One Image, Two Acts

One Image, Two Acts is the first film in a trilogy by Montreal-based artist Sanaz Sohrabi. The film probes the British Petroleum (BP) Archives, located in Warwickshire, England, diving deep into the immense holdings of ethnographic photographs and films created by the company throughout its history. By focusing on Abadan, Iran, where the largest refinery at the time was built, the artist hones in on the ways the company not only exerted immense control over the vast transnational extraction of oil, but also on how camera technology was used to control the image of oil itself.

Sanaz takes materiality into account with her poetic essay film, in which the objectness of photographs and films are foregrounded through the artists’ gestures of collaging, gathering, holding, and fading. In doing so, the artist draws the parallel between the oil company’s use of technologies to control, settle, and extract from the earth with their use of camera technologies. These specific technologies were used to survey and record the land stolen from Indigenous communities and to narrate an understanding of oil that aligned with their desire for control over the element. To use the artists’ words: “the image of oil became as instrumental as the material itself.” 

Sanaz foregrounds seemingly innumerable photographs of the vast transnational labour force that BP orchestrated. A labour force that, despite the evidently abundant photographic documentation, was kept invisible and considered replaceable. The workers’ images were taken without their consent, used for a colonial agenda, and are now preserved in the company’s archive. How do we understand such images, and what does it mean for them to be viewed in an archive in Warwickshire, or in a contemporary film festival in Toronto? If the images taken by BP are the first act, is the second their life in the archive, their contextualization in Sanaz’s work, or in an act yet to come? 

The films BP made were screened throughout Europe, often in film festivals, but also in cinemas they built in their oil towns, for their own workers. The cinema itself begins to take centre stage as Sanaz inquires into its use as propaganda but also its potential as a site of anti-colonial resistance and revolution. In One Image, Two Acts the artist contrasts the material produced by BP with a new wave of Iranian cinema that began in the 1950’s, comparing how the two opposing subject positions visualized and created a narrative around oil, asking: what might a complete image of oil look like?