Petrocinema: Sponsored Film and the Oil Industry

Petrocinemapresents a collection of essays concerning the close relationship between the oil industry and modern media-especially film. Since the early 1920s, oil extracting companies such as Standard Oil, Royal Dutch/Shell, ConocoPhillips, or Statoil have been producing and circulating moving images for various purposes including research and training, safety, process observation, or promotion. Such industrial and sponsored films include documentaries, educationals, and commercials that formed part of a larger cultural project to transform the image of oil exploitation, creating media interfaces that would allow corporations to coordinate their goals with broader cultural and societal concerns. Falling outside of the domain of conventional cinema, such films firmly belong to an emerging canon of sponsored and educational film and media that has developed over the past decade. Contributing to this burgeoning field of sponsored and educational film scholarship, chapters in this book bear on the intersecting cultural histories of oil extraction and media history by looking closely at moving image imaginaries of the oil industry, from the earliest origins or ＂spills＂ in the 20th century to today’s post industrial ＂petromelancholia.＂

Marina Dahlquist is a Professor of Cinema Studies at the Department for Media Studies at Stockholm University, Sweden. She recently published The Institutionalization of Educational Cinema: North America and Europe in the 1910s and 1920s (2020, with Joel Frykholm), Corporeality in Early Cinema: Viscera, Skin, and Physical Form (2018, with Doron Galili, Jan Olsson, and Valentine Robert), and Exporting Perilous Pauline: Pearl White and the Serial Film Craze (2013).
Patrick Vonderau is a Professor of Media and Communication Studies at the University of Halle, Germany. Recent book publications include, among others, Advertising and the Transformation of Screen Cultures (2020, with B. Florin and Y. Zimmermann), Films that Sell: Moving Pictures and Advertising (2016, with N. de Klerk and B. Florin), and Films that Work: Industrial Film and the Productivity of Media (2011, with V. Hediger). He is also an editor of the German scholarly journal Montage AV.