Facing Iraq "As It Is"
Notably, The Third River was also the first corporate public relations film of its kind; that is, a sponsored documentary foremost intended for general audiences in Iraq, and secondarily for English-speaking audiences in Britain. Clarke recalls that the film “was shown…extremely widely, yes. It was shown in 35 and 16, it was shown in every cinema in Iraq. This was so different from the specialized film and the all the too specialized distribution we were used to in most of the documentary business.”
The company’s decision to screen the film in cooperation with the Iraqi government as an event for the cinema-going public in Iraqi cities indicated a shift away from the strategy of Anglo-Iranian’s public relations efforts, which were directed almost entirely toward the British population. Running just shy of thirty minutes, The Third River documents the construction in 1951 of the 555 mile-long pipeline planned to bring oil from the fields of Kirkuk in northern Iraq to the port of Banias on Syria’s Mediterranean coast. This was to be the world’s largest capacity pipeline, deemed in the film’s narration as Iraq’s “Third River” – a river of oil.
The filmmakers captured the tedious and repetitive procedures involved in transporting and assembling the thirty-inch pipeline, one thirty-one-foot long steel pipe segment at a time. Tracking the gradual movement of the pipe-laying crews from the origin point in Banias, across the dessert and into Iraq, the black and white images dynamically capture a glimpse of the labor and the landscape required to fuel carbon-based economies in the modern world.
The Third River presented Iraqi, Syrian and British audiences in the 1950s an unparalleled, close-up perspective on the infrastructure of oil extraction, and the construction of the new pipeline that would deliver unprecedented quantities of Iraq’s so-called black gold to the European market – yielding unprecedented quantities of petro-dollars. However, in his discussion of the making of The Third River, director Michael Clarke suggested that, “To a great extent the 30 in. line served as a vehicle to convey impressions of the life and background of modern Iraq as the ‘cradle of civilization’ – as all important focal point of industrial development and as a land of sound economic promise.”