The Cinema of Extractions

The Cinema of Extractions: Film Materials and Their Forms by Professor of Visual Culture Brian Jacobson is a short book with broad ambitions. On its face, the book draws attention to the material requirements of early filmmaking. These materials—coal, oil, minerals—had to be extracted from the earth to enable cinema's technologies. Studio lights and theater projectors needed carbon and tungsten, film and its cameras required metals and chemicals, and the whole system ran on unprecedented quantities of water and electricity. But The Cinema of Extractions also examines the way that Hollywood films projected extractive industries on the screen, building storylines and set pieces around the mining, transport, and fabrication of resources like petroleum and minerals, and how the filmmaking industry grew up alongside the oil industry in Los Angeles. Finally, The Cinema of Extractions aims to see how an awareness of the material requirements of filmmaking can inform how we read the texts of films themselves.

"The title of the book comes from a famous and very important essay in cinema studies called 'The Cinema of Attractions,'" Jacobson explains. "Tom Gunning, who is one of the most important scholars of early cinema and the origins of film, coined the phrase 'cinema of attractions' in 1986 to capture a new angle on how the earliest filmmakers from 1895 to 1906 were making films that would appeal to the needs of an audience that didn't yet know what movies were or what they could do. Like Gunning's essay, my book aims to change how we look at films—not by looking at the films but by starting first with all the extracted materials that filmmaking required and the industries that were required to make these materials available."

This emphasis is part of a larger scholarly effort that consolidated in the early 2000s known as the environmental humanities, which seeks to uncover the material aspects of culture-making. On one level, The Cinema of Extractions aims to apply the insights of the environmental humanities to filmmaking. On another level, Jacobson is defining a cinematic genre of sorts: a group of films that, in Jacobson's words, "make the extractive processes that cinema requires visible to audiences. These are films that showed an extractive industrial world happening," he says. "These films not only document the world as it was being changed by the industrial and second industrial revolution but actually help to promote and make that world possible."

Jacobson provides readings of films such as D. W. Griffith's The Lonedale Operator, a 1911 film often screened for introductory film history classes because it introduced crosscutting scenes to cinema. Though The Lonedale Operator is not specifically about extractive technologies, it is set in a railroad station established for its proximity to a working mine. Throughout, the film relies on coal-burning locomotives and electric lights, technologies made possible by extracted materials for its main plot points. Other films Jacobson analyzes, such as Sunshine Molly (1915), are set in the midst of the oil industry. Molly, the heroine of this film, works in a boarding house for oil workers, and the film itself begins with a scene featuring the working oil derricks along what is now La Brea Avenue in Los Angeles.

In his first chapter, Jacobson quotes Charlie Chaplin's words from a 1959 film, The Chaplin Revue, describing Southern California in 1915, "with its sun-kissed oranges and lemon groves, before it was visited by the three horsemen of the apocalypse: oil, movies, and aeronautics, who strode the earth uprooting the orange and the lemon trees, and in their stead built factories and motion picture studios." Chaplin counts himself as "one of the offenders."

Jacobson, agreeing with Chaplin, points out that "when the first filmmakers came to Los Angeles, they found a blossoming oil industry all around them. By the late 1910s and 1920s, there were lots of stories in the press about Hollywood stars who were buying oil derricks and trying to make a fortune in the oil industry." Which leads Jacobson to ask, "How do we read these films then? Are they promotional films about the oil industry? Maybe not by design, but by chance these films encouraged people to accept the very industries that filmmakers could not make their movies without. If so, these films perhaps unwittingly become allegories for what's happening behind the screen."

Jacobson will be discussing his work in an upcoming Watson Lecture on March 26, 2025.