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Urban Sights: Urban History and Visual Culture

Iraqis Behind the Camera

Midway through shooting The Third River, as the ramifications of the “Iranian Oil Crisis” on Britain’s oil production became evident, IPC decided to establish a permanent film unit in Baghdad. Michael Clarke was initially approached to oversee the project, however he declined the job due to personal reasons. John Shearman took up the position and has since stated 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.” From 1953 the IPC film unit produced original Arabic-language episodes of a company cine-magazine called Beladuna, which translates from Arabic to "our country".

The unit, led by director Peter Kelly, 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, and Kerim Mejid were among those Iraqis who worked in the unit and some of these men went on to have significant filmmaking careers afterward. In general, film unit hires in Baghdad were made through word of mouth or personal networks rather than 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 affirms. However, despite the significant Iraqi participation, it must be noted that the films were ultimately produced with the oversight of British directors and producers, and the occasional censorship of Iraq Petroleum Company and Iraqi Government officials.

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Previous - "The Trappings of Modernity"

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"The Trappings of Modernity" During production, the filmmakers of The Third River were faced with a challenge: how to depict the ways that oil promised to change Iraq for the better before any remarkable visible evidence of development had been created for the cameras to capture. In other words, the film was to document the promise of modernity yet to come. Clarke wrote of the film’s objective:

Our aim throughout was not merely to make a record of the construction of the 30 in. line, but to put this into its context. The new pipeline is more than an example of remarkable engineering skill; it presages much for the people of Iraq. During our stay in the Middle East, the new “fifty-fifty” agreement was signed…About us was the bustle of change; and we wanted to say, however briefly, however synoptically, that the subject of our films was, fundamentally, Iraq itself. Our theme was, indeed, twinfold: in the foreground, the drama and achievement of building the pipelines, the pumphouses, the terminal; and beyond all this, the development and improvement of the human lot which the Iraq Government, through the Development Board, would have the means to achieve.

As a key example of how the filmmakers worked to represent "Iraq itself" in The Third River, the clip above describes Baghdad as a city that is beginning to be shaped by "trappings of modernity" thanks to the country's increased oil wealth. The narrator goes on to define modernity, on the one hand, in terms of new modes and a greater scale of energy consumption: the internal combustion engine, power lines, and factories. On the other hand, the film montage presents a sequence of perspectives on the city that highlight its physical transformation into a modern metropolis: wide boulevards, shiny buses, concrete buildings, traffic officers. Together the voiceover and montage craft a simple and clear image of a modern city that works to stand in for the promise of Iraq's new oil wealth.

The Development Board's overhaul of commercial boulevards in central Baghdad during the 1950s were among the most visible schemes to clear the city center for better vehicular and pedestrian traffic. For example, Nooradin has described the new plan for Al Rashid Street included “removing some structures to create new public squares and cutting or removing the balconies from buildings abutting the street so as to allow enough space for the London buses imported from England. Many buildings were also demolished and replaced with large and high-rise structures, so changing the established character of the street.” Such dramatic transformation projects in Baghdad created a visible image of a modern capital that was captured and circulated in IPC's films and photography. Meanwhile, about 45% of settlements in Baghdad were located in sarifa areas around the city where residents lived in mud reed huts without clean running water or electricity. These areas of the modern city were never captured by IPC's public relations image makers.

During the1950s, the Development Board invited several world-famous modernist architects to design landmark buildings for the capital. These building projects also generated images of modern Baghdad that linked Iraqi oil to the aesthetics of international modernism. Not only were Le Corbusier, Walter Gropius and Frank Lloyd Wright drawing up plans for new landmarks throughout the capital, but a vibrant home-grown discourse on the future of modern Iraqi architecture, painting, sculpture, poetry and literature was constantly circulating in meetings, exhibitions and conversations put on between Baghdad’s young practitioners and thinkers of the day. Images of the Iraqi capital as an emerging site of modernist architectural projects proliferated in IPC's periodicals, journals of architecture and planning, and international newspapers in various maps, drawings, and photographs. Baghdad was the stage upon which oil modernity was made most visible. IPC's The Third River was the first film to promote this image directly to Iraqi audiences.

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Previous - Facing Iraq "As It Is"

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