Mona Damluji, Pipeline Cinema: The Cultural Infrastructure of Oil Extraction in Iran and Iraq (University of California Press, 2025).
Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this book?
Mona Damluji (MD): This book originated with my first encounter with the 1954 oil film Ageless Iraq on YouTube. This Technicolor documentary presenting a positivist account of modernization and development in mid-century Iraq had gained online popularity (especially among the Iraqi diaspora) following the US invasion and occupation of Iraq and subsequent civil war. Sponsored by the British-controlled Iraq Petroleum Company, the film insists that oil industrialization promised to modernize Iraq—its economy, its built environment, and its society—according to presumed Western ideals of civilizational progress, a narrative that reproduces orientalist binaries of east-west, orient-occident, and tradition-modernity. I became somewhat obsessed with this film and curious about the nostalgic narratives of Iraq’s “golden age” that its digitization and rediscovery online was generating. Apart from the obvious prejudices of this oil propaganda film, what drew me back to it again and again were questions that could not be easily answered. What compelled neocolonial oil companies in Iraq and other oil-producing countries of the Global South to produce such documentaries? Who participated in their making? Who watched these films and how were they received? What were the social and political stakes of oil company film sponsorship and cinematic representations that claimed to document the culture and history of countries where major oil companies carried out their extractive operations and which the economies, military power, and societal status quo of the Global North relied upon? Pursuing what Thomas Elsaesser describes as the “first line of inquiry” in the study of nonfiction film, these questions initially guided my research across various incomplete and slippery oil and film archives.
When my research began, I had often thought about the oil company rather rigidly, as a kind of abstract monolith, and a villainous one at that. But almost immediately upon beginning this work, I unexpectedly discovered that my great-grandfather was a writer for Iraq Petroleum magazine and thus directly involved the creation of the cultural milieu of the oil company. Once the BP archive opened windows into my own family history, the vast distance I initially imagined existing between myself and my research collapsed. While this personal realization did not blunt my critique of the fossil fuel industry’s structural role in causing global warming and ongoing perpetration of environmental injustices around the world, it did open my mind to the nuance and humanistic perspective required to understand the complex social and cultural landscapes shaped through histories of oil extraction. In Iraq, this of course included members of my family who were paid to participate in the work of making oil extraction a culturally productive encounter.
The complexities of my personal discovery within the corporate archive pushed me to consider how we can hold together a critique of the violence of neocolonial extraction with recognition of the range of human experiences associated with it, including generative cultural engagement. This led me to ask other questions of the archive and to reckon with its irregularities in proffering an abundance of certain voices and silencing others. While writing this book, my attention was continually drawn to individuals who participated in the cultural work of oil extraction, namely, men who simultaneously collaborated with neocolonial institutions and expressed resistance to subordination within them. Who were they and what motivated them to work within the foreign oil company? How did they navigate the racial and class-based hierarchies imposed by the company on its workers? How were their voices and visions subsumed as corporate propaganda or otherwise? Were they able to reclaim platforms of oil company media through meaningful acts of creative expression? These questions too have shaped the histories of oil culture I write in this book.
J: What particular topics, issues, and literatures does the book address?
MD: Pipeline Cinema is a history of how the Anglo Iranian Oil Company (AIOC) and the Iraq Petroleum Company (IPC) developed and used cultural infrastructure alongside their physical infrastructure to normalize and naturalize oil extraction and distribution in the Middle East from the 1920s until oil nationalization in Iran (in 1952) and Iraq (in 1972). The book contributes to several key fields of inquiry, including Middle East cultural and labor histories, documentary and industrially-sponsored film history, and energy and environmental humanities scholarship. The book takes Stephanie LeMenager’s rousing and straightforward notion of petromodernity, or modern ways of living rooted in petroleum-based energy systems, as a generative point of departure and unfolds the conundrum of oil culture in Iran and Iraq, where extractive infrastructure has hollowed land and reconfigured life. The book insists that a fuller contemplation of the contradictions inherent in petromodernity must include deeper attention to the cultural infrastructures that uphold systems of oil extraction in the Global South and amplification of stories of people upon whose backs “cheap and uninterrupted” access to petroleum is imagined and realized. In this book, the aim is not merely to add color or dimension to the notion of petromodernity by including social and political contexts outside of the North American and European purview, but rather to insist that cultures of oil consumption cannot be isolated from colonial and neocolonial conditions of petroleum extraction that have unfolded in specific places.
This is primarily a study of oil culture in Iraq, but that story begins in Iran, where the AIOC piloted the first instances of industrial film use in the region. The AIOC’s film operations up until oil nationalization, and particularly the company’s missteps, were foundational in determining the strategy that the IPC took up in Iraq, steered by the British film producer Arthur Elton and the organization Film Centre. The cultural aspects of the oil industry in Iran and Iraq remain understudied despite the centrality of these sites to global histories of oil: during the 1950s the world’s largest oil refinery was in Khuzestan and the world’s largest oil pipeline originated in Kirkuk. In tracing a history that moves across national boundaries, this book takes up Timothy Mitchell’s urging to “follow the oil” and reveals through-lines of industrial film use and its tactical evolution across the borders of sovereign nation-states subject to British overreach into political and economic affairs. Pipeline Cinema also examines histories of resistance to oil imperialism in the ethnically diverse provinces of Khuzestan and Kirkuk, calling attention to the interconnectedness of struggles against neocolonial extraction within neighboring national contexts.
J: How does this book connect to and/or depart from your previous work?
MD: Most of my previous work has followed lines of inquiry to examine and reveal lesser-known aspects of histories of the built environment, specifically infrastructures of oil and oil cities, and their relationship to cultural production and social life in the Middle East. The monograph offers space for me to construct a fuller picture of the movement of films and workers as part of the cultural infrastructure of oil extraction. My access to a collection of personal correspondences between members of the IPC film unit in particular allowed me to focus on telling a deeper history of cultural labor within the oil company. I also engage more intentionally with labor histories of the oil company throughout the twentieth century to demonstrate how labor power pushed back on the forces of extractive capitalism.
J: Who do you hope will read this book, and what sort of impact would you like it to have?
MD: I am delighted that Pipeline Cinema is available as an open access publication via UC Press and thus available to anyone interested in learning more about histories of oil, histories of workers, and histories of film. I hope that, in particular, the book will appeal to students and colleagues in Middle East studies, film and media studies, labor studies, and critical energy studies and encourage further critical and creative scholarship that sheds light on the ways that extractive industries have shaped ways of seeing and being that we take for granted as emblematic of modernity.
J: What other projects are you working on now?
MD: Currently, I am focused on two ongoing creative-critical projects. The first is a creative writing piece that centers the perspective of children in a liberated future. I am also in the planning stage of producing a short film that revisits the government-sponsored film Oil 72 about oil imperialism and nationalization in Iraq.
J: What recent films related to this project would you recommend for readers to be aware of?
MD: While writing this book, I have been very excited to learn about the brilliant work of several scholar-filmmakers and artists whose work engages in innovative and critical ways with some of the same visual and documentary archives my research examines, including a trilogy of essay documentary films (One Image, Two Acts, Scenes of Extraction, and An Incomplete Calendar) by Sanaz Sohrabi, the short film Pouring Oil Over Troubled Water by Nariman Massoumi, and the essay film Petroscape by Anahita Norouzi. Iraq’s Invisible Beauty is a recent documentary (directed by Sahim Omar Khalifa and Jurgen Buedts) about Latif Al Ani, the prolific Iraqi photographer contributed most of the images of the Middle East published by the Iraq Petroleum Company in the mid-twentieth century.
Excerpt from the book (from Introduction, pages 1 to 5)
The Palestinian poet, novelist, visual artist, and cultural critic Jabra Ibrahim Jabra began his career with the Iraq Petroleum Company (IPC) when an old friend barged into his home unannounced. It was 1952, and Jabra was enjoying a leisurely afternoon in the company of his beloved, Lamia, when Michael Clarke, a documentary filmmaker from London, showed up and asked Jabra to translate the film script for the IPC’s first sponsored film—which Clarke had written—from English into Arabic. It had been seven years since the two men had last seen each other. They had become friends in their twenties, in Jerusalem, during the waning years of the British occupation of Palestine (which lasted from 1917 until 1948). Clarke, then an English soldier, and Jabra, an emerging Palestinian writer, were both Cambridge-educated, and after they met through a common acquaintance, they spent long evenings talking about literature and politics. After Clarke’s military deployment in Palestine ended, the two lost touch.
In 1948, in what Palestinians mark as the inception of the ongoing Nakba, or Catastrophe, Zionist forces declared the establishment of the State of Israel, expelling at least 750,000 Palestinians from their homes and villages. This included Jabra’s family, who were pushed out of their home in West Jerusalem. In exile, he eventually found a position as a college professor at the University of Baghdad in Iraq, where he remained for most of his life, immersed in a thriving milieu of modernist writers, artists, poets, architects, and musicians. He helped to found the Modern Baghdad Art Group and came into his own as a writer, penning his most internationally renowned literary contributions—including dozens of novels, short stories, and poems that explored themes of exile and self-determination as well as cultural criticism and Arabic translations of works by Shakespeare, William Faulkner, and Oscar Wilde. Meanwhile, Clarke returned to England, where he fell in with the group of filmmakers associated with John Grierson and the British Documentary Film Movement. The London-based group made its mark producing government propaganda films before turning toward the business of industrially sponsored documentaries. Clarke specialized in documenting large-scale infrastructural projects, writing and directing films sponsored by the National Coal Board and later joining British Transport Films.
Clarke relocated temporarily to Iraq in 1952 as part of the first documentary sponsored by the IPC—a multinational oil corporation headquartered in London that held exclusive rights to Iraq’s oil between 1925 and 1960. The mastermind behind the IPC’s film use was producer Arthur Elton, a major figure in the British Documentary Film Movement who worked closely with British Petroleum (BP, formerly the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company) and Anglo-Dutch Shell, both IPC stakeholders. Elton hired Clarke to direct the film, along with a small crew of two British and one Iraqi cameramen, who convened in Baghdad to commence filming of the documentary about the construction of the IPC’s new thirty-inch pipeline—the world’s largest at the time—connecting the oil fields of Kirkuk, Iraq, to the Mediterranean port in Banias, Syria. The pipeline film was a centerpiece of the oil company’s public relations campaign, intended to frame the foreign oil company and its infrastructure as essential to Iraq’s national prosperity. Its title was The Third River.
The title reimagined the man-made pipeline as a river of oil akin to the Tigris and Euphrates. Those two life-giving arteries preceded and eventually sustained human settlement in Mesopotamia, whose name comes from the Greek for “the land between two rivers.” The twin Tigris and Euphrates define modern-day Iraq’s geographical and ecological contours along the north-south axis of water flow, from the watershed of the Taurus Mountains to the river mouth at the Persian Gulf. When the IPC branded its thirty-inch pipeline as “The Third River,” the company sought to reorient the cartography of modern Iraq according to an east-west axis defined by oil infrastructure stretching from reservoirs of crude in Kirkuk to terminal ports on the Mediterranean Sea. It also suggested that the pipeline, like the actual rivers before it, could give rise to a new civilization.
The IPC and the Iraqi government had reason to mount a storytelling campaign about oil in Iraq in 1952. For more than two decades, British oil companies had maintained a stranglehold on Iraq’s oil, beginning with the colonial mandate in Iraq that was established in conjunction with the Hashemite monarchy in 1921, laying the ground for Britain’s domination of the country’s political and economic affairs. Continuing into the era of seeming independence after 1932, Britain’s outsized influence remained undiminished. The IPC loomed large in Iraq, as one of the country’s largest employers and a source of government income that continually exploited its land, labor, and petroleum. But in 1946 and 1948, Iraqis mobilized in unprecedented numbers to protest the ongoing allowances made to Britain in Iraq, and the foreign oil company was a chief target. Then in 1951, uprisings in Iran led to oil nationalization there and the ousting of the British oil company from Abadan. Amidst the general atmosphere of animosity toward foreign oil companies, the IPC (according to its profile in the journal Film User) aspired to present the “Third River” pipeline story to Iraqi audiences in order to “reconcile the oil company to the population” and “to prevent Persian happenings repeating themselves.” For Clarke, this meant that his artfully scripted commentary required translation to Arabic.
Jabra accepted Clarke’s job offer, and the two worked together closely on the final Arabic commentary for The Third River. After the film’s release, the IPC established a local film unit based in Iraq to continue promoting the narrative of transformative, state-driven development. The company also released films, magazines, and reports, and Jabra remained involved with its public relations efforts in Iraq. He described his contributions to the company’s cinematic productions as “another means of expression, besides writing and painting,” that was “sometimes no less exciting to my imagination and pleasure.” He also served as editor for the oil company’s Arabic magazine, Ahl al Naft (People of Oil), which featured stories about cultural subjects like literature, food, fashion, design, and travel in addition to reporting and opinions on economic developments (including but not limited to the oil industry) in the IPC’s areas of operation for a general readership of company employees and their friends and families. In his memoirs, Jabra describes his role at the company as “an enjoyable job at a good salary that gave Lamia the opportunity to leave her teaching later,” adding, “I worked in a civilized atmosphere that helped me continue my intellectual activities as I wished, for about a quarter of a century.” Jabra was one of many Arabs who worked as writers, directors, cinematographers, editors, musicians, artists, poets, and photographers for the company’s various attempts to convince Iraqis that the oil industry was benefiting them. Their labor was exploited—used in an attempt to protect the IPC’s bottom line—but they were also benefiting from significant professional opportunities, possibilities for creative expression, and meaningful social exchange with colleagues from diverse backgrounds and political orientations.
Ultimately, oil companies made material contributions toward the development of film culture in Iraq. But the IPC’s approach underestimated public discontent with British domination over the country’s political and economic affairs. For decades, the Hashemite government violently repressed demonstrations of open resistance to the status quo, most notably during the Wathba uprising in 1948, until a military coup with popular support led by the Free Officers overthrew the British-installed monarchy in the 1958 revolution. While its status was greatly diminished, the IPC maintained a foothold in the newly established Republic of Iraq. But the oil company’s efforts to control the public narrative, even with the help of local mediators, could not counter the material realities that workers experienced and people revolted against. In 1972, the Ba‘th government decidedly nationalized the IPC’s remaining assets in Iraq.
The pipeline cinema produced before these sea changes may not have been effective propaganda, but it was still a critical site in which the complex relationship between the foreign oil company, creative labor, and audiences took shape. This book explores the intertwined histories of the oil industry and cinema in mid-century Iraq and—for a shorter period of time—Iran, beginning with the earliest film use by the Anglo-Persian Oil Company (APOC, later AIOC and then BP) in 1921 and ending with the dissolution of the IPC in 1972. As these companies hungrily expanded their physical operations, they partnered with filmmakers to celebrate their infrastructural expansions as harbingers of postcolonial nation-building, development, and modernization schemes.