The Cinema of Extractions - (Film and Culture) by Brian Jacobson

About the Book

Brian Jacobson traces the surprising and inextricable connections between extractive industries and cinema, developing new ways to read films in light of the typically unseen material practices out of which they are built.

Book Synopsis

From the petroleum used to make film stock to the carbon and tungsten needed for studio lights and theater projectors, every movie relies on extractive processes. The film industry of Hollywood, moreover, rose alongside the oil and aeronautics industries that transformed Southern California. In this book, Brian Jacobson traces the surprising and inextricable connections between extractive industries and cinema, developing new ways to read films in light of the typically unseen material practices out of which they are built.

The Cinema of Extractions explores the ties between the worlds of movies and the materials that make movies possible and between the industries that make movies and the industries that use movies to reshape the world. Jacobson retells the history of cinema through the lens of extraction, considering its roots as a material form and its use as a tool for corporate and industrial world making. He brings together the material and industrial history of cinema with close formal analyses of films that depict extractive processes, juxtaposing early films and classics such as The Treasure of the Sierra Madre with industrial films made by companies like Shell Oil. Linking film and media studies with the energy and environmental humanities, this book models innovative historical and materialist approaches to formal film analysis and proposes a new poetics of industrial cinema.

Review Quotes

Meticulous and well-researched, The Cinema of Extractions shines.-- "PopMatters"

Brian Jacobson's timely, brilliant, and teacherly book fundamentally reorients film history to the history of the energy economy, and he introduces methods of reading form through the logics of a new "raw materialism." Nothing short of a "call to methodological action," The Cinema of Extractions is for anyone who cares about media aesthetics and the operations that underwrite industrial modernity's earth-defying ambitions.--Jennifer Fay, author of Inhospitable World: Cinema in the Time of the Anthropocene

Jacobson is the guide we need for practicing cultural studies now. Moving back and forth between histories of material extraction and the world-making forms of cinema, he jolts us out of the old ruts dividing industrial and formalist approaches and lays out a thrilling new eco-formalist method for our moment.--Caroline Levine, author of The Activist Humanist: Form and Method in the Climate Crisis

Jacobson's The Cinema of Extractions proposes that cinema became a world-making system integral to the new order of extractive capitalism it grew from. Our world bears the stamp of this past. Jacobson's sharp history of the entwining of cinema and its imaginaries with planetary matter is a vital intervention into the efforts to reckon with the work and environmental consequences of media.--Lee Grieveson, professor of media history, University College London

Reckoning with cinema's material dependence on our endangered planet alters our understanding of the medium. With The Cinema of Extractions, Jacobson hands us an invaluable guidebook to this approach. Giving a vivid account of how early Hollywood features and corporate shorts displayed or acclimated audiences to modernity's extractive roots, he magnificently shifts disciplinary frames. Read this book. Teach it. See films anew with it.--Priya Jaikumar, author of Where Histories Reside: India as Filmed Space

About the Author

Brian Jacobson is professor of visual culture at the California Institute of Technology. He is the author of Studios Before the System: Architecture, Technology, and the Emergence of Cinematic Space (Columbia, 2015) and editor of In the Studio: Visual Creation and Its Material Environments (2020).