The Cinema of Extractions: Film Materials and Their Forms (Film and Culture Series) - Softcover

Jacobson, Brian

Softcover

ISBN 10: 023121359X ISBN 13: 9780231213592

Publisher: Columbia University Press, 2025

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.

About this title

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).

Edition details

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Publication date: 2025
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 023121359X
• ISBN 13: 9780231213592
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 240