Adventures in Oil

Although this image makes no explicit reference to Iraq, it nonetheless documents the ways in which the western project of “documenting” the non-western world at large was conceived of and represented during the middle of the twentieth century. The image of three generic “natives” happily carrying filmmaking equipment atop their heads appeared a popular film trade magazine as part of an advertisement for a production company in 1955. 

Here, what immediately strikes the viewer today is how the charicature-like representation of the native/other is derogatory in its  drawing of the three “natives” with clear visual reference to blackface in its representation of race, stereotypes of “tribal” dress in its representation of the body, and ambiguous references to gender roles. Clearly, this mode of visual stereotyping draws explicitly from a colonial imagination of “natives” that was perpetuated in literature, photography, and films generated in America and Europe throughout the 19th and 20th centuries - e.g. see King Kong (1933) and Avatar (2009). 

While the crude simplicity of the representation of colonized people is immediately apparent, what may be less obvious in reading this image is what it suggests about the complex relationship between indigenous populations and foreign “experts” in the process of film production (and other imperialist industrial practices from oil extraction to urban planning). 

The image plays off of a reference to the stereotypical image of non-western and “traditional” practices of carrying a water jug on top of one’s head. Instead of a jug, each of the three natives pictured here are suggested to serve as caddies to the white filmmaker, toting his camera, tripod and film stock. The juxtaposition of the modern movie making equipment and the traditional behavior of the natives conforms to the dichotomous framework of modernity versus tradition that has shaped western perspectives of the rest of the world until today. Here, the natives are suggested to serve merely as manual labor, happily facilitating the work of the foreign filmmakers: the naturalized, subordinate role assigned to them by colonizers.  

However, beyond this particular instance of representation, what happened on the ground in terms of the interaction between indigenous peoples and foreign (film and other) companies is far more complicated. In the case of Iraq “natives” were hired and trained in the service of the petroleum company film unit to participate in all aspects of the process from photographing and composing music, to writing scripts and recording narration. However, it was not until after the Revolution in 1958 that these Iraqis took the technology into their own hands, so to speak, able to wield some creative control over the film projects they worked on. 

In general, films were an important part of the way in which young “modern” nation-states of the Middle East, Africa and Asia have been documented, and critically how knowledge about the non-western world has been produced and consumed by mass western audiences. The technology of film introduced a new dynamic mode of representation to define colonies and “post” colonial territories.  

Nader (1994) emphasizes the need for comparative consciousness, provoking the question of what it might have been like if in fact these “natives” turned the camera equipment around to document the western filmmakers and other imperialist figures in society. What of narratives and representations might they have constructed in a project to cinematically document, understand and engage with the imperialist presence?

Image Source: Film User, August 1955: 382.