Imagining a National Body
The historical narrative leaps across time to highlight the Mongol invasion of Baghdad, the birth of Islam, and finally the coronation of King Faisal II. The film depicts the King's speech, broadcast over radio, as a sequence that unifies Iraqis as a common national body. Staged close up shots of young men in Baghdad, oil workers in the Kirkuk fields, and unspecified villagers drinking tea gathered on the ground are cut together in a sequence intended to convey that the entire nation was listening intently as the King’s voice was broadcast over the airwaves.
Iraq's "natural wealth" is described as being a product of two major industrial undertakings. Agricultural production and irrigation schemes are introduced as the most important to Iraq. This is interesting as it suggests an attempt by the filmmakers to underplay the role of the oil industry at first, despite the fact that the remainder of the film is dedicated to explicating how oil wealth is transforming urban life through development projects in the country. “The revenue from this new wealth is being used to create more wealth for the betterment of the country.” Brief images of oil workers and oil derricks are paired in a short sequence that is intended to stand in for the entire project of oil extraction. The entire sequence on oil runs under one minute.
The last part of the film conveys an explicit narrative tying oil extraction to national progress that manifests as a new opportunity for individual citizens of Iraq to improve their social and economic standing. “Today, her revenues from oil are helping Iraq to lay a foundation for a new standard of wellbeing for all her people. The young people of today know that life for them is going to be different, and better, far better, than it was for their fathers.” The visual scenario cuts directly from landscape of oil infrastructure to a montage of pageant floats carrying costumed young women parading before King Faisal II.
Images of modern women continue to be featured as indicators of the modernization of urban society in Baghdad. For example, over a montage of women walking onto a campus and working in a chemistry classroom the commentary states, “When you see these young girls in their western clothes, so assured and confident, you’re inclined to forget how surprised their mothers would have been at the idea of training for
jobs that their daughters take in their stride. Jobs they thought that only men could and should do.”
The film closes with a sequence emphasizing how modern developments in healthcare and education are tied to modernization of urban society. This is particularly tied to the physical appearance and bodies of women in Baghdad. “And it’s natural that with all these modern developments, the women of Iraq are breaking away from their traditional style of dress, unaltered for centuries, to wear the comfortable, practical clothes that are right for this new life. It’s a turn of events significant of a wider change, of a more liberal attitude to life.” The accompanying sequence of a young woman in a tailor shop ends on a shot of her turning in the mirror to admire her dress.
The closing sequence depicts two men waving to each other, as one steps on board an airplane, closing the narrative as it began with the perspective of the visitor to Iraq looking out the window at the view of Baghdad from the air, connecting the city to its broader global context. Ageless Iraq clearly addresses a global audience, as opposed to being intended for distribution primarily among Iraqis, as the previous two films. In this sense it offers a different perspective on the project of documenting the modern oil city for a general audience. It presents the nation-state as a unified and seamless community, bound together by a common history and future. This narrative is linked directly to oil, framed as new wealth. The transformation of Iraq is figured most prominently through the image of the urban woman whose outward transformations are told to signify a “wider change” sweeping the country.