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Urban Sights: Urban History and Visual Culture

"A More Beautiful Capital"

Despite its unabated and uncritical approach to portraying the story of Iraqi oil, in 1953 the company executed a film program that was notably the most genuine effort among its contemporaries to engage with the complexities of modernization. Several of the short films included the company cine-magazine Beladunaprovide a relatively nuanced study of the challenges of nation building, from the destruction of old Baghdad neighborhoods to efforts to cope with river flooding. 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 crewmembers.

CLIP: Beladuna – “Modern planning requires the destruction of many of these old buildings, which everybody mentions. [Cinema Ghazi] will disappear to be replaced by a spacious plaza/square.”

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. No available documentation on the distribution and reception of these films from the Iraqi perspective was found,. What is clear is that the company and the state used the IPC films as an attempt to establish a coherent national imaginary of the creative destruction resulting from the modernization and development as a positive signifier of progress in Iraq.

Among the dozens of episodes made as part of the Beladuna series, the modernization of Baghdad reoccurred as a central theme. 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 transformation of Baghdad’s built environment in the mid-1950s. 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 neighborhoods is necessary to facilitate construction of modern buildings, which are fundamental to making Baghdad into “a capital fit for a modern country.”

CLIP: “In Baghdad, there are old neighborhoods that have beautiful houses, but most of them are rickety and it is time to re-design most of these neighborhoods. So the obsolete old houses are being destroyed to make way for modern building/construction.”

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Iraqis Behind the Camera Midway through shooting The Third River, as the detrimental ramifications of the so-called Iran Oil Crisis upon the British position in global production became evident, IPC’s public relations officers decided to establish a permanent film unit in Baghdad. The explicit purpose of creating the in-country unit was “to prevent Persian happenings repeating themselves in neighbouring Iraq, by showing the public there that the activities of an oil company benefit not only the shareholders but the country which owns the oil”. Clarke was initially approached to oversee the project, however he declined the job due to personal reasons. John Shearman, who took up the position to run the unit, has explained that the unit’s objectives were, first, “to train Iraqi film technicians in [the British] tradition of technical and documentary filmmaking,” and second, “to make films which would explain to the people of Iraq what the oil company was doing in their territory…that it was not really taking away the black gold because it was putting money back into national development.” Shearman immediately hired the young cinematographer Peter Kelly who had been part of The Third River production team to stay on in Baghdad as the film unit director. In his own words, Peter Kelly emphasized that that the purpose of the film unit was to make films “to let Iraqis know that the oil company was doing something worthwhile” and, above all, “to make films that Iraqis would be interested in watching.” The key strategy employed towards achieving the central objective stated repeatedly by the unit’s representatives was the production of films for Iraqi audiences. Beginning in 1953 the IPC film unit was dedicated to producing original Arabic-language episodes of the company cine-magazine. The series was called Beladuna, which in Arabic means "our country". In this regard, the project of imagining Iraqi oil was nominally endowed with a sense of national ownership despite the fact that British interests ultimately controlled the film unit and the company it belonged to.
The unit was led by director Peter Kelly and also included two British cameramen and several Iraqi film technicians, scriptwriters, and editors who usually had previous filmmaking experience with Studio Baghdad or other studios and film units in the region. Muhammad Shukri Jameel, Simon Mehran, Abdul Latif Saleh, Yehyeh Faiq, Youseff Anderws, and Kerim Mejid were among those Iraqis who worked in the unit and some of these men went on to have significant filmmaking careers in the region afterward. In general, film unit members in Baghdad were hired through word of mouth recommendations and personal networks rather than via formal advertisements. Arthur Elton, senior film advisor for the IPC, spelled out the motivation behind the approach strategy to make films for Iraqis and by Iraqis, writing that:

If…done imaginatively and from the point of view of the people…themselves (and not from that of the film technicians introduced from overseas), the effect will be gradually to create a favourable attitude towards the oil industry as a whole, and to make the Operating Companies seem a more natural and useful part of the economy…than many people are at present prepared to allow. Irrational, emotional attitudes will be damped down and criticism directed into informed and constructive channels.

The cine-magazine embodied this rationale, as the title Beladuna indicates. However, despite significant Iraqi participation on the ground, it must be recognized that the films were ultimately produced with the oversight of British directors and producers, and endured occasional interventions from top Iraq Petroleum Company and Iraqi Government officials.

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