What is the connection between oil and filmmaking? On March 26, 2025, at 7:30 p.m. PDT in Caltech’s Beckman Auditorium, Brian Jacobson, a scholar in visual culture, will examine how Hollywood evolved alongside the petroleum sector in Los Angeles and how the resource extraction industries utilized cinema to sway public perception regarding our environment.
In a public discussion titled “How Technology Shaped the Movies (and How Movies Shaped Technology),” Jacobson will investigate how early cinematographic technologies required resources—like coal, oil, metals, and chemicals—that needed to be mined from the earth along with significant quantities of water and power. Concurrently, Hollywood narratives and settings centered around the extraction, transportation, and processing of resources such as oil and minerals to convey specific concepts about resource extraction industries to the audience.
“A lot of my inquiries regarding Hollywood today pertain to sustainability and the ecological impact of the sector,” states Jacobson. His recently launched book, The Cinema of Extractions: Film Materials and Their Forms, highlights the inextricable links between extraction industries and film, offering readers novel perspectives on understanding films based on the materials and methods from which they are crafted. “I aim for individuals to recognize how industries manipulate culture to influence our thinking and to critically assess the culture produced by such industries. I want us to take a moment to reflect on the lessons we are learning and the ways we are conditioned to live.”
Jacobson serves as a historian focused on modern visual culture and media, examining their interplay with the histories of science and technology. His studies encompass architecture, cinema, and the development of human-made environments. Besides his faculty role, he is the director of the Caltech-Huntington Program in Visual Culture, which features undergraduate classes, postdoctoral fellowships, artist residencies, and various events and initiatives. Jacobson came to Caltech in the summer of 2020 after teaching cinema studies and history at the University of Toronto, where he completed his PhD at USC.
The Watson Lectures provide fresh opportunities every month to learn about how Caltech researchers address society’s most urgent issues and innovate for the future. Become part of a community seeking knowledge outside of Beckman Auditorium to relish food, beverages, and music together before each lecture. Interactive exhibits pertaining to the evening’s subject will give audience members additional context and insights. The celebration begins at 6 p.m. Attendees are also invited to remain for coffee and tea following the talk, along with the opportunity to engage in conversation with fellow guests and researchers.
Discover more regarding the Earnest C. Watson Lecture Series and its origins at Caltech.edu/Watson.
Watson Lectures are complimentary and open to everyone.
Advance registration is completely booked! There will be a standby line at the event, and a recording will be accessible on our YouTube channel.
Recommended Reading:
Check out some suggested readings from professor Brian Jacobson! Click the titles below to acquire from our partner bookstore, Vroman’s.
- Hollywood’s Dirtiest Secret: The Hidden Environmental Costs of the Movies (Film and Culture) by Hunter Vaughan
- Inhospitable World: Cinema in the Time of the Anthropocene by Jennifer Fay
- Greening the Media by Richard Maxwell and Toby Miller
- Seeing Green: The Use and Abuse of American Environmental Images by Finis Dunaway
- Defending the Arctic Refuge: A Photographer, an Indigenous Nation, and a Fight for Environmental Justice by Finis Dunaway