Scenes of Extraction

Sanaz Sohrabi | 2023 | Persian, with English subtitles | 43 min.

Scenes of Extraction is an essay film created with still and moving images from the archives of British Petroleum (BP). It reveals widespread land exploitation and a colonial approach behind expeditions across Iran and other British oil concessions in Papua and Southeast Asia. Using company and amateur pictures, the film shows how images are strategically used to cement the British Empire’s political and economic power. With a blend of archival and speculative modes of visual storytelling—necessary because there is a gap between the official record and lived experiences—the film offers critical insight into the entanglement of energy geopolitics, technology, and ecology.

Lessons of Darkness

Werner Herzog | 1992 | English | 54 min.

Lessons of Darkness is a film poem that chronicles the aftermath of the first Gulf War through a series of surreal tableaus of an apocalyptic landscape. Burning oil fields are set to the classical music of Wagner, Prokofiev, and Grieg, among others, while Herzog narrates the visuals in a prophetic tone. The classical score elevates the hypnotic and rhythmic montage of wide aerial landscape shots, close-ups of workers and torture instruments, and slow-motion takes of bubbling crude oil into a tragic symphony of destruction. The collapse of the human world and futile efforts of people in the face of a planetary disaster are a recurrent motif in Herzog’s cinema. Seen through his camera, Earth becomes a distant, alien planet that invites us to an unsettling meditation on war, industry, nature, and the human soul. While rooted in a concrete historical moment, Lessons of Darkness is a timeless apocalyptic parable rather than a war documentary.

Sanaz Sohrabi (b. 1988, Iran) is an artist, filmmaker, and researcher of visual culture. She works with essay film and installation as her means of research to explore the shifting and migratory paths between still and moving images, situating a singular image in a continuum of historical relations and archival temporalities. Since 2017, Sohrabi has conducted extensive research on the British Petroleum archives to learn more about BP’s colonial oil operations in Iran. Her work has been shown widely in exhibitions and festivals around the world.

Werner Herzog (b. 1942, Germany) is a critically acclaimed and pivotal art house film director whose themes and messages often provoke controversy. He debuted with the short film Herakles (1962), while with his first feature film, Sign of Life (1968), made him an important figure in the New German Cinema movement. Obsessive desire in Fitzcarraldo (1982) and the gripping true story behind The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser (1974) are presented with his renowned style of elusiveness and mystery. His distinctive narrative style, blending fiction and documentary, allows him to challenge conventional storytelling and to focus on the psychological hardships of his characters, often referred to as ‘ecstatic truth’.