For most people the concept of ‘oil cinema’ or ‘petrofilm’ might conjure images of crude oil, industrial processing or wells. Instead the oil industry has, over the course of a century, harnessed the potential of the moving image to orchestrate powerful narratives that visually evoke oil only occasionally as a material substance. The public relations agenda of oil companies has utilized moving image culture in sophisticated ways, going beyond predictable advertising forms to more comprehensively and ‘seamlessly equate the story of oil with the experience of modernity’, as Mona Damluji observes.1¹ The preferred genre for petroleum companies has been documentary, and the development of petrofilm culture in the first half of the 20th century became enmeshed with the centres of documentary production. Highlighting the importance of this sphere of filmmaking, Patrick Russell and James Piers Taylor write that

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石油现代性，环境与历史电影文化

对于大多数人来说，“石油电影院”或“电影胶片”的概念可能会让人联想到原油，工业加工或油井的图像。取而代之的是，在一个世纪的历史中，石油工业已经利用动态影像的潜力来编排强有力的叙述，这些叙述在视觉上仅偶尔会唤起石油作为一种实质性物质。石油企业的公共关系议程已应用在复杂的方式运动图像文化，超越预测的广告形式更全面和“无缝等同的石油故事与现代性的体验”，如蒙娜丽莎Damluji observes.1 ¹石油公司首选的类型是纪录片，而在20世纪上半叶，电影胶片文化的发展被纪录片制作中心所包围。帕特里克·罗素（Patrick Russell）和詹姆斯·皮尔斯·泰勒（James Piers Taylor）强调电影在这一领域的重要性，他写道：