Oil Thinking of World Cinema

Abstract

Oil and cinema are nearly of the same age: they both appeared in the second half of the 19th century. Oil, and more precisely, oil money has created the movies industry. As a confirmation, take one of the first feature films — it was entitled “In the Kingdom of Oil and Millions.”
It was shot on the money of oilmen in 1916 in Azerbaijan — the country supplying oil to the
whole world. V. Mayakovsky wrote that if you believed in good future, this was because the
black dense oil from Baku was pumped into hearts of world capitals.
The oil industry developed hand-in-hand with the cinema industry. Today we cannot image the
world without both. In the present-day panorama of the world cinema oil has taken a special
place — it is not only a decoration, but a full-fledged «actor». In the recent decades “films —
hydrocarbons” have appeared in the world cinemas to respond to some accomplished historical
event related to oil discovery, or enormous technogenic disaster entailing serious environmental
implications. The role of oil can be comprehended only in the context of technological achievements in oil prospecting and oil production. Oil has technologized and commercialized the
film-making industry — the films collecting multimillion audiences and, accordingly, returning
the millions invested in their making. The oil industry will develop and flourish with the growth
of energy demand and, therefore, will grow the film-making industry and cinema business fed
by oil-earned money. Filmmakers, using the modern digital and computer technologies, have
succeeded to demonstrate on the screen in a catchy artistic form many aspects of the «oil rush»
in its retrospect.