Oil
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 (2009), 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 (2006).
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.
