In this author’s note, Mona Damluji reflects on the archival and personal origins of Pipeline Cinema, her history of oil company filmmaking in Iran and Iraq. Beginning with a mid-century corporate documentary discovered on YouTube, Damluji traces how multinational petroleum companies used film to shape narratives of modernization, progress, and national development. The piece moves from corporate propaganda to family history, confronting the uneasy proximity between critique and complicity
In part one of our Forum on Fossil Capital, Jennifer Wenzel explores what is excluded in Fossil Capital. Wenzel puts Julie Livingston's Self-Devouring Growth to enrich how we understand growth and the role of empire in Malm's narrative.