The end of an era: A story of oil workers
(link to film here)
Paloma Yáñez Serrano
University of Manchester
Visual narratives of the End of the Oil Era, towards an energy conscious education
Paloma Yáñez Serrano
University of Manchester
Oily entanglements: A sticky media materialism
Elia Vargas
UC Santa Cruz
Petro-geist: critical enmeshments with oil, haunting and the abject
Chantelle Mitchell and Jaxon Waterhouse
The University of Melbourne
Comments 7
Welcome to Day 7 – and to the Extraction Conference’s ‘Oil’ Panel. I am Trisia Farrelly, Co-Director of PERC, and I hope you have been enjoying our third online conference so far! I look forward to lots more lively discussion in this panel.
Paloma, thank you for sending us your the film ‘The end of an era: A story of oil workers’ and the presentation which lays out vision, logistics, and methods behind the making of the film. The presentation has certainly whetted my appetite to view the film later on. I was particularly interested in learning more about the originally planned/possible collaboration with 350.org and your comment about ‘the terms…and necessary transformations had changed’ and so this did not eventuate. Could you please elaborate a little more on that? I loved the focus on the testimonies of oil workers as an important and currently relatively absent approach in ethnographic film. Could you please post the link for the educational website with the interactive game and testimonies if that is publicly available?
Thank you Trisia, In the film, we aimed to show the voices that contest the oil workers’ continued exploration practices, for which we decided to include 350 NGO activists’ anti-fracking speech at the oil licenses bidding round of the Brazilian National Petroleum Agency, opening the film. Once we had the first cut of the film ready, including the oil workers testimonies, the NGO objections in public events, and the critical views of Dr. Kevin Anderson contesting the oil workers, the communication department of NGO 350.org said we needed to radically change the message of the film, as giving the oil workers so much screen time without questioning, gave the impression that their arguments were correct. We decided to start working with them, hoping to reach a balance in which we could have the different actors shown in the film confortable with the overall representation. For two months we revised the script, noting the parts that needed clarification. We used some of the critique and the tone of suspicion to build the narrator’s voice. We addressed the more complex objections through the analytical statements of Dr. Kevin Anderson, using the oil workers’ interviews as a base for his assessment. Even after, the 350.org global communication team asked us to remove key ethnographic moments. Scenes such as an exploration manager ridiculing how the industry’s workers are seen as the lobby, or the laughter of a management assistant after saying he didn’t find it likely that renewables could power the world. For us, these were moments where light was shed on the contradictions, exactly the kind of material we wanted to provide in order to provoke contestation in our audience. However, the NGO saw these moments as a disservice to the viewer, who they claimed is influenced to empathise with oil executives when they cannot understand why they get so much bad press or why their claims are disputed by scientific studies that trace a pathway to 1.5°C. We agreed to the cut and started planning with the NGO to interview different NGO representatives, local communities and activists, to balance out the amount of oil workers interviewees.
We worked with Kevin Anderson to counterbalance the oil workers’ statements. Through this process, we were tailoring the oil workers’ ethnography to a context in which global climate targets need to be met urgently. This put in contrast the emotional obstacles and biased arguments they were using to justify their activities. We wanted the viewer to discern the validity of oil workers’ behaviours and justifications, seeing the problem at a wider scale and the behavioural challenge that lies ahead if we want to effectively reduce demand and implement a degrowth system. Yet, as the representatives of oil companies struggled to be confronted with the urgency for transformation, the 350.org representatives struggled to be confronted with the structural complexity of the transformation of the energy system from within the oil industry. This is an example of the confrontational dialogue among actors. As a consequence, while oil workers welcomed how their views were being challenged in the final outcome of the film, 350.org after checking we had abided by all changes they had suggested, allowed us to use the images we had shot of the NGO representatives in Brazil, but claimed they wanted to terminate their collaboration with the project. They concluded via email:
“We understand where you’re coming from and what your vision is, we respect it, but we also still disagree with the general setup of the documentary and don’t feel in good conscience that we have succeeded in helping you make it the type of communications product we would comfortably sign on.”
The 350.org statement clearly shows we weren’t able to build a meaningful dialogue with the participants through the film. Following the feedback from the audience, the film serves to incite dialogue and question our social passivity with regard to changing energy consumption from a diverse range of actors. However, it did not serve to put those concerns into practical dialogue and action from the participants’ standpoint. We would have liked to count with 350.org’s footage, featuring community leaders and on-the-ground impacts of the oil industry. They had agreed to share this with the project, after reworking the script with them. Yet, in the final instance they decided not to share their material, explaining, “that our respective visions for this documentary are not easily reconcilable”. This draws us to a bigger communicative problem between academics, industry workers, activists, and us as filmmakers, regarding how each wanted to tailor real-life testimonies to build a given narrative. The irreconcilability of views among participants and the inability of the filmmakers to rework the obstacles to collaboration are a small-scale example of the global energy debates where polarization impairs a pragmatic and holistic approach to the transformation.
Currently the webdoc is in its final phase of post-production, now with the narrative ready after many months of re-edits and audience feedback. I can send a link once it is published.
Thank you so much for your reply Paloma – so interesting and such a difficult balancing act. I look forward to receiving the link to the webdoc when it is published.
Thank you so much for your reply Paloma – so interesting and such a difficult balancing act. I look forward to receiving the link to the webdoc when it is published.
Welcome all to the final three days of the conference! We hope you are all enjoying it. I would like to encourage those who have had the opportunity to attend this panel to ask questions, make comments, and connect with each other and the presenters. If you haven’t seen these presentations, they are all wonderful and invite us to think radically differently about oil as media, lively and political material, about its symbolic work, and associated intra-actions and inter-relationalities. Enjoy and engage.
Please join us for the Conference wrap-up Session:
July 10th: 8pm NZ / 6pm Canberra / 10am Amsterdam / 9am London
Join us to de-brief – we encourage everyone to come along and share what you have found most illuminating at the conference. For example, What is one way in which you think differently about extraction? How have the range of presentations caused you to reflect on your work and the theoretical, epistemological, political directions you might go in future?
Join from PC, Mac, iOS or Android: https://massey.zoom.us/j/91386427058