This book studies the historical relation between cinema and petroculture
in order to underline the role of moving images in the way an energy regime
was established in the twentieth century. “Cinema” here is approached as
an “open system,”8 one whose institutional borders were both clearly defined
and often contested. This includes long features that were screened theatrically alongside nontheatrical film circulating within companies, schools, or
associations and later on television. Cinema contributed to the century’s
dominant energy regime not so much in a direct, political, or propagandistic
sense, but through forms of sponsorship and “usefulness”: by informing,
educating, and entertaining. While film occasionally was used by specific
social institutions to officially propagate oil as a resource or condition of modern life, it more often served to fuel the socially transformative potential of
various micropolitical practices. Cinema, in other words, became a realm of
activities meant to have public effect, and to shape the tenor of collective life,
while not fitting into the traditional paradigms of political action, with bodily
affect, social tempers, political moods, or cultural sensibilities as key targets.9
In focusing on this form of cinema as a medium for energizing micropolitical
practices geared toward the adoption of petroculture, the volume seeks to
demonstrate that an understanding of historical precedence, and of media
history in particular, is important for managing today’s problem of energy and
political agency.