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Urban Sights: Urban History and Visual Culture

A Neo-Colonial Film History

The emergence of neo-colonial corporate propaganda in oil-producing countries largely followed the approach promoted in the 1930s by John Grierson regarding the explicit benefits of sponsorship for corporate reputation for companies and citizens. The IPC films in particular worked to reinvent the image of the British presence in Iraq by constructing positivist narratives about the benefits of oil wealth to the modern nation-state and its people. IPC’s public relations media practices operated simultaneously in the service of corporate and state interests in Iraq during the 1950s. The company sponsored prestige films worked to influence global perceptions of Iraq as an oil state while its cine-magazine aimed to shape national discourses on oil and modernity among Iraqis.

This essay contributes to a deepening of scholarship that interrogates the multiple media practices that straddle and complicate the shared histories of “the colonial” and “the corporate” in media studies. The establishment of corporate public relations offices and associated film units during the first half of the twentieth century was not limited to the British petroleum companies in the Middle East. Nonetheless, the IPC’s efforts to govern national and global imaginaries of oil extraction is an instructive case for understanding the emergence of media practices that linked foreign corporate interests with postcolonial state agendas in the wake of British colonial rule.

In Film and the End of Empire, Lee Grieveson examines Britain’s efforts to ‘project the State’ to colonies through a network of film units, theatrical and non-theatrical distribution circuits, and mobile cinema vans. These hallmarks of the colonial film era, he explains, "were predicated on ideas about the utility of cinema for engineering consent and managing the conduct of diverse populations. ” The British oil company in Iraq produced its program of films during the 1950s based upon these same theories about film’s power to manufacture consent. Yet, despite Britain’s continued economic, cultural, and political hegemony over its former mandate, Iraq was ostensibly a sovereign nation-state after 1932.

Recent studies of industrially sponsored documentary in the collected volume, Films that Work: Industrial Film and the Productivity of Media, show how corporate image archives provide windows to unpacking key aspects of the internal organization of domestic labor and power structures within major European companies. However, the relationship between “educational” or “informational” industrial media practice and postcolonial political landscapes of industrialized resource extraction remain relatively unconsidered. As the exception, Rudmer Canjel's history of the Shell Film Unit examines the impressive range of documentaries made for prestige purposes since the 1920s; however, few of the films discussed by the author attempted narratives on the culture, history, and development of oil-producing countries.

Next - The Iraq Petroleum Company Medienverbund

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Damluji No sector of society made more enthusiastic use of the sponsored film than the oil companies; no medium was more enthusiastically embraced by them than the documentary film, and so nobody interested in the relationship of media to society can afford to leave the post-war oil documentary out of its history.
-- Patrick Russell, Shadows of Progress: Documentary Film in Post-War Britain

Summoning the popularity and prestige of cinema, the Iraq Petroleum Company (IPC) invented the image of Baghdad for Iraqi audiences as the sight/site of oil modernity in the 1950s. In other words, oil urbanization, or the modernization of the city as shaped by the petroleum industry and its revenues, in Iraq cannot be understood apart from the representation of Baghdad as visible evidence of petroleum’s promise to benefit the national population. The British-controlled oil company in Iraq produced a program of two-dozen sponsored films and cine-magazine episodes between 1951 and 1958, which this essay examines as an emblematic case of neo-colonial film, constituting an archive of media practices that bridge the categories of colonial film on one hand, and industrial film on the other.
After the Second World War, the Atlantic Charter reinforced the right to democratic self-rule as a global norm and the British state developed creative tactics to abet its continued control over strategic resources in its colonized territories. Oil above all became central to this story and, as this essay will show, British oil companies played a fundamental role in reinventing the imperial project in the postcolonial context of Iraq. Through a contextualized analysis of the IPC films, I argue that the company public relations office utilized the conventional approaches and standard formats of colonial and industrial film – including montage, scripted voiceover, and staged b-roll – to narrativize the association between neo-colonialist practices of oil extraction and national development as causal, inherent, and positive. Following the invention of still and moving image technologies, industrial operations the world over have entailed the systematic production of massive image archives. Indeed, these corporate image worlds should not be dismissed as a subordinate function of industry, but rather recognized as a primary dimension of company operations. During the early twentieth century, as I show elsewhere, the petroleum industry in particular not only used film technologies for internal company needs, but also institutionalized new networks of production and distribution that were chiefly responsible for globalizing the British documentary film movement after World War II. At its peak in the 1950s, the IPC’s public relations media strategy included the bilingual production of annual reports and monthly periodicals, as well as in-house units for documentary photography and film. This IPC Medienverbund served as a critical discursive dimension of the postcolonial landscape of oil extraction in Iraq after World War II. As we know from reading Melanie McAlister’s study of visual culture in relationship to foreign policy in the United States, cultural texts do not simply “reflect” or “reproduce” existing social realities but are “active producers of meaning” situated in precise historical contexts. Accordingly, this essay aims to better understand how oil companies used film and more specifically cinematic representations of the modern city as a strategic aspect of the neocolonial British project to control oil in the Middle East after the Second World War. In particular, this essay shows how its prestige films and cine-magazine worked to legitimate political acts of foreign exploitation and control of Iraqi oil, land and labor from 1951 to 1958 within a regional context of mounting anti-imperialist discourse and nationalist movement building. The films included in this essay were the first moving images of modern Baghdad to be filmed on location and circulated widely among general audiences in Britain and, more significantly, to as many as two-thirds of the Iraqi population. This essay will focus on an historical and visual analysis of a selection of the known IPC sponsored film titles that were produced and distributed prior to the 1958 July Revolution that diminished Britain’s hegemony in Iraq. Since no comprehensive archive of IPC films exists today, this essay examines the small number of films that have been irregularly conserved and made available in the archives of the British Film Institute, British Petroleum Video Library, British Pathe and personal collections of former IPC employees. From this small but significant sample, this essay determines that irrespective of the distinct approaches that IPC employed in the production of the films The Third River (1951), Ageless Iraq (1954), and A More Beautiful Capital (1955) an underlying objective remained consistent throughout the oil company’s film use: to link the neo-colonial practice of oil extraction to the promise of postcolonial urban modernity.

Next - A Neo-Colonial Film History
The Iraq Petroleum Company Medienverbund In 1951 the Iraq Petroleum Company (IPC) established its public relations office in conjunction with the new 50-50 agreement. The focus of the office was to produce and circulate periodicals and films that explained the company’s operations in Iraq to internal company employees as well as the general public. This included magazines, illustrated reports, company calendars and annual diaries, which were produced in English and Arabic versions and circulated throughout Britain and the Middle East. Circulation of the monthly magazines reached 46,000 per issue for Ahl al Naft (in Arabic) and 20,000 per issue for its English language counterpart Iraq Petroleum. In its inaugural issue the editor in chief of Iraq Petroleum explained that,

Between them the two publications represent an important step in the forward march of the Iraq Petroleum Company and its Associates, and it is confidently hoped that it is a step that will lead to a closer integration of the interests of all our people everywhere, from Banias to the Persian Gulf, from Baba Gurgur to the crush and bustle of Oxford Street.

The publication headquarters for Ahl al Naft was based in Beirut, with contributions from Arab writers from across the region. Meanwhile, the English language version produced in central London made its way into the homes and offices of company employees living throughout Europe and the Middle East. Long features on national development programs in Iraq as well as lighter essays on artistic or historical issues were typical of the content of both publications. Photo essays and articles about modern architecture, art and everyday life in Baghdad were frequent from the earliest issues in 1951.
A strong relationship between the IPC public relations office and the Iraqi government was made explicit through the regular contributions of state ministers writing about topics from education policy to housing programs. Close collaboration between the government and the company was further reflected in the reproduction of exact photographs and text from the IPC periodicals in publicity documents published by Iraq’s Directorate-General of Guidance and Broadcasting, such as the three volume tome Land of Two Rivers: Building a New Iraq. An internal report by the IPC Public Relations office emphasizes that IPC also made films with the cooperation of the Iraqi government, “which welcomed the concept that films would publicise the country's historical traditions, plans for development and, generally speaking, arouse public interest, both inside and outside Iraq.” IPC’s approach to making films was distinguished by the company’s objective to project a vision of modern Iraq for Iraqi audiences, as opposed to the precedent set by Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. Beginning in 1921 just ten years after the completion of the first pipeline to Abadan, the Anglo-Iranian used photography and film technologies chiefly to document company operations in oil-producing regions for company executives and stockholders in Britain. These silent reels were the earliest films to narrativize the discovery and development of the British oil industry in the Middle East. In subsequent decades, Anglo-Iranian, Shell, and ARAMCO sponsored prestige films that were intended to entertain and educate general audiences in order to bolster those companies’ reputations among potential consumers. Traditionally, British and American oil company films were produced in English and translated into other languages for distribution in other markets. However, after the nationalist movement in Iran ousted Anglo-Iranian in 1951, the Iraq Petroleum Company newly established public relations office reconsidered the question of how film use could best serve the company. The result was a novel approach that prioritized the production of Arabic-language films and an emphasis on direct distribution to Iraqi audiences, in addition to the standard industry practice of sponsoring films made by British production companies in English that were later translated for regional distribution. Midway through production of its first company film The Third River, IPC’s film officer John Shearman began to recruit British filmmakers for a new Baghdad-based film unit. As Peter Kelly, the unit's director, has explained, the IPC film unit was distinct from its contemporaries because of its explicit concern with making films for “the cinema-going Iraqi people” as opposed to stockholders or consumers in Britain. Between 1953 and 1958 the unit shot, scripted and edited thirteen episodes of the IPC cine-magazine Beladuna in 35mm, each comprised of two or three short films about Iraq and its regional context. The films tended to focus on various aspects related to the modernization of Baghdad from its new bus system to its modern architecture and planning.
The IPC public relations office assumed that the company films, “probably contributed to bringing Iraq before the public eye, both in the sense of awakening the interest of the Iraqi people themselves, many of whom had little or no concept of their own country's history and an equally sketchy knowledge of development projects.” Indeed the IPC films were the first to project moving images of the modernization of Baghdad to mass audiences in Iraq. In the Beladuna episode titled A More Beautiful Capital, the physical transformations of the city are used as evidence of Baghdad's progress and Iraq's modernization. For example, the final sequence features a montage of modern homes and cars, over which the voiceover concludes, “More homes, more beautiful houses, and more grand constructions make Baghdad a capital city fit for a modern country.”

Together, the oil company films and cine-magazine constructed a new national imaginary for Iraqis residing in the north, center and south of the country, many of who had never travelled to other parts of Iraq.

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