The Cinema of Extractions: Film Materials and Their Forms authored by Brian Jacobson, a Professor of Visual Culture, is a succinct volume with ambitious goals. At first glance, the book highlights the material needs of early cinema production. These resources—coal, oil, minerals—were necessary to be extracted from the earth to facilitate the technologies of film. Studio lighting and theater projectors required carbon and tungsten, while film and its cameras depended on metals and chemicals, with the entire system operating on unprecedented amounts of water and electricity. Yet, The Cinema of Extractions also explores how Hollywood films depicted extractive industries on screen, crafting narratives and settings around the extraction, transportation, and processing of resources like petroleum and minerals, and illustrating how the film industry developed alongside the oil sector in Los Angeles. Ultimately, The Cinema of Extractions seeks to demonstrate how an understanding of the material requirements of filmmaking can enrich our interpretation of film texts.
“The title of the book is inspired by a famous and significant essay in cinema studies titled ‘The Cinema of Attractions,’” Jacobson clarifies. “Tom Gunning, an influential scholar of early cinema and its origins, introduced the term ‘cinema of attractions’ in 1986 to convey a fresh perspective on how the initial filmmakers from 1895 to 1906 crafted films that would resonate with an audience unfamiliar with movies and their potential. Similar to Gunning’s essay, my book strives to alter our perception of films—not by analyzing the films directly but by beginning with all the extracted materials essential for filmmaking and the industries that facilitated the availability of these resources.”
This focus is part of a broader academic movement that emerged in the early 2000s known as the environmental humanities, which aims to highlight the material dimensions of cultural production. On one level, The Cinema of Extractions seeks to apply the insights derived from environmental humanities to the realm of filmmaking. Additionally, Jacobson is delineating a particular cinematic genre: a collection of films that, in his wording, “render the extractive processes necessary for cinema visible to viewers. These are films that exhibited an industrial world in the midst of extraction,” he states. “Not only do these films chronicle the world being transformed by the industrial and second industrial revolutions, but they also actively contribute to enabling that world.”
Jacobson offers interpretations of films such as D. W. Griffith’s The Lonedale Operator, a 1911 feature frequently shown in introductory film history courses due to its introduction of crosscutting techniques to cinema. Although The Lonedale Operator is not explicitly centered on extractive technologies, it takes place in a train station chosen for its closeness to a functioning mine. Throughout the narrative, the film utilizes coal-powered locomotives and electric lighting, technologies made feasible by extracted materials for its central plot developments. Other films Jacobson examines, such as Sunshine Molly (1915), occur in the heart of the oil industry. The titular character, Molly, serves in a boarding house catering to oil workers, and the film opens with a scene showcasing the operational oil derricks along what is currently La Brea Avenue in Los Angeles.
In his introductory chapter, Jacobson references Charlie Chaplin’s remarks from a 1959 film, The Chaplin Revue, describing Southern California in 1915 as “with its sun-drenched oranges and lemon orchards, prior to being visited by the three horsemen of the apocalypse: oil, films, and aviation, who traversed the land uprooting the orange and lemon trees and in their place erected factories and film studios.” Chaplin considers himself “one of the culprits.”
Jacobson, echoing Chaplin’s sentiments, notes that “when the pioneering filmmakers arrived in Los Angeles, they discovered a flourishing oil industry surrounding them. By the late 1910s and 1920s, numerous stories in the media began surfacing about Hollywood celebrities purchasing oil derricks in pursuit of wealth in the oil sector.” This prompts Jacobson to inquire, “How should we interpret these films then? Are they promotional materials for the oil industry? Perhaps not intentionally, but these films incidentally encouraged viewers to embrace the very industries that filmmakers depended on to create their movies. If so, these films may unwittingly serve as allegories for the realities occurring behind the scenes.”
Jacobson is set to discuss his research in an upcoming Watson Lecture on March 26, 2025.