Imperial ideology, as Constantine puts it, “offered for ideological approval the notion of an Empire which was both an economic asset and a civilising mission” in early 20th century Britain (1986: 193). On the one hand the ideology appealed to “perceived economic self-interest” through creating opportunities for individual enterprises and encouraging the values of private property and profit-making to maintain capitalist economies. The self-claimed civilizing mission of imperialism on the other hand, appealed to the “moral instinct of all social classes” (ibid). Accordingly, the preservation of imperial control over India, the Middle East and the colonial Empire remained a priority for all the political parties, putting the ‘colonial development policies’ on their agenda (ibid). This policy was endorsed by economic institutes who managed to set up bodies like the EMB, to encourage imperial connections in their advertising and marketing activities. The use of film as part of this effort was not only carried out through the public relations service at the EMB but later also through other official bodies and some industrial sectors started setting up their own film centres.
Oil companies were among the most active in starting such units and were the biggest sponsors of documentary film (Sussex, 1975: 174). As mentioned before, the majority of documentaries on Iran up to the late 1930s were sponsored by the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (AIOC) which had a crucial part in Britain’s international status up to the mid 1950s. Benefiting from Britain’s position as the paramount imperial power in the Middle East at the end of World War I, Anglo-Iranian secured a share of Middle East oil that was larger than any other major company (Bamberg, 2000: 3). Bamberg explains the importance of the company in the nation’s security as oil became vital in the economy of Britain.
Britain had long sought to guarantee its supplies through the ownership of crude oil by British companies, principally Anglo-Persian,5 in territories within Britain’s sphere of influence. Indeed, that had been the British government’s chief motive in financing, and taking a majority shareholding, in Anglo-Persian (ibid: 8).
5 Persian was the original name of the company from 1909 to 1935, when it was changed to Anglo-Iranian. In 1954 it was renamed as British Petroleum (Bamberg, 2000: 2)
It is important for the purposes of this research to emphasize the link between the crucial role of the oil industry in Britain’s imperial status and the way the oil industry was represented in documentary films. This argument is fully explored in Chapter 5 of this thesis. Here, I would like to highlight once more the role of filmmakers in the constructing the image of the British oil industry. We have already discussed the faith of Grierson in the Empire as the force of good, and the BDM’s conformist approach to the ideology of the day. To narrow this down to the specific case of film sponsorship by the oil industry, here I would like to highlight two other points: first, the Movement’s view of the impact of the oil industry on the life of the countries where they operated; and second, the Movement’s all-encompassing influence on sponsored filmmaking.
For the BDM members, the oil industry was at the very frontier of the West’s civilizing mission in ‘undeveloped’ countries, embodying the spirit of an ‘Enlightened Empire’, committed to improving the welfare of the international community. This is evident in words of Grierson, for example in an interview he gave specifically about Shell Oil:
Shell Oil was the first and greatest of the sponsors because it saw the full implications of its international operations, its full implication in terms of instruction, in terms of social welfare and the preaching and teaching of social welfare. For example, one of the propositions that was first put to us in the early thirties was that they found in the Gulf of Persia that it took two men to lift a bag of cement. Therefore, they were in the nutrition business. So they were in the business not only of creating a new nutritional basis but of teaching nutrition, teaching sanitation, and so on. Well, they worked logically into all kinds of services of an educational or inspirational kind in the communities in which they operated, whether it was in Venezuela, whether it was in the Upper Persian Gulf, or whether it was in the Dutch East Indies (quoted in Sussex, 1975: 61).
This quotation is interesting as I intend to examine the reflection of this particular viewpoint in a film called Dawn of Iran (1938) in Chapter 6. Made for AIOC by two senior members of the BDM, Arthur Elton and John Taylor, the film tells the story of how the whole country mushroomed out of the desert overnight, thanks to the discovery of oil underneath it, by the British. Made in 1938, the film presents a history of Iran 16 years prior to that date, during which a piece of land covered by the “ruins of the
past….populated by nomadic tribesmen and deprived of any central government”, to quote the film, became a country in the full modern sense, with “cities, roads and public buildings”, crowded by “industrial workers” and governed by a sovereign monarchy/administration. The film is just one example of numerous films made by the British oil industry that underscore a sense of benevolent internationalism on the part of the industry, embodied in what is presented as the mutual benefit of the enterprise for both the company and the host country. This however leads to forging the representations of the host country to uphold this particular image of the company, as fully discussed in Chapter 5.
The second point in relation to the BDM and film sponsorship is that the movement succeeded in making its particular trend of documentary the prevalent trend in sponsored filmmaking for both governmental and industrial sectors. As we shall see in the following section, this trend in documentary which can be called ‘Griersonian’, was maintained by Grierson through two major venues: the setting up of film units to train people for filmmaking, and initiating consultative units to maintain consistency in documentary productions. The most important of these units was the Film Centre, set up in 1937 by Grierson and Arthur Elton as an aid to long-term planning for film sponsors.
The role of the Centre in the final shape of films was vital, sometimes even more than the commissioning body. As Stewart Legg (member of the BDM and director of the Film Centre) puts it the sponsor would be told by the Centre:
We think the best thing to do is this; make this sort of film or that sort of film, or don’t make a film at all. If you think our advice is right, we can arrange to have this done. Usually Film Centre will then employ an outside body to do it (quoted in Sussex, 1975: 94).
The influence of the BDM and the Film Centre was particularly strong in case of the film unit of Shell Oil. This unit, which eventually grew into one of the biggest documentary film units in Britian, formed in 1934, and Edgar Anstey, a senior BDM member was recommended by Grierson for running the unit (Sussex, 1975:92). Although the film unit was in Shell premises “the planning of films and the supervision of them was done from
outside by Film Centre” (Legg quoted in Sussex, 1975: 94).
Sir Arthur Elton, a senior member of the BDM, a director of the Film Centre and advisor to the Shell Unit described in an interview this policy of Shell to have their films made through an outside body:
We [Shell] present in the best possible way aspects of the work we do, never put our name on the films. And we practically never do from that day to this. You will very rarely find the word Shell inside a Shell film. There are no advertisements. (I know sometimes there are specific advertising films, which we’re not speaking of).
And this presentation of its own world has been made year after year from 1936 till today (quoted in Sussex, 1975: 95).
This strategy of Shell was described by Elton as ‘a policy of excellence’, and was adopted to prevent their films looking like “an ordinary piece of Shell public relations from the inside” (Legg quoted in Sussex, 1975: 93). It resulted in films being regarded as
“universal in their application” (ibid), and the image of the Shell Oil group held as being
“conditioned in some measure by the distinction and objectivity, and humanity too…”
(Anstey, quoted in Sussex, 1975: 178).
This description of Shell’s strategy as a “policy of excellence” is paradoxical and could be seen as a double-edged sword. On the one hand it is indeed ethical for a sponsor not to be opportunistic in ‘advertising’ explicitly their own organisation; on the other hand, however, it is virtually impossible for them to provide totally ‘neutral’ content. This point is developed on a recurring basis throughout this thesis in relation not only to sponsors such as Shell, but the BDM itself. The claims of neutrality will be examined through an in-depth analysis of the films. I will also argue in the next chapters that the ideas of universalism and internationalism shape one of the central themes of documentaries made on oil/Iran, and together provide a thematic thread running through these documentaries from the 1930s to the 1960s. The issues involved in industrial sponsorship of documentary also affect other aspects of documentary representation, namely the ones concerning the concepts of ‘self’ and ‘other’. Below I examine it as a dual concept to show how the image of Iran is constructed implicitly as ‘other’ in
relation to a ‘self’ (Britain as an Empire with a civilising mission) imbued with an unconsciously pervasive and therefore necessarily non-neutral and idealised image of its
‘self’. For the discussion of this section I will focus once more on the BDM, this time from a different angle.