tenth episode of the IPC’s Arabic-language cine-magazine. The film depicts the modernization of Baghdad's built environment in the mid-1950s, namely the destruction of older neighborhoods to make way for 'modern construction'. The documentary is constructed as a sequence of montages accompanied by an original soundtrack and scripted voiceover, narrating various scenes of the making of modern Baghdad. Visible evidence of urban change is used to illustrate and substantiate scripted commentary. The musical composition shifts in tone and level to enhance the mood of each sequence. The narration works to persuade audiences that destruction of older neighbourhoods is necessary to facilitate construction of modern buildings, which are fundamental to making Baghdad into 'a capital fit for a modern country'.IPC promoted its Beladuna series as an effort 'to project modern Iraq' to ordinary Iraqis. The decision to make the national population of an oil-producing country the primary audience for corporate films was until then unprecedented in the Middle East. IPC screened the films in theatres of every major Iraqi city prior to feature films, as well as in mobile units that would travel to audiences of oil workers in remote oil fields, pump stations and refineries. During the summer special screening would be held outdoors. Documentation of the distribution and reception of these films from the Iraqi perspective has not been recorded or is no longer available. What is clear from the films as well as interviews with filmmakers related to the production of Beladuna is that the company used the company cine-magazine as an attempt to establish a coherent national imaginary of progress in Iraq that was implicitly tied to the story of oil.