Oil production (1953/1954)

Directed by: Bert Haanstra | 93 minutes | documentary

Haanstra’s four documentaries about oil production were again an assignment from Shell. Not surprising given the subject matter, but Shell wanted it emphatically not to be commercials. A nice aim, but in the case of this series of films, this set-up is not entirely successful. After all, which random spectator is waiting for a detailed report on the ups and downs of oil production? Why should this topic be divided into four separate documentaries? It feels stretched. “Like butter spread on too much bread”, as Ian Holm as Bilbo described his own vague feeling in ‘The Fellowship of the Ring’.

All together, this series of films about oil lasts about an hour and a half, which is far too long for an educational piece of cinema that should appeal to a wide audience. Half an hour had been enough. There is now too much empty material. Too much repetition or for a layman uninteresting details. It seems as if the viewer experiences the search for oil fields and drilling in “real time”, while a short overview would have been much more effective in both conveying the message and captivating the viewer cinematically.

Practically every film has its problems. The first work is both too short and too childish in the communication of its information. With the silly animations of swimming and transforming plankton, it’s like watching school television. Shots of mountains shrouded in fog are still aesthetically pleasing, but the content of this first part of the series is barely worth anything. It’s just a brief introduction to the bigger movie to come. The irony, however, is that while watching that bigger film, you long for the succinctness of the introduction. Because more playing time does not necessarily mean a lot of extra clarification or interesting material.

Because after the introduction, half an hour is spent on locating and mapping possible oil areas, which mainly comes down to a lot of running gear and digging in the jungle. It becomes clear what different measuring equipment there is, such as seismometers and gravometers (gravity measurements). The viewer springs up for a moment when an interesting vehicle appears: an amphibious vehicle that drives through the water with large wooden wheels. And the last shot, that of a drill bit in a drilling rig, from a frog’s perspective, is also tantalizing. Maybe a nice harbinger of things to come in part three of the series?

It looks like it. Part three picks up right where part two ends and begins with a shot that seems to hint at Haanstra’s nature-conscious nature. Haanstra starts with a shot of untouched nature – and calls it that in the voice-over – after which this nature is brutally plowed by a bulldozer. But a lot of interesting things don’t happen – again – in this half-hour documentary. Yes, some nice shots of derricks come along, but too much attention is paid to images of, and explanations about, wedges, truss rods, ropes, and various pipes. And there is continuous drilling. The last few minutes, when the oil could be found, suddenly become exciting. But it’s too little and too late to save the movie. On to the final piece then, across the oil field.

Fortunately, the last part of the series is a lot more dynamic. This film is more interesting both cinematically and substantively. It already starts with the quick assembly, with nice image changes between towers and end pieces of drilling machines. The pace is a lot faster, especially in the first half of the film. What happens to the extracted oil is also interesting. Where the pipes all lead. That gas from so-called separators can be used for all kinds of things, and that gasoline can also be extracted from the oil, for example. But one of the most startling things is that the extraction areas are developing into full-fledged settlements to keep the area active. They become real villages with houses and gardens, workshops and sports fields, churches and laboratories, hospitals, shops, department stores. Finally, the overview of the locations of drilling rigs, refineries and sales areas is fortunately clear and concise, as the rest of the series should have looked like. In short, there is quite useful material in this four-part series about oil production, and from a cinematic point of view there are also nice things to do with it, but Haanstra unfortunately does not exploit this potential enough.