Energy Cafe: Hollywood, Westerns, and the Oil Frontiers of Grass (1925)
Hosted by Dr Patrick Adamson
Associate Lecturer, Film Studies, University of St Andrews
Today best known for being an important early documentary and the first collaboration between Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack, Paramount’s Grass: A Nation’s Battle for Life (1925) is an ethnographic film that follows the Bakhtiari people of Iran on an epic seasonal migration over snowy Zard-Kuh in search of pasture for their livestock.
In its day, however, it was considered a noteworthy release for two other reasons. The first was the perception of it as a major contribution to Hollywood’s post-Great War drive for global “understanding”—allowing masses of people to view and apprehend other places and cultures using this unprecedented medium of cinema. The second was that it invited, and received, frequent comparison with the Western film. Staged upon the varied climes of Grass’s grand Eastern landscape are episodes of a mythic narrative of migration familiar from Westerns, in particular those about the nineteenth-century American pioneers: spectacles of mass movement, moments of new life and death, hunts, camping, and, above all, the negotiation of natural obstacles.
Less noted were its connections to the oil industry. Focusing on the close ties between frontier narratives and historical questions around energy, this paper explores how Grass was not only shaped by these links but deployed rhetoric and conventions from the Western genre to naturalise imperial impulses and advance the aims of fossil capitalism. In the same year, the Anglo-Persian Oil Company (now BP), which had aided Grass’s production, released its own The Persian Oil Industry (1925), presented as a film that “depicts the changes wrought in the land of Cyrus the Great by the Anglo-Persian Oil Company”. And more such productions would follow in the decades to come. This paper thus explores the links between Hollywood’s stated ambition to produce and circulate knowledge about disparate peoples, cultures, and geographies and the efforts of companies like BP to reshape and ultimately exploit them.
The Energy Café is an informal, open and inclusive space where people across our network, from undergraduates to Professors Emeriti, can come together for an hour to share ideas about the energy research they are working on. It is intended to encourage collaborations, expand research horizons, and inspire new ideas and questions about issues of energy.
Fostering collaboration and interdisciplinarity are at the heart of the Centre’s ethos and the motivation for the Café. By openly exchanging ideas with others and working across disciplines, the Energy Café offers a unique venue that celebrates the diversity of roles and contributions individuals make to energy research and research culture.