Koyaanisqatsi (Godfrey Reggio, 1983, 85m) Rivers and Dams The River (Pare Lorentz, 1938, 31 min)
Up the Yangtzee (Yung Chang, 2008, 90 min) Oil Oil: A symphony in Motion (Artkino, 1933, 8m)
Petropolis (Mettler, 2009, 42m)
Deep Weather (Ursula Biemann, 2013, 10m) Labor Workers Leaving the Factory (Harun Farocki, 1995, 36m) Maquilapolis (Sergio De La Torre & Vicky Funari, 2006, 69m) Workers leaving the GooglePlex (Andrew Norman Wilson, 2011, 11m) Pollution Red Desert (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1964) Space & Place Powers of Ten (Ray & Charles Eames, 1977, 9m) Space is the Place (John Corney, 1972, 85m) Nostalgia The Royal Road (Jenni Olson, 2015, 64m) The Urban Commons Style Wars: The Original Hip Hop Documentary
(Tony Silver, USA, 1983, 70m) Surveillance How Not to be Seen (Monty Python, 1970, 3min) How Not to be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educational .Mov File (Hito Steyerl, 2013, 15 min) Nostalgia for the Light (Patricio Guzman, 2011, 90m) Topiary Landberg cfb350d468ec5c2054ab0b7ea98b3e2b63e3e296
Petropolis - aerial smokestack
1 2015-12-05T23:35:26-08:00 Topiary Landberg cfb350d468ec5c2054ab0b7ea98b3e2b63e3e296 7087 1 plain 2015-12-05T23:35:26-08:00 GP01QCV E M Alberta Canada © Greenpeace / E M © Greenpeace / E M Canada's tar sands are an oil reserve the size of England. Extracting the crude oil called bitumen from underneath unspoiled wilderness requires a massive industrialized effort with far-reaching impacts on the land, air, water, and climate. Air emissions from the tar sands include 300 tonnes of sulphur a day. This photo was taken during the production of "Petropolis", a documentary film about the tar sands, directed by Peter Mettler and produced by Greenpeace Canada. For more information about this project, please go to: www.petropolis-film.com. 20080625 Aerial view Air pollution Bitumen Industrial landscapes Forests (campaign title) Climate (campaign title) Factories Energy Industry Oil (fossil fuel) Oil exploration Oil refineries Pollution Tar sands CANADA, Montreal/Toronto/Vancouver Air Pollution from the Alberta Tar Sands North America Topiary Landberg cfb350d468ec5c2054ab0b7ea98b3e2b63e3e296This page is referenced by:
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Oil
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Oil: A symphony in Motion (Artkino, 1933, 8m)
Petropolis: Aerial Perspectives of the Tar Sands (Mettler, 2009, 42m)
Deep Weather (Ursula Biemann, 2013, 10m) image_header 212350 2024-03-20T13:14:27-07:00 Program Notes:
In this program, three short films represent petroleum’s vast power. In the first film, Oil: A Symphony in Motion (1933), oil is personified as the force which has magically arrived to fuel our modern technological age. This silent short, by the Los Angeles film collective “Artkino,” is a vision of machine-age euphoria. By contrast, Petropolis: Aerial Perspectives of the Tar Sands, provides a mute but critical counterpoint—an omniscient, aerial vision of the terrifying scale of environmental devastation wrought by the rapacious extractivism of the Canadian tar sands.
In the final film, Deep Weather, by Swiss artist Ursula Biemann, a nearly identical aerial view of the tar sands juxtaposed to footage of a community of Bangledeshi people engaged in the sisyphean task of building up their shoreline with hundreds of sandbags in an attempt to protect against impending sea-level rise. Biemann describes Deep Weather as a film connecting two narratives, one about oil, the other about water, which she describes as "the two primordial liquids that form the undercurrents of all narrations as they activate profound changes in planetary ecology." In making this parallel, Deep Weather implicates the activities of the Canadian tar sands in the dramatic realities faced by this far away community in South Asia.
Much as been written about aerial views as a kind of “god’s eye” or objective view that places the viewer at a remove from the landscape. Yet, in both Mettler’s and Biemann’s visions, the aerial serves to implicate us in the image while also keeping us at a remove from the site. These films highlight the question of whether these kinds of machine/aerial views and viewpoints are necessary for us to understand the scale of environmental transformation that is taking place today?
Ursula Biemann is an artist, writer, and video essayist whose work is research oriented and involves fieldwork in remote locations where she investigates climate change and the ecologies of oil and water.
Peter Mettler is a Swiss-Canadian film director and cinematographer, best known for his cinematography on the Jennifer Baichwal and Edward Burtynsky film Manufactured Landscapes.
Artkino was an amateur film collective based in Los Angeles. Despite the appearance that Oil: A Symphony in Motion was produced by the oil industry, it is likely that the film was actually created as an experimental film. Considering the importance of the car for the development of LA, it is possible that the work was responding to the nascent car culture developing around them.
