Stuck in the Truck: Oil Dependency, Acceleration, and the Nature of Catastrophe

An Ecocritical Reading of The Wages of Fear

(Le Salaire de la Peur, Henri-Georges Clouzot, 1953)

Sonya Helgesson Ralevic

Department of Media Studies Master Thesis 30 ECTS credits Cinema Studies Master’s Programme in Cinema Studies (120 ECTS credits) Spring term 2020 Supervisor: Malin Wahlberg

Helgesson Ralevic

Stuck in the Truck: Oil Dependency, Acceleration, and the Nature of Catastrophe

An Ecocritical Reading of The Wages of Fear

(Le Salaire de la Peur, Henri-Georges Clouzot, 1953)

Sonya Helgesson Ralevic Abstract

As a medium of modernity, film has always been entwined with the energy regime sustaining it. This thesis is interested in the interrelation between film and oil, and approached as a piece of petro-fiction, Henri-Georges Clouzot’s film The Wages of Fear (1953) is subject to a close, ecocritical analysis. A selection of four additional oil-films are used as points of comparison. By looking at a variety of representational and aesthetic aspects, the study explores how the film visualises the Anthropocene and negotiates the oil culture in which it exists. By reading the film in terms of oil, this thesis finds that the film in various ways expresses an entanglement with oil culture, while also criticising the same dependency. From the five oil films that have been analysed, catastrophe is an inherent motif, and part of the attraction of oil as subject matter, mirrored in broader culture of exuberance. In contrast to the other films, The Wages of Fear plays less into spectacle but opens to a critical examination of the various exploitations involved at the hands of the oil industry.

Keywords

The Wages of Fear, Le Salaire de la Peur, Henri-Georges Clouzot, ecocriticism, petro-fiction, Anthropocene, oil film, film noir, ethnographic film, spectacle

Helgesson Ralevic

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank my supervisor Malin Wahlberg for her support, patience, and wise words. Thank you to my friends who proofread, and to my classmates for the good discussions we have had throughout the year. I would also like to thank my husband and the rest of my family for their support throughout this partly challenging semester. Finally, I would like to thank the department of Media Studies for 3,5 years of excellent education. I have enjoyed every class and every screening, and will miss it dearly.

Helgesson Ralevic

Contents

Chapter 1. Introduction ...... 1 1.1. Theoretical Framework and Methodology ...... 1 1.2. Aim, Method and Research Design ...... 8 1.3. Material ...... 10 Chapter 2. Theoretical and Historical Background ...... 12 2.1. The Wages of Fear ...... 12 2.1.1. Synopsis and Remakes ...... 12 2.1.2. Production History ...... 13 2.1.3. Genre and Style ...... 15 2.2. Cinema and Oil ...... 17 2.3. Cinema and the Automobile ...... 24 Chapter 3. Situating Oil in The Wages of Fear: An Ecocritical Analysis ...... 28 3.1. Genre Fusion: Ethnographic Film, Melodrama and Film Noir ...... 29 3.2. Men in Trucks ...... 36 3.3. The Nature of Catastrophe ...... 41 Chapter 4. Visualising the Anthropocene: Final Discussion ...... 50 Appendix...... 55 Bibliography ...... 58 Filmography ...... 63

Helgesson Ralevic

Chapter 1. Introduction

When I first saw Henri-George Clouzot’s The Wages of Fear (Le Salaire de la Peur, Henri- Georges Clouzot, 1953) a couple of years ago, it stuck me how well it resonates with a current wave of eco-melancholia. The slow-paced, dark story of four men who go on a high-risk journey commissioned by an oil company exposes corruption, exploitation and a dismal worldview, therein framing some of the themes and sentiments that circulate in today’s climate breakdown. Although oil has a different cultural status today than it did in the 1950s, oil companies hold a continued strong position in our societies and greenhouse gas emissions keep increasing by the year.1 One of the things that intrigued me, and later led me to this topic, was the question of what precedes the pessimism in this particular film: only a couple of years into the Great Acceleration, the film seems to go against the general wave of post- war optimism in the Western world, not least in relation to petroleum as enabler of this expansive economic growth. Re-watching it, I am further intrigued by its ambiguity. It comes off as both racist and strangely respectful in its depiction of the local inhabitants of the small town that is almost held hostage by the American oil company, and voices both a sense of dependency on and distaste for the oil industry. In the United States, the film was censored and heavily criticised for being “anti-American and anti-capitalist”.2 Some of the film’s originality lies in its play with genre, its cultural critique and its multilingualism.

1.1. Theoretical Framework and Methodology It is, of course, a simplified understanding that film only would reflect dominant ideology. On the contrary, following Sean Cubitt’s reasoning, films are not only symptoms of their age, but also voice its contradictions.3 It is my understanding that all culture both reflects, negotiates and shapes the historical time in which it came into being. Culture is also entwined with the energy systems sustaining it. The Wages of Fear actualises two opposing political traditions in film history – that of an exploitative, colonial film history in which the camera is used to

1 Jannike Kihlberg, ”Utsläppen av koldioxid fortsätter att öka i år”, Dagens Nyheter 04 12, 2019, accessed 25 05, 2020, https://www.dn.se/nyheter/varlden/utslappen-av-koldioxid-fortsatter-att-oka-i- ar/?forceScript=1&variantType=large. 2 Christopher Lloyd, Henri-Georges Clouzot (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007), 3. 3 Sean Cubitt, EcoMedia (Amsterdam, New York: Rodopi, 2005), 2.

Helgesson Ralevic legitimise an imperial worldview, and that of a political, anti-colonial film history (a decade before the wave of “third cinema”), in which the camera is used to draw attention to the injustices of imperialism and capitalism.

Clouzot’s oil-film will be the main object of study in this thesis. It is important to differentiate between our understanding of oil today and Clouzot’s understanding of it 70 years ago – the concept of global warming caused by the burning of fossil fuels was far from generally known in 1953 (although Svante Arrhenius described the greenhouse effect in his study of carbon dioxide already in 18954), and should not be understood as the source of Clouzot’s pessimism. Nevertheless, I want to emphasise that watching this film today propels certain reflections and theoretical perspectives. Timothy Morton, one of the most prominent ecocritical theorists, has described global warming as a hyperobject, a term which refers to phenomena distributed across such vast spatiotemporal dimension that they simply cannot be perceived with our sensory apparatus.5 It seems a fitting description. How, then, can we grasp it? Nicholas Mirzoeff investigates the same question when he states that we cannot “see the Anthropocene, extending across centuries, through dimensions and across time. It can only be visualised.”6 Mirzoeff re-interprets Monet’s famous painting “Impression: Sun Rising” and argues that the painting “at once reveals and aestheticises anthropogenic environmental destruction.”7 I would not directly agree with his confident claim that environmental destruction is aestheticised in the painting, especially since he does not very clearly define what he means by this aestheticisation – what Monet and the impressionists did was to form a new visual style and approach to art by painting fluid impressions, thus breaking the contemporary aesthetic rules of composition and motif. Nevertheless, the notion that the painting visualises the Anthropocene by depicting scenes from everyday industrial life is intriguing. Another scholar interested in the visibility/invisibility paradox of environmental destruction is Roman Bartosch. Bartosch writes about oil usage and claims that our deep entanglement8 with oil offers no “way of really thinking about the consequences […], let alone thinking beyond this

4 Roy Scranton, Learning to Die in the Anthropocene: Reflections on the End of a Civilization (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 2015), 40. 5 Timothy Morton, Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World (Minneapolis, Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 2013). 6 Nicholas Mirzoeff, “Visualizing the Anthropocene”, Public Culture 26:2 (2014): 213, accessed 23 05, 2020, https://yatesmckee.files.wordpress.com/2014/08/visualizing-the-anthropocene.pdf 7 Mirzoeff, 221. 8 Throughout this thesis I will use the term “entanglement” as a synonym to dependency or to describe an entwined relationship (with oil). I am aware of the theoretical discourse surrounding the term but do not wish to engage with it further.

Helgesson Ralevic addiction”.9 For that reason, he refers to it as the “petroleum unconscious”, a dependency that is difficult to visualise because it is so entrenched and pervasive in our culture. According to Bartosch, it is through cultural analysis of petro-fiction and other kinds of petro-narratives that this unconscious can be brought to light. Celebrated ecocritic Rob Nixon is also engaged with the question of the visibility of environmental destruction, or rather; in its invisibility. Through his concept slow violence he draws our attention to the way a certain media logic rewards spectacular images at the expense of a more sensitive understanding of environmental destruction as different slow-working, “invisible” processes. Thus, he criticises moving images that turn environmental destruction into spectacle, and questions film’s ability to evoke a necessary engagement. Mirzoeff mostly discusses art in his article, and Bartosch’s and Nixon’s research is on literature, but their arguments can surely be tested against cinema as a medium of visuality. Drawing on Benjamin, film is well suited as a study object to approach certain aspects of the unconscious: “It is through the camera that we first discover the optical unconscious […]”10, he writes, thus allowing the spectator to go beyond the perception of the film maker.

In fact, film is not just any visual medium, but arguably the modern medium of visuality. The birth of cinema marks a moment of intense modernisation in the Western world and beyond. Consequently, cinema is often viewed as a product of modernity. This also means that the relation between cinema and the natural environment is multifaceted and complex. Nadia Bozak neatly states that: “[e]mbedded in every moving image is a complex set of environmental relations”.11 A crucial aspect of these relations has from the very beginning been cinema’s involvement with exploitation of the natural world and with the dominant energy resource – fossil fuels. In everything from the minerals in the celluloid strip itself, to the energy needed for screening, to disposable sets used for filming, to the transportation of personnel, to the amounts of energy used for streaming in recent years – cinema culture has always consumed nature. Walter Benjamin famously compares the motion of early film to a specific production regime, namely the Fordist assembly line, making the point that this

9 Roman Bartosch, ”The Energy of Stories: Postcolonialism, the Petroleum Unconscious, and the Crude Side of Cultural Ecology”, Resilience: A Journal of the Environmental Humanities 6, no 2-3 (spring-fall 2019), 117. 10 Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility”, in Critical Visions in Film Theory: Classic and Contemporary Readings, ed. Timothy Corrigan, Patricia White and Meta Mazaj (Boston, New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2011), 244. 11 Nadia Bozak, The Cinematic Footprint: Lights, Camera, Natural Resources (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutger University Press, 2011), 5.

Helgesson Ralevic embodiment of capitalist production formed, what Buell calls, an oil-induced aesthetic in cinema.12

As an example of an oil-induced aesthetic product, The Wages of Fear will be approached from an ecocritical position in this thesis. Ecocriticism is an interdisciplinary academic field that developed in literature studies in the late 1970s and thereafter moved into other disciplines with the common (and somewhat vague) ambition of bringing environmental awareness to the humanities, often criticising the nature/culture dichotomy as well as questioning the traditional conception of progress.13 Over a decade ago, Adrian Ivakhiv sketched the outlines of “green film criticism” in an academic article, and since then, the field has expanded as climate breakdown has started to reach a collective consciousness.14 Climate breakdown, arguably the most pressing issue of our time, demands of us as academics to make environmentalism a concern of “all the human sciences”,15 not only the natural sciences. The question is how a discipline such as cinema studies can contribute. Though there is much to be said here, this thesis mainly adheres to the understanding that film as a popular form of cultural expression is shaped by and shapes understandings and circulations of ideas and imaginaries regarding the man-nature relationship. As cinema scholars, our job is to make sense of these notions, and to point out how they are communicated through the instruments specific to cinema: the framing of the camera, editing, the interplay between sound and image, etc. To situate cinema culture within an interdisciplinary fossil fuel discourse invites a wide range of considerations, including the material conditions for filmmaking, distribution and screening, all of which can show how film is entangled both directly and indirectly with the fossil fuel economy. However, the fossil discourse also relates to the representation of the natural environment and its exploitation on screen, which is what this thesis will mainly engage in. This incorporates the way nature is depicted, and how the human subject is situated in relation to it, among other things. Paula Willoquet-Maricondi argues that cinema shapes cultural attitudes towards the natural environment and specifies that “it is not that representations directly shape nature but that they shape our perceptions of nature, perceptions that in turn inform and pattern our actions in relation to nature; our

12 Benjamin, 243. 13 Paula Willoquet-Maricondi, “Introduction: From Literary to Cinematic Ecocriticism”, in Framing the World: Explorations in Ecocriticism and Film, ed. Paula Willoquet-Maricondi (Charlottesville, Indiana: University of Virginia Press, 2010), 2-3. 14 Adrian Ivakhiv, “Green Film Criticism and Its Futures”, Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 15.2 (Summer 2008). 15 Lawrence Buell, “The Ecocritical Insurgency”, New Literary History 30 (Summer 1999): 699.

Helgesson Ralevic actions, in turn, shape nature by preserving ecosystems or by despoiling them”.16 This is partly due to an imagined transparency of the film medium, she argues.

To closely analyse a film that circles around the subject of oil and the fossil fuel economy therefore has a directness and a certain self-reflexive element to it, as a film both of and about oil. Whether or not there are self-critical or self-conscious elements to it is for the analysis to show. The Wages of Fear will be approached as an example of petro-fiction, which Bartosch defines in wide terms as “mediatised engagement with petroculture”.17 The element of fiction is important to stress, differentiating it from other historical documents. Bartosch admits that the term had no clear demarcation: “Whether or not novels become regarded as petro-fiction is less a matter of representation and critical interrogation of specific infrastructural systems than of one’s critical reading practices”.18 Translating Bartosch’s argument to my film case, The Wages of Fear should not be understood as an ecocritical film in and of itself, but as a cultural product that generates ideas about the human subject’s relation to the natural world and therefore lends itself to ecocritical readings. This distinction is important to make and has been the subject of discussion among cinema scholars. Whereas the ecocritical branch of cinema studies initially focused on a narrower set of films – films with an explicit ecological theme – it has over the last decade come to include a larger variety of films, given the above- mentioned premise that cinema culture by definition is intertwined with nature, no matter what the intended message. This thesis will follow in the footsteps of a recent ecocritical tradition that re-situates film history in a theoretical paradigm that proposes environmental awareness by demonstrating this dependency. Researchers like Sean Cubitt, Hunter Vaughan and Nadia Bozak analyse such diverse films as Lord of the Rings (Peter Jackson, 2001-2003), Singin’ in the Rain (Gene Kelly, 1952), The Blue Planet (Alastair Fothergill, 2001) and Princess Mononoke (Hayako Miyazaki, 1997) in their books; indeed, writings in this field today can include anything from obscure sci-fi, blockbusters, children’s films, activist documentaries and silent cinema.19 Joseph Heumann and Robin Murray have had great influence on the setup of this study, in their wide range of study objects from The Fast and the Furious-films to the Lumière film Oil Wells of Baku: Close Look (Puits de Pétrole à Bakou:

16 Willoquet-Maricondi, 7. 17 Bartosch, 118. 18 Ibid., 131. 19 Sean Cubitt, EcoMedia (Amsterdam, New York: Rodopi, 2005); Hunter Vaughan, Hollywood’s Dirtiest Secrets: The Hidden Environmental Costs of the Movies (New York: Columbia University Press, 2019); Nadia Bozak, The Cinematic Footprint: Lights, Camera, Natural Resources (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutger University Press, 2011).

Helgesson Ralevic

Vue de Près, Auguste and Louis Lumière, 1896), many of them connecting to a larger fossil fuel culture. A lot of the methodological considerations are reflected in their discussion on precisely Oil Wells of Baku, and whether it should be considered an “ecological” film. Their discussion sheds light on important historiographic issues regarding historical material and the application of modern theoretical frameworks. It is my belief that a historical distance can bring forward understandings about the circulation of ideas, attitudes, fears and desires that might not have been directly intended in the time it came into being. To apply a contemporary theoretical paradigm on a historical case may result in “reading against the grain”, which means to analyse a film in opposition to how it has generally been understood. It can also imply focusing on certain aspects of film, as will be the case in this study with its focus on oil.

One of the defining divides within ecocriticism is that between post-humanist studies that approaches the issue of climate breakdown by questioning the rigid boundaries between all living organisms, and the anthropocentric approach that puts human activity at the centre. Although a post-humanist approach can be eye-opening, this thesis leans more towards an anthropocentric approach. Critics of the post-humanist school like Andreas Malm and Clive Hamilton, often argue that it is not political enough, and I am willing to agree: there is an urgency in mapping out the power dynamics of the hydrocarbon economy, and to recognise the un-evenness in the way that global warming effects people across the world, that demands us to scrutinise the human as the major agent. That does not mean that the two should necessarily be seen as opposing schools. I regard it as something of a feedback loop: an anthropocentric world-view has unquestionably caused a lot of harm to animals, nature and in extension, humans (as a post-humanist would suggest); however, it is exactly for that reason that it is important not to abandon the anthropocentric perspective. The Anthropocene is the human’s doing, not the tick’s nor the chimpanzee’s, and therefore the responsibility falls squarely on the human’s shoulders.20 Whether or not it is just to put the burden of responsibility on third world citizens or generations to come is a crucial discussion that needs to inform policy making, but it does not erase the basic facts that (some) humans have caused massive harm to the climate, and that it is for humanity as a whole to deal with the consequences. After all, we only have one planet. Clive Hamilton makes the case for “a new anthropocentrism” in his book Defiant Earth and argues that we are in fact not anthropocentric enough, meaning that humanity must face up to its unique power position in

20 I refer here to the influential study on the perception of a tick (within the posthumanist school), conducted by Jakob von Uexkull.

Helgesson Ralevic order to stop misusing that very power, instead of levelling the human with all other living organisms. It is too late to turn back, he argues. This anthropocentric perspective should not be understood as normative but rather as descriptive, something Hamilton stresses:

I am insisting that a sharp division must be made between anthropocentrism as a scientific fact – humans are the dominant creature, so dominant that we have shifted the geological arc of the planet – and anthropocentrism as a normative claim: that it is right and proper that humans should be masters of the Earth. Never has the ‘is’ been more apparent; never has the ‘ought’ been less defensible.21

This naturally leads to a discussion about the very term “Anthropocene”, which was coined by atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen in 2000 to describe the era following the “Holocene”, in which human beings – Anthropos – have become a geological force. The term is widely utilised but equally debated and criticised. I hold a pragmatic position here. Andreas Malm and other critics are right in pointing out that not all humans are responsible for the breakdown of the climate. On the contrary, quite a small number of people, relatively speaking, are responsible for a majority of the carbon emissions. I do not believe this to stand in conflict with the term itself, however. Critics pick up on the way “anthropos” is used and how it would suggest that a certain destructiveness is implied as part of human nature. This, in their opinion, risks resulting in a political paralysis. To me, this is not inherent in the term. To state that humans are responsible for climate breakdown should be understood as descriptive. Again, the tick has nothing to do with it. I find the term quite practical; it gives us as academics and humans a tool to initiate a discussion about the unprecedented situation that we find ourselves in, and as a hyperobject, climate breakdown needs any possible conceptualisation that might help us grasp it. A debate of the concept’s relevance risks doing a disservice to the wider cause. Many issues raised in the debate are important and legitimate, but not necessarily in regard to the term’s existence and should, in my opinion, not stand in the way for its usage.22

One inspirational ecocritically oriented academic who positions human activity at the centre is Stephanie LeMenager. LeMenager is interested in oil and the culture that sustains it. She perceives oil as an all-encompassing energy regime and sets out to uncover “the everything of

21 Clive Hamilton, Defiant Earth: The Fate of Humans in the Anthropocene (Cambridge: Polity, 2017), 43. 22 For deeper insight into this discussion, see Clive Hamilton, Andreas Malm and Alf Hornborg. Andreas Malm and Alf Hornborg famously criticise the concept in the article “The Geology of Mankind? A critique of the Anthropocene Narrative”. I generally agree with Clive Hamilton’s position described as “a new anthropocentrism”, expressed in the second chapter of his book Defiant Earth.

Helgesson Ralevic oil” in her book Living Oil. Her objective is to make the reader aware of the extent to which modern human life is dependent on oil, going as far as problematising the production and circulation of her very own book. Truly understanding this dependency, in her opinion, is a necessary first step.23 Nadia Bozak has a similar mission in her book The Cinematic Footprint, although she focuses more clearly on cinema, investigating production and representation. Seeing that cinema is a product of modernity, it is also a product of a fossil fuel discourse, or as she calls it, “the hydrocarbon ideology”. Bozak recognises that filmmaking choices such as duration of a take, lighting and camera angles inform this imagination.24 A major contradiction in our time, or so it can be understood, is our inability to stop the burning of fossil fuels, although a large portion of society at this point will agree on its destructive consequences. This contradiction makes LeMenager and Bozak’s perspective fruitful: we need to understand the cultural significance of oil and what it represents beyond violence and destruction. Some historians argue, for example, that oil helped to abolish slavery in the United States, since muscle-power was not required to the same extent.25 Dipesh Chakrabarty draws a link between the many forms of liberation that have evolved in the last hundred years and the intensified burning of fossil fuels during the Great Acceleration: “The mansion of modern freedoms stands on an ever-expanding base of fossil- fuel use. Most of our freedoms so far have been energy-intensive”,26 and Timothy Mitchell introduces his book Carbon Democracy with the broad statement that “[f]ossil fuels helped create both the possibility of modern democracy and its limits.”27 Indeed, a totalising energy regime; hence my focus on a film with a transportation vehicle as central motif, arguably the number one symbol of petroleum culture.

1.2. Aim, Method and Research Design My objective within the framework of this thesis is to articulate a critical reading of The Wages of Fear and to consider the ways in which it visualises the Anthropocene. In other words, what I present here is as an empirical case study in which the film is analysed thematically, in dialogue with an ecocritical theoretical paradigm. In my close, textual

23 Stephanie LeMenager, Living Oil: Petroleum Culture in the American Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 6. 24 Bozak, 11-12. 25 LeMenager, 5. 26 Dipesh Chakrabarty, “The Climate of History: Four Theses”, Critical Inquiry 35, no. 2 (2009), 208. 27 Timothy Mitchell, Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil (New York: Verso Books, 2013), 1.

Helgesson Ralevic analysis of the film, I will look at various cinematographic and narrative devices, to more closely assess how The Wages of Fear represents and negotiates the fossil fuel-culture of its historical time. The approach is tentative in its exploration of how – and if – representational and aesthetic aspects can be read in terms of oil. My mission is twofold: first, providing a historical context in order to ground my reading historically, and secondly, stressing what a contemporary discourse can bring out in a historical case. Murray and Heumann’s discussion on Oil Wells of Baku will partly be mirrored in my discussion on whether the film communicates any concern for the environmental destruction that is depicted. This regards the film’s (potential) self-awareness and asks what it is reasonable to assume that it communicated to a contemporary audience. Adding onto this, I will consider what the film communicates to an audience today, disregarding intention and historical meaning. In other words, I will consider both what the film itself exposes in terms of oil and the oil industry, as well as exposing its own engagement with the same culture.

The film will be analysed using several historical, thematical and theoretical concepts to be further explored in the second chapter, including the history of oil as energy regime; the transportation motif and the way that the characteristics of oil inform a certain spectacle- oriented aesthetics. This chapter also presents some general background regarding synopsis, production and genre. Some of the sections presented in this chapter – including the discussion on genre and the transportation motif – mirror a more general discourse. My research contribution partly consists of turning this broader discourse into a specifically ecocritical framework through the analysis of The Wages of Fear.

Provided with this, the analysis will focus on three different ways in which the film can be read in terms of oil; first, by looking at the blend of different genres and what they entail about its subject matter, what implications these have on cinematography and narrative, and how they are used to invoke pathos and mood. Secondly, I will look at the transportation motif, consider how this reflects the construction of masculinity through the concept of petro- masculinity and explore how a historiographic critique of accelerated progress can be originated. Lastly, focus will be on looking at the catastrophic event(s), how they are related to a broader oil culture of exuberance and whether the dramatic and aesthetic appeal of oil allows for catastrophe to communicate concern. By working with a modern theoretical framework and a historical document, I expect that the study will also shed light on larger methodological concerns and potential obstacles, but also contribute to the field by demonstrating how moving images can speak to an audience through time.

Helgesson Ralevic

1.3. Material Besides working closely with The Wages of Fear, and the theoretical framework that has been presented, I will include a couple of additional media historical cases to use as points of comparison in order to substantiate my analysis. These include Oil Wells of Baku: Close Look, Louisiana Story (Robert Flaherty, 1948), Thunder Bay (Anthony Mann, 1953) and Sorcerer (William Friedkin, 1977). The films are chosen on a thematic basis and will be referred to as oil films in this study.28 Oil Wells of Baku and the discussion thereon mirrors some methodological considerations as well as providing insight into the history of oil and film, symbolising a starting point in a long-lasting relationship. Louisiana Story will work as a complementary piece in mapping out the broader oil culture of its time. As a commissioned film, it will reflect an official standpoint of Standard Oil, the largest oil company of its time. It also juxtaposes oil industry and nature in an interesting and poetic way that lends itself to comparison with the way nature and oil industry/the truck interrelates in The Wages of Fear. Thunder Bay functions as a contemporary to The Wages of Fear and is as an example of the mainstream, American oil narrative of the 1950s. As such, it will be a useful point of comparison, not least in relation to the masculinity ideal it poses. The film also has direct ties to the oil industry, since the actor James Stewart, who had personally invested in oil, initiated the film that Anthony Mann came to direct.29 Thunder Bay is a film that has not aged very well, and therefore been largely forgotten by film historians, which makes it even more important to bring life to in this historical mapping of oil films. As a remake of Clouzot’s 1953 film, Sorcerer affords an important point of comparison that can clarify the specific cinematic qualities of The Wages of Fear.

In order to further support my claims, I will also provide some background on the production history of the film. It is important to point out, however, that the study will not be auteur- centric: what Clouzot intended with his film is only of interest in combination with other factors. I will therefore carefully balance my ecocritical reading with considerations of the historical time of the film in order to avoid ahistorical or decontextualised readings. I regard it as an opportunity to theorise my method in broader terms – exploring what the historical distance does to the analysis – and it is my hope that applying a contemporary theoretical

28 ”Oil film” is a broader term than “petro-fiction” given that it encapsulates non-fiction film as well as fiction film, which is the reason that it will be used to describe the group of five films together. The criterion is simply that the films in one way or another relate to oil as part of their subject matter. 29 Robin L Murray and Joseph K Heumann, Film and Everyday Eco-Disasters (Lincoln, Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 2014), 167.

Helgesson Ralevic framework on the film will bring out things about this historical time that might have gone unnoticed in earlier analysis. The historiographic approach borrows from history philosopher Reinhart Koselleck and his definition of historical time. His argument is that the gap between the past and the present appears to grow in accelerating modernity, an assumption I sense that The Wages of Fear plays with, with its focus on transportation and acceleration. The novelty of the ecocritical field, that is expanding and developing as we speak, discloses the fact why no similar study has been done of The Wages of Fear. In fact, Clouzot in general is somewhat understudied compared to some of his contemporaries. The Clouzot researcher Christopher Lloyd speculates that this has to do with his partial unpopularity in the home country as well as his lack of self-justification. With the French New Wave gaining an international audience, some of the “classic” French filmmakers partly became forgotten in the general canonisation of French film history. The fact that a film labelled “cinema de papa” today appears clear- sighted and modern in certain aspects, only strengthens my view that the historical distance that marks this case study and the contemporary ecocritical discourse speaks to the strength of the study, and not vice versa. I wish to explore my initial sentiment of eco-melancholia and the uncanny feeling that this cinematic representation carries with it grains of knowledge of our own destruction, in the shape of a soon to be seventy-year old document.

Helgesson Ralevic

Chapter 2. Theoretical and Historical Background

2.1. The Wages of Fear 2.1.1. Synopsis and Remakes The Wages of Fear is based on the novel by Georges Arnaud with the same title. It is shot in black and white with an aspect ratio of 1.37:1. There is no nondiegetic music in the film (apart from the opening sequences), only some pieces played at the local bar.

The film starts off in the small town of Las Piedras, situated in an unspecified Latin American country, a site of prospect for the American oil company SOC (Southern Oil Company; the reference to Standard Oil Company is obvious). Las Piedras is the temporary home for a bunch of Western, mainly European “vagabonds”, unregistered men who presumably sought gold at the oil company but without success due to their unregistered status. There is Mario, played by Yves Montand, a careless playboy, and the woman who loves him; Linda, the local beauty who works at the town bar. Soon the rumoured gangster Jo arrives by plane and form a close friendship with his compatriot Mario, to the dissatisfaction of Mario’s roommate Luigi, an Italian man. A little bit into the film, an accident is announced to have happened at an oil field, 500 kilometres from Las Piedras, causing 13 victims, 12 of whom came from Las Piedras. A group of locals start protesting against the harsh working conditions, and the oil company comes up with a plan to extinguish the fire – involving the lethal transportation of nitroglycerine. To avoid trouble with the Union, the SOC decides to look for volunteers among the unregistered vagabonds, ending up with Mario, Jo, Luigi and Bimba, a Dutch man. Mario and Jo team up in one truck and Luigi and Bimba take the other one. There are several obstacles on the way due to the faulty roads. One involves reversing onto a rotten wooden ramp in order to make a sharp turn, another forces the men to blow up a large rock blocking the road. There is a shift in roles as Jo loses his tough guy-approach and is clearly shaken by the danger of the journey, making him attempt to flee the truck more than once to Mario’s annoyance. Luigi, on the other hand, turn out to be a real “tough” man, and he, Bimba and Mario team up against Jo who they see as weak. Mario and Jo suddenly see a cloud of fire and smoke ahead and realise that Bimba and Luigi has hit something that made their truck explode. As they reach the site, they learn that the explosion ripped of a pipeline, causing oil

Helgesson Ralevic to flood into a puddle that is growing into a pond, and that they must drive through before it gets too big. Mario takes the driver’s seat and Jo wades through the oil to clear away any obstacles, but gets his leg stuck, causing Mario to drive over it. Jo later dies from his injury. As Mario reaches the oil field as the only survivor, he collapses out of exhaustion. The news then reaches Las Piedras and the bar where Linda works, causing them to celebrate the return of Mario. On his way back, however, he drives so carelessly that he skids of a cliff and dies.

The film inspired other films. Violent Road (Howard W. Koch, 1958) is often understood as a remake but not labelled as such. William Friedkin’s Sorcerer (1977), however, is explicitly a remake, even though there are big differences. In Sorcerer (1977) the geopolitical conditions for and implications of the oil industry are stressed more than in the original text, reflecting the Cold War and the tense geopolitical balance in the wake of the oil crisis 1973. Friedkin himself described the message of the film as one of peace and co-operation, “that perfectly captured this notion of the separate countries of the world either co-operating or dying together”.30 The four characters are in other words meant to represent different regions of the world: Mexico, the United States, France and Palestine. All four were involved with criminal activity or terrorism before fleeing to the town of Porvenir in South America. As the town is introduced, images of posters of a political leader campaigning for re-election are juxtaposed with images of primitive everyday life. The stress on the political situation implicates how the oil business is in collusion with corrupt political leaders, shifting the blame in the film from the oil corporation, as is very much the object of critique in the original text, to the political situation in the country.

2.1.2. Production History Henri-Georges Clouzot (1907-1977) started working in the film business in the early 1930s, in the French section of the German production company UFA. He soon left when the company was overtaken by the Nazis, because of an alleged friendship with a Jewish producer.31 His career at UFA proved to be fruitful, however, when he was offered a job as Head of Scripts at the German production company Continental who opened an office in occupied Paris. This opportunity can be seen as both a curse and a blessing – it is owing to the years at Continental that Clouzot could begin working as a filmmaker in the first place, but his

30 Mark Kermode, “Road to Perdition”, Sight and Sound 27, no. 12 (Dec 2017), 36. 31 Lloyd, 5.

Helgesson Ralevic anti-patriotic behaviour made him unpopular in the French film business and is presumably one of the reasons that he was seen as something of an outcast. He left Continental in 1943 and was banned from the French industry for four years.32 Among audiences, Clouzot was rather popular in his time, however, and The Wages of Fear was the second most popular film in France in the year it was released.33 In a career that spans 26 years, from 1942-1968, Clouzot made ten feature films, one short and six documentaries.34

Clouzot travelled to Brazil where he met his wife, Vera Clouzot. There he had ambitions for making an ethnographic film. He started making one that the local authorities found provocative, since it focused on the poverty and rough parts of Rio de Janeiro rather than the tourist areas. The film was never completed, but Clouzot wrote a book about his journey. Part one of The Wages of Fear is by some understood as being a substitute for the film he never made, and it does have an ethnographic quality to it, even though it is filmed in France. The production was delayed because of heavy rain, which proves how the on set-filming practice (in contrast to the studio system that dominated Hollywood in this time) in a very direct sense is interlinked with climate and nature.35

Clouzot is difficult to pin down politically. Christopher Lloyd brings up rumours of fascist sympathies as well as anti-capitalist convictions, but more or less dismisses them both on the ground that they are no more than rumours and that Clouzot himself never made any overtly political statements.36 Clouzot was one of the major objects of critique from the progressing French New Wave filmmakers, labelling his films “cinema de papa” – they were seen by this younger generation as traditional, literary, cumbersome due to their big budgets and without psychological depth. Not least Truffaut was quite harsh in his critique, even though he would nuance it in later years.37 Lloyd speculates that one of the reasons Clouzot has partly been forgotten in the French canonisation is his lack of self-justification, something that the French New Wave film-makers were active in, with their close bonds to the intelligentsia.38 In the United States, the film was seen as anti-American and anti-capitalist and therefore censored,

32 Lloyd, 2. 33 Ibid., 3. 34 Ibid., 1. 35 Ibid., 7. 36 Ibid., 25-26. 37 Ibid., 19-21. 38 Ibid., 11.

Helgesson Ralevic and even the censored version was heavily criticised.39 Upon its uncensored re-release in 1991, it was attacked for being pan-European and openly racist.40

2.1.3. Genre and Style Clouzot’s films often express pessimism and depict a bleak, enclosed world in which characters are betrayed or killed in the end. To characterise his style is not easy – some simply understand it as classical French cinema prior to the French New Wave, others emphasise the noir element.41 He is conventional in some senses, but in a film like The Wages of Fear, he toys with genre and expectations. Genres and styles that are at play include film noir, neo- realism, adventure film and ethnographic film.

Film noir is not a genre per se, but a retrospective characterisation of a wave of American detective films from the 1940s and 50s, with common themes, moods and motifs.42 Generally, the films are set in an urban environment (often Los Angeles), shot in black and white with chiaroscuro lightning, dealing with themes such as corruption, violence and cheating with a sense of cynicism and moral decay.43 The universe is a godless one, expressing “a grim view of human existence.”44 Robert Porfirio asserts that this strain of existentialism was especially prevalent in France, which is perhaps why film noir was appreciated by French critics, who also gave the cultural phenomenon its name.45 The genre was later adopted by European filmmakers, and Ginette Vincendeau brands Clouzot’s film as post-war social noir.46 It might also be of interest to note that many scholars identify German expressionism as a source of inspiration for film noir, since Clouzot started his career in Germany.47 In a 2017 article in New Statesman, author Douglas Kennedy finds that film noir can be a tool in understanding and scrutinising contemporary topics – his examples is the rise of Donald Trump – noting that “American directors were […] beginning to explore the country’s shadowy morality with film

39 Robin Buss, French Film Noir (London: Boyars, 1994), 18. 40 Lloyd, 20. 41 Lloyd, 11-12. 42 I will, however, refer to the group of films as a genre in this thesis for practical reasons, as it is often done. 43 Buss, 7-8. 44 Ibid., 20 45 Robert Porfirio, “Foreword”, in Philosophy of Film Noir, ed. Mark T. Conrad (Lexington, Kentucky: University Press of Kentucky, 2006), ix. 46 Ginette Vincendeau, “French Film Noir”, in European Film Noir, ed. Andrew Spicer (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007), 50. 47 Jason Holt, “A Darker Side: Realism in Neo-Noir”, in Philosophy of Film Noir, ed. Mark T. Conrad (Lexington, Kentucky: University Press of Kentucky, 2006), 24.

Helgesson Ralevic noir”,48 and that these themes are actualised once again. In a similar fashion, I will look at the way the film relocates film noir and why the genre can be so intriguing as a way to approach a fossil fuel discourse.

It is likewise interesting to look at the way the film uses ethnographic conventions to establish the context in the first part of the film. Ethnography is a method for conducting social research by observing and attempting to understand behaviour and social norms in different cultures. It existed before the advent of film, but new possibilities for recording and observing opened with the new medium. Karl Heider refuses any absolute definition in his introductory book Ethnographic Film but describes several common features to this body of films. One is holism, that is to say looking at a context as a whole by not focusing on one individual or aspect, but an attempt to observe and document behaviour in a larger environment.49 An implication of this is frequent use of full shots. Close-ups are generally used modestly, as well as voice-over narration and non-diegetic music.50

Ethnographic film has historically functioned as a means to legitimise colonial rule. With a Eurocentric worldview, non-western cultures have been exoticised and made to look primitive and backwards. Through narrative and cinematographic choices, the colonised has been turned into an Other by a colonial gaze. Speech was seldom translated. Common tropes to these representations are animalisation, or naturalisation; meaning processes by which the colonised is associated with nature and the animal world; as well as sexualisation, or portraying the colonised as childish and irrational.51 “The Ethnographic is without intellect: he or she is best represented as merely existing”,52 Fatimah Tobing Rony observes in an article about Nanook of the North (Robert Flaherty, 1922), which reinforces the notion of the Other as passive and in need of rule.

Closeness to nature is seen as a proof of the primitiveness or backwardness of the colonised. But as Catherine Russell points out: “The primitive Other comes to represent the childhood of civilization only within a modernist historiography of progress.”53 Agreed upon by followers

48 Douglas Kennedy, “How Film Noir Explains Trump”, New Statesman, 03-09 11, 2017, accessed 15 05, 2020, 44, https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/film/2017/11/how-film-noir-explains-donald-trump. 49 Karl G. Heider, Ethnographic Film, Revised Edition (Austin, Texas: University of Texas Press, 2006), 5-6. 50 Ibid., 78-80. 51 Robert Shohat and Ella Stam, Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media, 2nd edition (London and New York: Routledge, 2014), 137-138. 52 Fatimah Tobing Rony, The Third Eye: Race, Cinema, and Ethnographic Spectacle (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1996), 104. 53 Catherine Russell, Experimental Ethnography: The Work of Film in the Age of the Video (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1999), 5.

Helgesson Ralevic of critical theory such as ecofeminism and post-colonialism, systems of dominations should be dissolved by critical interrogation of a world order built on binaries (mind/body, nature/culture, west/east etc.) that works to sustain a Eurocentric, patriarchal system of power. They generally agree upon a revisionist history in which the Western idea of linear progress is questioned: “Eurocentric discourse projects a linear historical trajectory leading from classical Greece […] to imperial Rome and then to the metropolitan capitals of Europe and the US,”54 writes post-colonial theorists Robert Stam and Ella Shohat. The interesting question is how the medium of film helps sustain that same world order and what its possibilities of questioning it are; a question mirrored in the larger question of the thesis, namely how the fossil fuel discourse is negotiated through the film.

2.2. Cinema and Oil In order to establish what is meant by a fossil fuel discourse, it is necessary to historicise oil as energy regime. By energy regime, I refer to the way a certain energy resource relies on, and has implications for political, economic, cultural and social structures beyond the pure technological.55 Oil is made from pressurised carbon stock, hidden underground for millions of years, dead in its very essence and at once the stuff that makes things come alive.56 Though there are historical records of crude oil going as far back as 1200 BC, the modern exploration of oil that birthed modern life as we know it dates back to the middle of the 19th century, and an oil refinery in Pennsylvania in 1859.57 Early crude oil was refined into kerosene and used for lamps – convenient since the whale oil stock used before started to grow thin – but soon found new functions in the automobile industry, as well as in plenty other products as oil steadily worked its way into our everyday life.58

The oil business typically follows a boom and bust-pattern because of the fluctuating supply. When oil is discovered somewhere, boomtowns emerge. These suffer as the oil runs out and the company moves to another site of prospect. In countries outside the United States, camps

54 Shohat and Stam, 2. 55 Bruce Podobnik, “Toward a Sustainable Energy Regime: A Long-Wave Interpretation of Global Energy Shifts”, Technological Forecasting and Social Change: An International Journal 62 (1999), 155. 56 Cara Daggett, “Petro-Masculinity: Fossil Fuels and Authoritarian Desires”, Millennium: Journal of International Studies 47, no. 1 (2018), 36. 57 Brian C Black, Crude Reality: Petroleum in World History (Plymouth: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2012), 23-28. 58 Frederick Buell, “A Short History of Oil Cultures: Or, the Marriage of Catastrophe and Exuberance”, Journal of American Studies 46, no. 2 (2012), 290.

Helgesson Ralevic were often set up where oil was found, segregating workers by nationality with different living standards in the different parts of the camp.59 In the early days, local workers were often refused any real wages since the oil companies made deals with the state.60 Later records from Mexico that Black bring up show how workers were attracted to the industry through festivities, got real wages, but later chose to leave the business because of the harsh working conditions.61 The business structure of oil extraction benefitted from the economic structure of colonialism in the exploitation of third world countries, and to trace the history of oil is also to recognise how globalised capitalism stepped in the shoes of former colonial geopolitical power structures.

The industry soon transformed into an oligopolist, vertically structured mega-industry, ruthlessly overrunning any competitors, with Standard Oil and John D. Rockefeller in the lead.62 The reasons for this development of the business structure are manifold: one being the streamlined product, meaning that variation and specialisation could not sustain small businesses as it would with other lines of products; another being the huge investment required in building pipelines to transport the crude, favouring large-scale infrastructure.63 Furthermore, Western oilmen soon recognised the power of oil and set out to dominate the global market. The oil business helped create a global market and mastered the same.64 This required a “change of mindset”, in the words of Brian Black, if they were to succeed in making deals with foreign states and setting up production in foreign lands.65 Energy historians have pointed out that this ability to master a global market was one of the determining factors behind oil’s domination over coal.66

One way to approach the concept of an energy regime is to look at what kind of narrative it fosters. The narrative of coal, the dominant energy regime before oil, is one of back-bending, dirty labour in dark mines. As an industry, coal mines required large workforces, and united in their number, these workforces had a potential strike power.67 The oil industry, in contrast, required fewer workers and was therefore less vulnerable to strikes. As states became more and more dependent on oil for their military (among other things) in the 20th century, this

59 Black, 85. 60 Ibid., 53. 61 Ibid., 84. 62 Ibid., 46-47. 63 Podobnik, 160. 64 Ibid., 161. 65 Black, 70. 66 Podobnik, 161. 67 Scranton, 57-59.

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“stability” was seen as an advantage in comparison to coal.68 Oil also required less physical labour. Where coalminers had to go underground to work, the oilman waited for the oil to come pouring up.69 Frederick Buell argues that part of the narrative surrounding oil is an envisioning of individual opportunity, playing well into the American myth of the self-made man. The “rule of the jungle”-custom that characterises oil business, and that stipulates that any oil found simply belongs to the first lucky person who finds it, both foreshadows foul play and corruption, as well as an appealing prospect of accessible wealth to the ordinary man.70 This myth is perhaps best personified in James Stewart’s oil man Steve Martin in the film Thunder Bay, where he plays a speculator who strikes gold on the coast of a Louisianan community dependent on fishing. His “modern” manliness is countered by the manliness of the local fishers, roughened by hard physical labour. The line of conflict lies in the villagers’ hostility towards the newly established industry, but this is neatly resolved as it turns out that Martin’s oil business helps boosting the fishing industry in their search for “the golden shrimp”.71

One way to approach the social implications of oil as energy regime is through the concept “petro-masculinity”, introduced by Cara Daggett. Daggett makes the case that oil culture is organised around a gendered logic that carries social meaning and helps sustain a white patriarchal order. In her article, she mainly focuses on the rise of authoritarian far-right groups in the United States today and suggests that their upswing partly can be ascribed to the threat posed to petroleum culture by environmentalists and ecomodernists. Challenging fossil fuels becomes a questioning of white patriarchy. Her argument can favourably be applied not only to our contemporary context in which fossil fuels are becoming more and more questioned, but to the era of petroleum hegemony, since it effectively demonstrates the historical ties to white patriarchal rule and a colonial history. Daggett explains:

To describe fossil violence as misogynistic is not to claim that gendered norms offer a totalising explanation for fossil fuel consumption and the authoritarianism it underwrites. Instead, it is to recognise that gendered identities have something to do with the pleasures of fossil fuel life, and quite a lot to do with the more extreme versions of fossil authoritarianism. Fossil fuel extraction

68 Podobnik, 161. 69 Frederick Buell, 281. 70 Black, 40-41, 88. 71 Murray and Heumann, Film and Everyday Eco-Disasters, 170-171.

Helgesson Ralevic

and consumption can function as a performance of masculinity, even as it also serves the interests of fossil capitalism.72

To read the performance of masculinity in terms of energy the way Daggett does seems apt to apply on The Wages of Fear, a film mainly including men that explores the nature of their masculinity in critical situations. Daggett’s line of reasoning is to be understood as part of an ecofeminist discourse. The reason I believe this is important to bring up is because of it how it highlights the multiple exploitations involved in The Wages of Fear – exploitation of nature, labour and third world countries, as well as exploitation of women, and how they are interrelated within the energy regime of oil. This is reflected both in the subject matter of The Wages of Fear and in the film itself: apart from exploiting nature through the production, the ethnographic style of the first part of the film opens up towards an exploitative film history whereby film and the gaze it enables is understood as an extension of colonialism. Petro- masculinity also helps conceptualise the specific forms of masculinity that are expressed in petro-fiction, and how the gold-striking, urban investor comes to represent a new masculine ideal in place of the stooped worker, as in the case of Thunder Bay. The analysis of The Wages of Fear will show how and if the representation of masculinity resonates with a broader narrative of petro-masculinity.

However, oil and film were partners in crime long before the Great Acceleration. Oil Wells of Baku: Close View is a 30 second Lumière film that was shot and distributed in 1896, one year after the birth of cinema. The film simply shows a giant fire at an oil field. The oil field is situated in Baku, which in 1896 belonged to Russia but was something of a waterhole to foreign investors, most prominently the Swedish Nobel family and the French Rothschild family, competing with the United States as the largest producer of crude oil. As with a lot of early cinema, spectacular motifs were in demand, preferably in “exotic” places, why Tom Gunning famously labelled early cinema “cinema of attractions”.73 The fire in the Lumière short is surely dramatic: huge flames lick a sky blackened by smoke. A figure walks past the camera, indicating just how enormous the fire is. In dissecting the film, Robin Murray and Joseph Heumann argue against a claim made by the French filmmaker and critic Bertrand Tavernier that the film is the first ever ecological film. This, they argue, presupposes an

72 Daggett, 43-44. 73 Tom Gunning, “The Cinema of Attractions: Early Film, Its Spectator and the Avant-Garde”, in Critical Visions in Film Theory: Classic and Contemporary Readings, ed. Timothy Corrigan, Patricia White and Meta Mazaj (Boston, New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2011), 71.

Helgesson Ralevic ecocritical reading of the film, which risks becoming ahistorical. To viewers today, the film might read as an exposition of human destruction of nature and the danger of oil (the danger of the extraction itself and the long-term danger of a petroleum induced lifestyle), but to viewers in 1896, the film supposedly carried a different meaning. Murray and Heumann argue that the presence of the human figure, walking calmly in front of the fire, indicates that the film transforms eco-disaster into spectacle. Panic, or grief over lost nature was arguably not the anticipated response, but awe, much because of the human figure, signalling business as usual, but also a general sense of wonder at the technological possibility of depicting such a scene.74 It is also worth noting that the word “fire” is not in the title of the film, further indicating that an event such as this one was to be expected in the business.

“When do burning oil wells move beyond spectacle to gain the status of ecological disaster, and when do the costs begin to include not only money and human lives, but also nature?”75 Murray and Heumann ask rhetorically. To suggest that Oil Wells of Baku is ecological is to indicate that a concern for nature is communicated. But disaster counts in economic terms in this historical context; smoke signals the prospect of profit. Fires at oil wells had an ambiguity to them: they were without a doubt dramatic events, but were often caused by enormous oil gushers, allowing large amounts of crude oil to be collected. Documents from the time show how businessmen’s sole concern regarding oil was that it might ruin their garment.76 Pollution was not seen as any major concern, neither for humans nor nature.

To label the film “ecological” without further ado is therefore ahistorical; however, reading the film from an ecocritical perspective, pointing out what a contemporary discourse brings out in a historical document, is a legitimate approach, and one that I will use. After all, the extraction and burning of oil was de facto dangerous and disastrous also in 1896, even though it was not generally known or perceived that way. I find it reasonable both to interpret the film ecocritically as a document revealing the breakdown of nature in the name of oil whatever the purpose was in 1896, and equally important to historicise the film and understand how and what it communicated to a contemporary audience.

In her exploration of our “ultradeep” relation with oil, Stephanie LeMenager highlights the “charisma of energy”, as she calls it.77 Oil has a cultural and aesthetic appeal, not just in the

74 Robin L Murray and Joseph K Heumann, “The First Eco-Disaster Film?”, Film Quarterly 59, no. 3 (spring 2006), 45. 75 Ibid., 45. 76 Ibid., 46. 77 LeMenager, 2.

Helgesson Ralevic lifestyle it enables, but in the narratives it fosters, making it even more difficult for us as a civilisation to de-attach ourselves from it. Frederick Buell is also occupied with the grand scale of oil when he states that “oil is haunted by catastrophe.”78 He argues that exuberance is inherent in oil culture, reflected in the extraction as well as in consumer culture, and that exuberance and catastrophe are closely linked. Exuberance in relation to extraction partly mirrors the boom and bust-nature of oil business. The nature of oil business incorporates gushers, fires and oil spills. Exuberance in consumer culture “is no longer just surplus energy creating optimism, and its catastrophe is not hapless dependency on what is running out. Exuberance and catastrophe materialised as historically specific forms of capitalist triumph and oppression, of environmental domination and destruction, and of human liberation and psychic and bodily oppression,”79 he asserts. This is a point I want to stress. Just like oil is haunted by catastrophe, catastrophic imagery seems to be inherent in oil films. As Daggett argues: “Fossil-fuelled life had always been violent, but much effort has been expended to make the suffering subterranean, and to render it as invisible as possible to privilege American consumers”.80 Petro-fiction can be a helpful tool in revealing this violence.

Through his concept slow violence, Rob Nixon is also occupied with exposing the violence of climate breakdown. Nixon’s main point is that environmental destruction in various forms has long-lasting and slow acting consequences that are unequally distributed across the globe and that are largely ignored on a policy level because of their status as unattractive and unspectacular. Examples include toxic drift, acidifying oceans, and deforestation. To be blamed for this ignorance is a media logic that rewards spectacular images: “[h]ow can we convert into image and narrative the disasters that are slow moving and long lasting in the making, disasters that are anonymous and star nobody, disasters that are attritional and of indifferent interest to the sensation-driven technologies of our image-world?”81 Nixon comes from literature studies and focuses mainly on the potential for activist literature to represent slow violence, but his critique of the spectacular image certainly relates to this discussion of catastrophic imagery in oil films, sharing similarities with Murray and Heumann’s distinction between eco-disaster and spectacle.

78 Frederick Buell, 276. 79 Ibid., 280. 80 Daggett, 42. 81 Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2011), 3.

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Nixon’s assumption that entertainment culture is occupied with large-scale, sensational events is confirmed in Hunter Vaughan‘s book Hollywood’s Dirtiest Secrets. Stressing the materiality of film business, Vaughan is interested in scrutinising “[…] the sociocultural contract whereby we collectively agree to convert material reality into destruction spectacle”.82 In one chapter, he traces entertainment industry’s historical fascination with fire and finds that fire was in popular demand before cinema in the form of amusement parks and vaudeville acts. Vaughan regards movie business as a kind of metaphorical fire, in the sense that worlds are built and destroyed for the sake of spectacle, but also that fire in the physical sense has stimulated and attracted audiences from the very early days.83 Fire often becomes a symbol of industrialisation and electricity. Also interested in this cultural fascination with fire, and more specifically explosions, film critic Kevin B Lee analyses eight top-grossing blockbusters from 1977-2014 in an entertaining article in the Times. He counts and schematises fire in the form of explosions, differentiating between “dramatic” and “decorative” explosions. Dramatic explosions “have a significant narrative or emotional impact” whereas decorative explosions can be seen as “fireball wallpaper”, he assesses. Apart from accounting for an impressive number of explosions in all of the films, and some in particular, more significant still is the nature of the explosions: a large majority of them count as decorative.84 This seems to testify to a continued, and amplified, sociocultural demand in fire as spectacle.

Whereas Murray and Heumann differentiate between catastrophe as eco-disaster and as spectacle; Lee constructs a similar scale, where he looks to see if the catastrophe (the explosion) is dramatic or decorative. The scales are not interchangeable however, and Lee’s scheme is difficult to translate into early examples like the Lumière film. One of the criteria for a “decorative explosion” is that it is an “explosion without narrative impact”, but the fire is a dramatic visual spectacle in the Lumière case, partly because there is no narrative. The spectacle lies in its dramatic effect. What I believe his article does testify to is a development in the evolution of spectacle, not least considering the commercial logic of entertainment industry, feeding upon a public demand in continuously renewed or augmented forms of entertainment. To add to this discussion therefore, I suggest that an additional component is to

82 Nixon, 26. 83 Hunter Vaughan, Hollywood’s Dirtiest Secrets: The Hidden Environmental Costs of the Movies (New York: Colombia University Press, 2019), 26. 84 Kevin B Lee, “Kaboom!”, The New York Times 02 05, 2014, accessed 27 03, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/05/04/movies/summer-movie-explosions.html

Helgesson Ralevic be taken into account: not only if the catastrophic event has dramatic effect, but whether or not its presence is mainly motivated by concern or by its visual appeal, which will totally depend on the genre and intention of the film.

2.3. Cinema and the Automobile In a study of the intersection of film, fossil fuels and climate breakdown, 1895 turns out to be a year of heavy symbolical value. Swedish scientist Svante Arrhenius described the greenhouse effect for the first time this year; the same year as a certain Lumière film was screened in Paris, generally known as the birth of cinema. Moreover, in another part of the same city, the automobile industry took a great leap forward in its development. With the Paris-Bordeaux-Paris trail, the first motor race took place, and Black notes that the race “presented a host of great possibilities growing out of the international quest to provide humans with powered transportation that required no animals. Petroleum actively vied for its future […]”.85 Paris was in other words not just the epicentre of cinematic development in the 1890s, but also of automobile invention. As cinema and the automobile accelerated towards a bright future side by side, it is perhaps not strange that their interconnectedness is something of a love story: both being representants of modern life, both about movement. There is an ontological similarity here as well: just like the fuel of oil is dead in its essence, but at once the stuff that makes “things come alive” (movement to the car), cinema has a ghost like quality in brining life (movement) to images that are in fact stills.

Automobility, the adjective describing the function of the car, awake associations to autonomy and mobility, underscoring the concept of an autonomous transporting vehicle that enables the passenger to travel from one place to another. In the United States particularly, it became an important symbol of consumer power and individual opportunity. In the post-war era also known as the Great Acceleration, suburbia and a new American lifestyle took form, and soldiers who came back started up suburban family life, giving the car an even more vital role in every-day life.86 Murray and Heumann argue that the 1950s therefore represents a golden age of films representing car culture.87 The car speeding down a highway can be read

85 Black, 99. 86 Robin L Murray and Joseph K Heumann, “Fast, Furious and Out of Control: The Erasure of Natural Landscape in Car Culture Films”, in Framing the World: Explorations in Ecocriticism and Film, ed. Paula Willoquet-Maricondi (Charlottesville, Indiana: University of Virginia Press, 2010), 158. 87 Murray and Heumann, “Fast, Furious and Out of Control: The Erasure of Natural Landscape in Car Culture Films”, 159.

Helgesson Ralevic as both a flexing of muscles, even as a celebration of winning the war, and closely related; as a symbol of progress towards a bright future.88 They add that even though the general emotion circulating was victorious, the car also gave the drivers a possibility to release themselves of trauma or pressure from suburban family life. Driving can in this sense be seen as “challenging both nature and nurture”,89 in the words of Kris Lackey, cited by Mark Osteen who points out both the rebelliousness associated with driving, as well as the car as a space for self-fulfilment.90

In their study on the development of the Fast and the Furious films, Murray and Heumann find that although the representational politics of the films have been somewhat updated in the 60 year time span that marks the first film from the most recent, they continually glamorise “abuse of nature and ecosystems” through situating man and man-made landscape above nature. The car signals power, youth, rebellion and sex, and the way the films are narrated draws the spectator’s attention away from the conditions sustaining car culture and at what expenses it is sustained.91 Murray and Heumann add that “[t]he automobile creates a symbolic space in which dreams of freedom and conquering frontiers can be kept alive”92, even though there are no geographical frontiers to conquer in the physical sense. Underlying all this is a sense of the car as extension of the body. Osteen notes that one way this is expressed is in the common underemphasis of the mechanics of the cars.93 Murray and Heumann’s perspective is of course American, but considering Hollywood and America’s cultural market dominance in the 1950s, it is not irrelevant to bring up their mapping of the more general iconography of the car, especially in looking at the way Clouzot negotiates this symbolism.

Another perspective on the iconography of the car comes from film noir. In noir, the car often stands in as an alternative home for the lonesome man with a mobile identity, a space that can be accessed any time of the day, which is important to a genre that is often played out in night time. But as a mobile space, the car often becomes an amoral space in which the foundations of society are rearranged or negotiated.94 Especially prevalent in noir films involving hitchhikers, the genre comes to challenge the general connotations of the car, such as those

88 Mark Osteen, “Noir’s Cars: Automobility and Amoral Space in American Film Noir”, Journal of Popular Film and Television 35, no. 4 (Winter 2008), 184. 89 Kris Lackey, RoadFrames: The American Highway Narrative (Lincoln: University of Texas Press, 1997), 12. 90 Osteen, “Noir’s Cars: Automobility and Amoral Space in American Film Noir”, 184. 91 Murray and Heumann, “Fast, Furious and Out of Control: The Erasure of Natural Landscape in Car Culture Films”, 167. 92 Ibid., 158. 93 Osteen, “Noir’s Cars: Automobility and Amoral Space in American Film Noir”, 184. 94 Ibid., 184.

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Murray and Heumann discuss. As a person who does not own a car, the hitchhiker challenges the “aura of ownership by embodying risk”,95 refusing to live by the American mantra of social mobility, instead latching on to someone more well off. In a film such as Ida Lupino’s The Hitch-Hiker (1953)96, a psychopath invades the private sphere of the car belonging to two men on their way to Mexico, and making the potential isolation of the space a threat, turning it into a “false safe place”.97 Osteen concludes that “noir’s cars seem to speed us toward liberation, with a promise of automobility and convertibility; instead, they inevitably crash into roadblocks”.98 Noir thus transforms the car into a potential death machine rather than a space of invincibility.

Important to point out is that the men in The Wages of Fear does not actually travel by car but by truck (although small trucks, admittedly). The difference might seem subtle, but the two vehicles carry somewhat different meanings: the car being a symbol of consumption and the truck a symbol of production. Both differences and similarities between these two transportation vehicles will be pointed out in the analysis.

This concept of forward movement invites a historiographic perspective. The history philosopher Koselleck theorises historical times and temporalities, arguing that there is no such thing as one historical time; there are multiple. In order to grasp one particular historical time, he coins the categories “space of experience” and “horizon of expectation” and argues that it is in the asymmetrical intersection of these that a particular historical time is constituted. Before early modernity, which is the focus of his research, the difference between these two categories was small: generation after generation lived similar lives, and the sum of experience shaped the horizon of expectation. In early modernity (Koselleck is concerned with the period from 1700 to 1900 in Europe), something happened: major changes in society took form partly as a result of the industrial revolution, and development started to accelerate. As a result, the gap between the space of experience and the horizon of expectation started to widen.99 “The future in modernity is characterised by two factors: partly by the accelerated

95 Osteen, “Noir’s Cars: Automobility and Amoral Space in American Film Noir”, 185 96 Osteen discusses The Hitch-Hiker as a film noir in his text, although I would like to add that the film is arguably not a typical film noir. Part of the reason for this is that it takes places in a barren landscapes and not the city. 97 Ibid., 189-191. 98 Ibid., 191. 99 Reinhart Koselleck, Erfarenhet, tid och historia: om historiska tiders semantik, trans. Joachim Retzlaff (Göteborg: Bokförlaget Daidalos, 2004), 170-177.

Helgesson Ralevic speed by which it approaches, partly of its character as unknown.”100 As the name the Great Acceleration suggests, this acceleration continued and reached new heights in the middle of the 20th century (in the western world). This is one of the reasons that The Wages of Fear is such an interesting case, and why I believe it fruitful to make the historical time visible. What the cultural critique of the film consists of will be further explored in the analysis, but in quite a literal sense the film exposes oil as dead end. The play with speed in the film also challenges the connotation of the car as a vehicle that accelerates towards the future.

100 Koselleck, 48. My translation from Swedish. ”Framstegets framtid kännetecknas av två moment: dels av den accelererade hastighet med vilken den nalkas, dels av sin karaktär av att vara okänd.”

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Chapter 3. Situating Oil in The Wages of Fear: An Ecocritical Analysis

Less than five minutes into The Wages of Fear five languages have been spoken: German, Italian, Spanish, English and French. French then becomes the dominant language. Story-wise this is motivated by the fact that the main characters are teamed up in pairs, one pair being French, and the other of different nationalities (Dutch and Italian), testifying to a time in history when French and not English was the lingua franca. German and Italian are only spoken a couple of times, whereas English is the language of the oil company and Spanish the language of the locals, and therefore heard in several scenes. The film is co-financed by an Italian production company, and in return, Clouzot cast the French-Italian Yves Montand as his lead, and made one of the drivers, Luigi, an Italian man. The multilingualism of the film is one of its defining features.

Film industry has been an international business since its early days, something Clouzot’s own career bears witness to. In The Wages of Fear he visualises a particular, globalised community that would not have existed had it not been for the infrastructure of oil. As such, I believe this film tells us something significant and somewhat overlooked about the entwined nature of the film and the oil industry. Not only is the story about international oil business, the film itself is a product of a global economy, not just in the practical sense that the crew has to be transported and that the film was distributed across the globe, but also through the very post-war ideology of co-operation, competition, trade and communication between nations for economic and cultural gain. Of particular importance for my analysis, the film can be seen as a product of cultural exchange in how it combines and plays around with different generic elements. Film noir is an American genre, but as the name suggests, defined as such by French critics, and ethnographic film is dependent in its very mission upon travel and cultural exchange (from a colonial point of view). One could therefore argue that the global economy fuelled by oil and dominated by Western powers conditioned the film’s very existence, part of that being its multilingualism and transnational production.

The following analysis chapter will be divided into three sub chapters. In the first section, I will consider questions of genre; more specifically how ethnographic film, melodrama and

Helgesson Ralevic film noir perform different functions in the narrative, and the way these inform mood, pathos, and acting style. I explore how these different narrative and aesthetic traditions relate to the theme of oil. In the second part, the discussion on film noir partly continues in an analysis of the transportation motif. This motif partly sheds light on representations of masculinity as well as providing a gate way into a historiographic perspective, which is key in understanding the cultural critique of the film. Lastly, in the third part I attempt to demonstrate how The Wages of Fear relates to a larger tradition of catastrophic imagery in relation to oil and how catastrophe is represented neither as spectacle nor eco-disaster, but as something in between.

3.1. Genre Fusion: Ethnographic Film, Melodrama and Film Noir As has just been stated; in this part of the analysis the original blend of culturally exchanged genres and styles of The Wages of Fear is examined, in order to establish what function they fill and how they can be related to the theme of oil.

The first part of the film is about the town of Las Piedras and its inhabitants. This is where the film aims to present a culturally specific context that is used as backdrop to the establishment of the narrative. To invoke authenticity and to situate the story in a site-specific and cultural context, an ethnographic approach is implied in the mixing of amateur actors with well- known stars like Yves Montand. As in a lot of ethnographic film, life is depicted as “primitive”, and although the word “primitive” is a little condescending, it is plausible to assume that it describes what Clouzot wanted to communicate to an audience, and what ethnographic film historically has intended to communicate. This is done through the usage of different visual cues and stylistic conventions. The opening sequences seems to depict life before modernisation, automatisation and electrification, and the locals are seen engaging in different kinds of physical labour like washing clothes, weaving and pulling around market stalls on wheels. In the opening scene, a small, naked boy torments a couple of cockroaches tied together with thread.101 It is commonly read as a prevision of the hellish journey to come for the drivers who will be trapped and tormented.102 Moreover, with the cockroaches being a symbol of non-human nature, the tormenting can arguably be read as a metaphor for human intervention with the same; a theme that is clearly present throughout the film. The

101 00:01:55-00:02:10 102 Lloyd, 98.

Helgesson Ralevic primitiveness is in this scene conveyed through several details. First of all, the boy is half- naked and wears no shoes, and secondly, he plays with a stick and insects. A common trope in ethnographic film is that nakedness is treated much more casually when it comes to colonial subjects than it would with Western subjects, which explains the boy’s lack of clothes. This is further reinforced in a later scene in which a local woman is seen showering in the background as Mario and Jo engage in conversation. Other common tropes in the ethnographic film is animalisation and naturalisation, as stated by Shohat and Stam. In one scene three local women sit on the floor, laughing and eating with their hands, whereby Mario comments “Have you seen that kind?” and Jo replies “Fell right out of the coconut tree”.103 The racist connotation to monkeys is a clear example of animalisation. Besides this instance however, I would argue that the locals are more commonly subject to naturalisation through the use of animals; they are depicted as closer to the animal world than the vagabonds (but “are” not animals themselves). Even though the boy in the opening scene torments the cockroaches, he nonetheless interacts with them. In the panning of the town we see birds, piglets, dogs and donkeys. They are used by the inhabitants in different ways or walk freely among them. In the scene where Jo is first seen, descending from an aeroplane, another man is seen descending from the same plane with a goat in a rope.104 This scene has a comic tone to it that is echoed in another scene in which Jo’s taxi has to stop because of “traffic jam” – meaning a donkey that stands in the middle of the road and refuses to move.105 These instances of entanglement between man and animal are contrasted with the first line spoken in the film. A vagabond sits on the veranda to the local bar, throwing rocks at a nearby dog. “I don’t like dogs”, he mutters, before he backs away, physically and symbolically distancing himself from the animal, and in extension, the non-human world.106 The action also entails something about the different ways the locals and the vagabonds occupy spaces. The vagabonds mainly sit on chairs at the veranda or the bar (and later in the car), whereas the locals to a larger extent sit on the ground, either indoors or outdoors. The simple fact that the boy wears no shoes in the opening scene can be read as a sign of his contact with the earth.

All these indications that the locals are in touch with the non-human world (more so than the vagabonds, at least) resonate with a presumption that closeness to nature is a sign of primitiveness and are informed by an ethnographic custom that aims to observe its subjects in

103 00:16:20 104 00:10:17 105 00:11:46 106 00:03:36

Helgesson Ralevic their natural environment. As Heider suggests, the ethnographic approach is and should be observational and holistic. Many of the establishing shots work in such a manner, without dwelling on individuals, rather catching the gestures and routines of everyday life. There is no voice-over nor any non-diegetic music, the soundscape is made up of natural sounds of village life and local music performed by the depicted locals or that is played at the bar. The locals mainly stay in the background, and melting into their environment, they stand in contrast to the vagabonds who are detached from the place with a desire to leave.

From the looks of it, SOC’s operation in Las Piedras is approaching the bust-stage of business, indicated in a scene where Mario points at a building and explains to Jo that construction started three years ago, but was never finished. This is probably also the reason why Mario, however much he despises the company, expresses a certain dependency upon it: “When the oil runs out, there is nothing”.107 This is telling of the vagabond’s relation to the space they occupy, and the space the film occupies. In her writings on black culture, academic and activist bell hooks notes how it so often becomes the “scenery for narratives that essentially focus on white people”108, and the same could be said about the way Las Piedras and its inhabitants are used as a backdrop to provide meaning and mood for a narrative of and about white patriarchy. When the oil company offers no vacant jobs, they have no reason to stay; the place is “nothing”.

Of course, The Wages of Fear is a drama and not an ethnographic film, but the introductory part of the story depicting life in Las Piedras clearly borrows from the conventions of representation and enactment in ethnographic cinema. Clouzot wanted to stage the authentic and culturally specific, and the traits and segments that I have described above do reverberate the stylistics of the ethnographic film. Seeing as Clouzot used various stylistic modes to tell his story, it is interesting to consider what happens in the convergence of the different genres or styles that are at play. Part of the genre blend crystallise in the contrast between the characters of Rosa and Linda. Rosa is a local woman who works at the bar. Her role is minor and she has no lines, but she has a name and is permitted a few reverse shots. She tells on Linda to the bar owner in one scene, and in another she is seen taking sides as a dispute erupts at the bar. There are no close-ups of Rosa, but a couple of medium close-ups (see figure 1). Her role is credited to Miss Darling, and IMDB informs us that her full (stage) name is Darling Légitimus, an actress and performer born in Martinique who moved to France at a

107 00:24:04 108 bell hooks, Black Looks: Race and Representation (New York and London: Routledge, 2015), 32.

Helgesson Ralevic young age.109 Linda also works at the bar and is infatuated with Mario. She is played by Vera Clouzot and is clearly supposed to fill the role of the beautiful female star. She is a local (white) woman, described by Mario as “half wildling”; heavily sexualised, naïve and childish. She is subject to violence (by Mario) and to rape (by the bar owner). It is suggested that she is a prostitute although it is never outspoken. Her acting style stands out to the rest of the cast; it has a melodramatic quality to it with large gestures, exaggerated expressions, and theatrical speech. In that sense, Linda is silly, annoying, and even an object of ridicule.

Different kinds of objectification are in other words forced upon the two women as a result of the different genre conventions that inform their roles. Whereas Rosa is Othered and becomes an anonymous minor character at the stage of a white man’s drama, she is not sexualised nor made fun of in the way that Linda is. With the realistic and low-key portrayal of Rosa, one could argue that Clouzot’s quest for authenticity liberates her from the burden of sexist objectification. In contrast to this naturalness comes the theatricality of Linda. Linda has a bigger role and has the privilege (debatable, but still) of being the beautiful female lead. Her role is permitted a larger variety of feelings and traits. Both women are exploited by white patriarchy, and interestingly for this analysis, both exploited partly in terms of nature. Whereas Rosa is subject to naturalisation in the way she is depicted as blending in with her environment in the ethnographic fashion, Linda is subject to animalisation in the first scene she appears in. Just minutes after the “I don’t like dogs”-line is uttered, Linda is seen scrubbing the floor of the bar sitting on all fours. Mario sees her, and the camera positions him above her in the picture. He makes a whistling sound, and she crawls to him on all fours, stroking her body towards his like a loyal dog.110 The parallel is not discreet. In ecofeminist terms, the depiction of Linda and Rosa testifies to the intersectional exploitation of women, racialised people and nature, and how they are mutually constituted.

The dichotomy between the locals and the vagabonds becomes less and less emphasised as we are introduced to the oil company SOC. The way the oil company is represented invites a somewhat different reading of the first hour of the film and the implications of the ethnographic style. As discussed above, a sense of primitiveness is conveyed in the opening images through different visual cues. However, I would like to claim that this is complicated

109 Darling Légitimus was part of the stage act “La Revue Négre”, sat model for Picasso and played in various plays and a couple of films. The casting of her opens to an interesting aspect in production history and its racial politics, and how it reflects colonial history. “Darling Légitimus”, Internet Movie Data Base, accessed 19 05, 2020, https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0529587/. 110 00:03:53-00:04:05

Helgesson Ralevic by the juxtaposing of certain symbols of modernity. In the opening images of daily life in Las Piedras, a motorcycle and a car owned by the SOC intersect the image. There is something about the car that is reminiscence of a tank that drives through a village in time of war, something that interrupts the daily life of the villages, hostile and arrogant, highlighting the imperial premises for the very presence of the company. More wheels are seen; wheelbarrows, bicycles and market stalls on wheels, apart from the car and the motorcycle, but rather than creating a “hierarchy of wheels” to further situate Las Piedras at the dawn of civilisation, the focus on wheels invites a scrutinising of such hierarchies. In the shape of the car that intersects the image, modernisation is represented as something forced upon the town from the outside, but without ever working to their advantage.

Although there is a social and racial hierarchy in the town, situating the white characters above the brown and black ones, the men over the women etc, the line is not clear cut. The vagabonds have a somewhat vague status as unemployed and unregistered, clearly expecting a certain respect because of their racial status but nonetheless being thrown out by the local bar owner when they cannot pay for their drinks. The line between the different stands of social hierarchy are blurred especially in the bar scenes where the ethnographic style meets noir/melodrama. Even though the general rule is that the vagabonds sit at the tables and the locals at the floor or outside the bar, there are several instances when people blend. The locals mainly sing themselves, whereas the vagabonds play music at a radio. Jo, however, does not like music and turns off the radio, causing a dispute to erupt in which the vagabonds start singing in protest and are backed up by the locals. In other words, music seems to be a unifying element among the locals and the vagabonds, and the dispute could in a somewhat strained analysis be read as a conflict over controlling culture. Music is an integral part in conveying the voice of the local in ethnographic film and has always been central to revolutionary causes. To silence the music as Jo does appears unsympathetic and authoritarian, making him the true imperialistic figure.

“Where there’s oil, they will always be,”111 Mario says about the Americans. O’Brien and the SOC are depicted as a mutual enemy for the locals and the vagabonds, although there is no united struggle, and although their situations differ. The company has an oligopolist structure and comes off as mean, ruthless and greedy, not afraid to use corrupt means to cover up the truth, silence witnesses and sacrifice workers in the name of profit. The depiction rings true of

111 00:22:03

Helgesson Ralevic the characteristics of oil labour in comparison to coal labour; the situation suggests that workers are powerless and easily exploited, as Black and others have illustrated through their research. It is suggested that there is a Union involved, but it is clearly not so powerful that it can prevent the company from finding loopholes to exploit workers. In Sorcerer, the “blame” has shifted. In this American version, the focus lies on the corrupt regime that co-operates with the company. In the opening images of the town of Porvenir (the equivalent of Las Piedras), this is effectively done through the juxtaposition of images of rural life with images of election posters.112 This perspective reflects another reality, namely the often shady agreements made between oil companies and nation states. It testifies to a tightening geopolitical battle as the former power dynamics start to shift somewhat after the 1950s, in which domestic oil production in the United States decreases and the Middle East becomes more independent.

This shift in blame is understandable from a marketing point of view seeing as The Wages of Fear was censored in the United States and heavily criticised as being anti-American (in America). This sentiment of anti-Americanism is partly established thorough the ethnographic style. One scene is particularly powerful; the one in which we learn about the accident for the first time. A local woman stands on something, preaching to a crowd. She is clearly enraged. “They came and said it would make us rich. No! We were worse off. Sending our sons to death! Yesterday there was a big catastrophe! It’s not fair. We’re always the ones who get to suffer. Always the ones who die.”113 Jo stumbles out to see what is going on, and asks rather patronising: “What’s going on? Are they starting a revolution?” 114 He is careless and ignorant of what the woman expresses (in contrast to Bimba, who stands listening), but I would not assume that the film is totally unconcerned with the tragedy that is played out. This woman is given a voice, and the spectator gets a brief insight to the perspective of the locals. In the original novel, much more time was spent on the accident itself and the perspective of the men who died, which Clouzot largely chose to overlook in his adaptation, but a short scene like this still provides the viewer with a widening perspective on the situation.115 Here, bell hooks’ observation that non-white cultures are mainly used as scenery does not quite apply. I would argue that this scene uses the objective of ethnography – understanding behaviour – to create pathos. The behaviour of the locals in this scene – gathering because of collective anger

112 00:24:14-00:25:00 113 00:35:03-00:35:23 114 00:35:45 115 Lloyd, 93.

Helgesson Ralevic and despair – seems highly legitimate. The locals are arguably not given a lot of time, but neither are they ridiculed or depicted as irrational or stupid. It seems then, that the style and methodology of the ethnographic film has been used in the first part of the film both to create a backdrop for a white man’s drama, but also to channel and express yet another perspective of the ruthless exploitation by oil companies. Thereby, the film actualises the two opposing political traditions within film history that were mentioned in the introduction: that of using the camera as a colonial tool to exploit and objectify, and that of an anti-colonial tool to drawing attention to imperial injustices.

By emphasising the corrupt nature of oil industry, film noir as mood setter is also foregrounded. This is demonstrated in several details, as well as in broader themes. As for the details, Mario embodies the hard-boiled noir man, indicated already in his first line: “We’re not asking for the story of your life”116 (as a reply to the man who mutters that he doesn’t like dogs). The fact that the film is shot in black and white is not irrelevant to mention, and in some shots, Clouzot play with lightning and contrast in a way typical in noir, as reflected in the various shots of characters seen through the shades of drapes, suggesting a murky persona (see figure 2). Adding on to that, there is, of course, the general mood of cynicism and fatalism. The setting stands out; while true film noir always takes place in the city (almost always in Los Angeles), Clouzot has relocated his story to a rural third world country. Nonetheless, he manages to turn the barren landscape into a space equally hostile and claustrophobic. The theme of entrapment, foreshadowed in the opening images of the cockroaches, is echoed in the landscape. Twice this dilemma draws Jo out of the car, as he tries to escape. Once he returns on his own will, the other time Mario forces him back. His desire to escape from the car is won over by his fear of the landscape and the nothingness it has to offer. He is technically free to leave (the first time at least), just like the vagabonds in Las Piedras are not kept there by force (“there is no fence”117) but nevertheless remain.

This way, the film uses the scenario to question the nature of free choice. In his book about film noir and the American dream, Osteen summarises four American ideals that film noir problematises: “self-creation, individualism, free choice and upward mobility.”118 It would seem like the four men do not, in fact, have much of a choice, something Jo’s inability to decide on staying or leaving testifies to. Their destiny is inescapable; they are indeed stuck in

116 00:03:38 117 00:20:28 118 Mark Osteen, Nightmare Alley: Film Noir and the American Dream (Baltimore, Maryland: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012), 1.

Helgesson Ralevic the truck. But is this pessimism caused by the situation as such or is it a metaphor for life itself? Steven Sanders suggests that the bleakness of the film noir universe can be derived to a certain view of life as meaningless, not just the particular situation that a certain character finds him- or herself in.119 I would argue that the film can be read both ways. There is definitely a cynicism that informs the general atmosphere of the film and that explains its otherwise meaningless misogyny, as well as Jo’s last line before he dies (“there is nothing”120). But the blame for the hellish situation the drivers find themselves in is clearly put on a certain exploitative, capitalist system, in the form of a ruthless oil company. The fact that it is an oil company does matter. Part of this comes from its mere size and power, allowing it to stand above the law and offer human lives in the name of profit. It is also significant that the labour situation is much more individualised in comparison to the labour situation within the energy regime of coal, or factory work for that matter, in which the workers could unite and therefore achieve a certain degree of influence, reflecting the energy historical conditions for fighting the power. The four men are in that sense alone, and pulled in by their desire for individual gain. But the oil industry and oil culture also involves a certain degree of violence and catastrophe, something I will explore more in the next part of the analysis. Suffice it to say that these factors add up to a cultural critique of the oil industry and oil culture as such, moving beyond a general life fatigue.

Film noir becomes a platform on which to approach societal issues like corruption and injustice today as well as of the 1950s. Just like Douglas Kennedy finds in his text about film noir and Trump, I find that film noir answers to themes and moods regarding climate breakdown today. It is not an aesthetic form that provides any (easy) solutions, perhaps not even hope; it does, however, channel a sense of being powerless and recognises the powers sustaining it.

3.2. Men in Trucks In this part of the analysis, I return in part to the discussion on film noir through a focus on the transportation motif. By doing this, the performance of masculinity will be interrogated

119 Steven Sanders, “Film Noir and the Meaning of Life”, in Philosophy of Film Noir, ed. Mark T. Conrad (Lexington, Kentucky: University Press of Kentucky, 2006), 93. 120 02:13:50

Helgesson Ralevic through the concept of petro-masculinity and, lastly, it will be demonstrated how the play with acceleration invites a historiographic reading that embeds a cultural critique.

The Wages of Fear is totally dependent on the truck as vehicle of action and carrier of meaning. It is also aesthetically decisive. The second part of the film largely consists of medium close ups of the two pairs of drivers, as well as close-ups in the most intense situations. This emphasises that the truck is an enclosed space, and the truck window becomes frame through which they see the world. As discussed in the previous part of the analysis, the car can be seen as a symbol of aggressive modernity in the introductory bit of the film. It also holds a position as status marker, however, and explicitly so in the scene in which Jo and Mario meet for the first time and Mario suggests that they take the town taxi the few metres to the bar, “in order to make a good impression” on the bar man.121 Apart from that instance, the truck is very much a transportation vehicle. When the oil company decides on having the nitroglycerine transported, they point out that the trucks are not of top quality, why it is of ever more importance that the drivers are experienced. Mario, Bimba and Luigi all pass the drivers’ test. Jo, however, made a deal he made with O’Brien that stated he could step in in case of absence, and assumedly killed or in another way got rid of a man named Smirloff who was supposed to fill the fourth spot.

True, the truck carries a promise of freedom, as a window of opportunity that might be the only way out of Las Piedras and back home. But that is about how much the iconography rhymes with cultural values like those Murray and Heumann bring up (freedom, autonomy, rebellion). The film rather inverts such concepts. As symbols of production, the trucks are not the property of the four men (in that aspect resembling the hitchhiker narratives that Osteen discusses) and therefore not a sign of consumer power. The situation – having to drive a lethal carriage for a mean and corrupt corporation – makes the driving neither particularly mobile nor autonomous. Instead, the truck is a potential death machine in this scenario, a prison for the drivers, and as such the opposite of a the “space of invincibility”. If anything, the film seems to mock such an illusion, particularly through Mario’s death scene, in which Mario drives off a cliff and dies. He is on his way back to Las Piedras with 4000 dollars (yes, the double amount), so relieved that his driving becomes careless. Expressing feelings of joy and freedom through driving turns out to be lethal: even without the nitroglycerine the truck is a death machine.

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Helgesson Ralevic

One way that the film conveys the sentiment of fatality is through the large focus on the mechanics of the truck, contrasting Osteen’s claim that an underemphasis on the mechanics communicates a feeling of the car as extension of the body. If anything, the truck appears very clumsy and cumbersome. It does not appear to be a natural part of the environment and therefore does not normalise abuse of landscape, as Murray and Heumann argue that The Fast and the Furious-films do; rather, it appears to be an uninvited guest in a landscape not suited for driving. The focus on tyres in the opening images continues here in a constrained and minimalistic manner. The drama effectively relies on small details for its effect, as in the scene where Mario is supposed to reverse onto a rotten platform. A rope that holds the platform up gets caught in a handle on the car, and the approaching disaster (which Mario is unaware of) is told through shots of a sweating Mario juxtaposed with of the ever more tightly stretched rope. The Wages of Fear is sometimes described as “a French Hitchcock”, and the minimalism of a scene like this does recall Hitchcock’s philosophy on suspense, which suggests that it is more effectful to create a sense of suspense by letting the audience anticipate an explosion (in his case), than surprising them by letting them see the explosion itself.122 Without making any claim as to who Clouzot was inspired by, a similar logic informs the film in my opinion, with its pacing and narrative simplicity.

The acceleration motif is especially significant in sustaining this cultural critique. American film noir largely feeds upon the experience of war and the trauma it caused, but as a French film, the space of experience that The Wages of Fear comes from is somewhat different. The anti-Americanism that the film expresses was arguably fuelled by the advent of Pax Americana following the war, and the diplomatic and cultural tension of the Cold War. But not only did America come out victorious and therefore threaten France’s geopolitical power position; France and other European nations were concurrently losing their grip of their former colonies. Without claiming that the film is explicitly expressive of these historical circumstances, it does appear to process a sense of anxiety towards the future, presumably rooted in assumptions derived from a certain historical experience. Film noir does not join in the cheering of the victory of war nor of the Great Acceleration, and neither does Clouzot’s film. It is largely through the inverted iconography of the car and the journey that this is expressed. Not only is mechanical acceleration often times dangerous in the imagined

122 Danny Peary, “The Wages of Fear”, Criterion 08 10, 1991, accessed 20 05, 2020, https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/943-the-wages-of-fear. François Truffaut, Hitchcock/Truffaut: The Definitive Study of Alfred Hitchcock by François Truffaut. Revised Edition (New York: Simon & Schuster Paperbacks, 1983), 73.

Helgesson Ralevic scenario – the driving has to be conducted through careful manoeuvring – but the road itself does not symbolise a way forward. It is a trap. It is so both in the sense that three of the characters die along the way, but also since the finish line of the oil field is in fact not a finish line, but a turning point, forcing the only surviving man to turn back and “make the journey again”. This would not have carried the strong connotation of a loop if it was not for the fact that Mario dies so violently. Free choice is therefore interrogated, as well as upward mobility. Simply put: the car does not lend itself to a symbol of historical acceleration, instead, Clouzot pictures the future as a dead end. As a point of comparison comes this quote from Thunder Bay, in which Steve is in a dispute with one of the fishermen, Dominique: “Without oil, this country of ours would stop! And start to die. And you’d die. Now it doesn’t make any difference what you do to me, Dominique. You can’t stop progress, nobody can.”123 Steve explicitly puts into words the understanding of progress as a linear and natural development that Clouzot seems to question with his film.

Through the transportation motif and the space of the truck, The Wages of Fear also invites an interrogates of masculinity. As Daggett suggests, a particular form of masculinity is performed in relation to oil as energy regime and the lifestyle it enables. In my view, Linda plays a key role here. As a female, Linda is reduced to certain spaces, namely, the domestic space of the bar and some outdoor scenes within the town. When Mario and Jo drive off on their dangerous journey, Linda clings to the truck and begs them to stay. Mario and Jo roll their eyes and jerk her off. She falls into the mud and is left there (see figure 3).124 There is something in this scene that is so perfectly illustrative. Not only is Linda in general used as a symbol of femininity against which these men construct their own identity; she is in such a direct sense excluded and used. Her brutal exclusion in this scene reflects the fact that oil labour was and still is a male dominated field of work, as well as saying something wider about oil culture and who gets to sit in the driver’s seat.

By comparing themselves to Linda and excluding her, the masculinity of the four main characters are constructed. She is, however, excluded to the extent that she is not even a love interest to Mario. Linda’s melodramatic style seems to clash with Mario’s low-key performance, implying that he cannot embody the hero-figure that she wishes him to be. As pointed out by Lloyd and others, there are homoerotic undercurrents in the film that could

123 01:34:44-01:34.55 124 01:01:31

Helgesson Ralevic explains this arrogance towards Linda.125 Several lines have a direct homosexual connotation, like when Jo looks at Linda and says to Mario: “Guys like us are not made for girls”126 and when Mario dresses up for a date with Jo and Luigi asks if he’s going to meet a woman, and Mario replies “No, a man. A real man”.127 There is a rivalry between Mario, Jo and Luigi that suggests underlying attraction. The relationship between Mario and Luigi as explained by Mario to Jo is reminiscence of a married couple. Lloyd highlights a scene later in the film in which Mario, Bimba and Luigi join in a “peeing ritual”, in which they pee together at the spot where they successfully managed to blow away a large rock blocking the road, as a moment of homosocial bonding.128 By this point, tough-guy Jo has undergone a personality change. As the journey starts, Jo soon starts complaining that he is ill and becomes visibly weak. It is soon clear that fear has a grip on him, completely changing his macho appearance and turning him into the coward of the party. His attempt at one point to run away and leave Mario in a critical situation makes him unpopular among the other three, who form a new companionship based on their self-appreciated toughness. Luigi, on the other hand, inferior to Jo in the first part of the film, turns out to be “a real man”, marked by his years of physical labour. In that sense, the film seems to communicate a hegemonic masculine ideal while simultaneously opening to a homoerotic dimension that challenges the same ideal. In comparison to Thunder Bay, there is a different ideal at play. The oil man Steve Martin, embodied by James Stewart, is everything you would expect from a Stewart-character: he is handsome, laid-back and witty. He impersonates the urban businessman who waits for the oil to come pouring up, contrasted with the rural fishermen, but the kind of businessman who appreciates physical labour and manages to gain the workers’ trust. He is an ordinary, self-made man with a certain popularity among women; not surprisingly, beautiful fisher daughter Stella fills the role of the heterosexual love interest whose heart Steve will win in the end. He is also inherently American. It might seem obvious but is important to point out, since most of the fishermen are Hispanic.

There is more nuance to the masculinities at display in The Wages of Fear. Just the word “fear” in the title is illustrative of this. While on the one hand fear is seen as a weakness among the men, it is something the drivers all experience, not least towards the end. I would argue that despite the theme of masculine rivalry, the vulnerability of the men is clearly

125 Lloyd, 100-106. 126 00:27:20 127 00:17:40 128 Lloyd, 106.

Helgesson Ralevic stressed. In that sense, they are incapable of becoming hero figures. Mario, Luigi and Bimba are physical workers. We learn that Bimba used to work in a Nazi mine (as a prisoner), and Luigi has slaved away in constructions to the extent that his lungs are filled with concrete. He perhaps best impersonates the traditional worker, more reminiscent of the coal-mine worker than the oil-industry worker. Jo’s gangster-like persona is stripped down and almost ridiculed in the face of the dangerous, physical work that is required on the journey. Drawing on that, it appears that Clouzot through his characterisations draws away from the modern petro-man, that Jo is the closest to representing, by expressing what could be perceived as a nostalgia for physical labour. Further reinforcing the reading that Jo at least in part symbolises the petroleum man is the fact that he is an old acquaintance with the oil company boss O’Brien, and therefore the only personal link between the SOC and the rest of the vagabonds.

Daggett suggests that a white patriarchal order is sustained through the energy regime of oil. As has been implied above, Steve embodies this modern petro-man perfectly, with his view of the Earth as his playground, securing cultural meaning and power through his involvement with oil. A similar figure can be detected in O’Brien in The Wages of Fear – a personification of white patriarchy. Where does that leave Mario, Jo, Bimba and Luigi? Oil as energy regime rewards white patriarchy in lieu of women, racialised people and nature, as my analysis has shown. It is effective as a concept in drawing attention to the uneven distribution of agency that conditioned the Anthropocene. But our main characters are not only white men but also workers, which situates them slightly outside the role of petro-masculinity that Daggett sketches. Their fate paints a clear picture – they are not winners. While Mario, Luigi and Bimba come to represent a different form of masculinity – that perhaps originates from the coal worker, and that Clouzot also glamorises in a sense, Jo fits neither in the role of petro- masculinity nor in the role of the physical worker. But although petro-masculinity as analytical category does not apply to the main characters of Clouzot’s film, it is a helpful tool in differentiating the masculinities at play in Thunder Bay and The Wages of Fear. Both films make one thing clear, albeit with different aims: the petro-man is a white American man.

3.3. The Nature of Catastrophe In this part of the analysis, I will concentrate on the instances of catastrophe. To begin with, I will look at the role of nature, whereby an ecofeminist approach is applied in order to reflect upon potential gendered aspects of nature. Thereafter, I attempt to enclose how catastrophe is

Helgesson Ralevic depicted, for whom it is presented as a catastrophe and how the catastrophic images relate to a broader tradition within the sub-genre of oil films.

Beth Berila notes that “the gendered and racialised portrayal of nature informs how women and people of colour are situated”, and as has been pointed out in the first part of the analysis, this imperial binarism has informed the different ways men/women and white people/racialised people are depicted in The Wages of Fear (although the lines are not always clear cut, as my discussion indicates). Examples include the way Linda is confined to domestic spaces, effectively illustrated in the scene where she is left in the mud when Mario and Jo drive away, and how the locals are associated with animals. Berila writes specifically about the gendering of land and how cinematographic choices can feed such an imaginary. She draws on two Robert Redford-films (The Horse Whisperer (1998) and A River Runs Through It (1992)) to make her case. These two western/epic films depict nature as pristine and beautiful with Christian undertones, establishing a strong emotional connection to the land by alluding to nostalgia. Berila problematises the mainstream reading that suggests that the films are expressive of environmentalism, thanks to Redford’s star persona and his commitment to conservational causes. In contrast, she finds that the emotional connection to the land comes at the expense of critically scrutinising the human’s relation to it, and that the separation of human and nature that it proposes sheds light on a larger issue of obscuring exploitation of nature. Instead, the films invite a consuming gaze of nature, and a sense of mastering is invoked through the high positioning of the camera and the sweeping panoramic shots of the landscape. By depicting the land as beautiful and untouched by humans, it is positioned as an object to be consumed by the viewer, which supports the ecofeminist view that nature is often gendered.129

The pristine nature in the Redford films is also seen in Louisiana Story, although the film has an outstanding poetic and lyrical quality. The famous docufiction is a mix of nature documentary, industry film and boy’s adventure and is told through the perspective of a young Cajun boy who spends his days in the Louisianan marshlands together with his pet racoon. Their existence is one day disturbed by the realisation that an oil rig is being established nearby. The uncertainty surrounding this construction at first frightens the boy, but as the story proceeds and he makes contact with two of the workers, he is ensured that

129 Beth Berila, “Engaging the Land/Positioning the Spectator. Environmental Justice Documentaries and Robert Redford’s The Horse Whisperer and A River Runs Through It”, in Framing the World: Explorations in Ecocriticism and Film, ed. Paula Willoquet-Maricondi (Charlottesville, Indiana: University of Virginia Press, 2010), 17.

Helgesson Ralevic their operation is safe and that it poses no threat to his family’s way of life. The message is that nature and oil industry are not in opposition, but that they can live side by side in harmony, making it more subtle than the populist message of Thunder Bay, stipulating that the marine life is enriched by the drilling of oil. Thus, Louisiana Story legitimises oil drilling in a way one would expect from a film commissioned by an oil company, answering to potential environmental critique. An accident occurs in the second half of the film that has dramatic effect in the story; an odd narrative choice, one might think, since Standard Oil supposedly did not want to be associated with accidents. The accident quickly gets solved, however, and the focus lies on the professionalism of the oil workers. The film seems to signal that accidents are part of the reality of oil business, but that it should not be a source of concern. To balance it out, much attention in the film is given to the battle between the boy and an alligator that presumably killed the boy’s racoon. This situates the line of conflict between the natural world and the boy, de-emphasising the potential conflict between the oil company and the boy.

It could be argued that nature is feminised in the film, particularly because of the fact that the film is narrated from a young boy’s perspective, consciously drawing on a certain appeal and genre convention. More specifically, the oil rig is approached with the same curiosity and wonder as nature, making it a site of exploration for the boy. This, is turn, suggests a gendered approach to the industry and that a certain kind of petro-masculinity is being constructed alongside the rig. The same way the boy struggles to tame nature through his battle with the alligator, he is being cradled into a petroleum culture that aims at mastering nature at macro- level. Making the boy the protagonist also invokes a sense of responsibility, suggesting that the oil company has his future in their hands. Adventure is thematised in Thunder Bay as well, and in dialogue with Stella, who asks why Steve has chosen the oil business, he replies: “Oh, it’s a challenge, I guess. Nobody had ever wrestled with this particular spot in the world before I came along”130, putting into words the colonial rule-of-the-jungle custom that characterises oil business.

Another way to represent nature is demonstrated in Sorcerer. Friedkin’s film is more of an action film, and the dramatic events are narrated through faster cutting, a shakier camera and more varying camera angles than in Clouzot’s film. Nature is hostile and violent, playing into the trope of the third world as “dark continent” (although the term “the dark continent” is

130 00:54:03

Helgesson Ralevic mostly applied to Africa), threatening in its wilderness, rather than beautiful or pristine. In one of the most dramatic sequences, the drivers reach a rotten suspension bridge that they have to pass over. The tension is built not solely upon the fact that the bridge is fragile and narrow but reinforced by the fact that a storm is raving. Branches, wind and rain beat the characters and narrow their already limited view (because on top of everything else, it is in the middle of the night).131 Nature, in this scenario, becomes part of the threat, and the scene clearly communicates how dangerous the situation would be even without the nitroglycerine. In this regard, Sorcerer differs considerably from its original. The narrative economy of Clouzot’s film centres the action around certain basic indicators of tension and does not allow for any shots that do not contribute to the main story (point of comparison: Louisiana Story that positions the lyricism of nature over narrative efficiency). Most attention is given to the drivers and the trucks, and nature itself takes on a small role. In one scene, a sense of mastery over nature is communicated, namely, when the men have to use some of the nitroglycerine to blow up a boulder blocking the road. After the dramatic but successful explosion, Mario, Luigi and Bimba celebrate their victory by peeing together on the spot where the boulder lay; a masculine ritual to mark out their victory, and a metaphor for the anthropogenic situation in which humanity has become a geological force (see figure 4).132 But apart from that instance, nature is neither evil as in the case with Sorcerer, nor beautiful and godly but passive as in the case with the Redford films (and partly Louisiana Story). On the contrary; as a space of film noir, nature is both hostile and godless, passive and indifferent to man. The road and its surrounding environment is simply a stretch of land that needs to be traversed, and is thus viewed in instrumental terms: will the road allow the journey to succeed? It had no other purpose than that, dramatic or emotional. According to Berila, the sentimentality attested to nature in the Redford films is partly due to the gendering of nature that invites a consuming gaze of nature. This assumption could in extension suggest that by not gendering the landscape, Clouzot does not invite a consuming gaze of nature. But is this lack of possessiveness enough to communicate an eco-disaster? Probably not. Clouzot’s unsentimental approach to nature implies that ecological damage was not his concern, neither in his story nor in the production. The non-gendering of landscape is nevertheless interesting to point out since it seems to mark out The Wages of Fear in relation to other film in which exploitation of nature needs to be justified.

131 01:15:30 132 01:54:15

Helgesson Ralevic

This requires a closer examination of how the catastrophic events unfold in The Wages of Fear. To begin with, it is interesting to note that the explosion at the oil field is not shown, in contrast to Sorcerer in which the explosion is seen in a dramatic scene involving flying, burning and mutilated bodies. The resulting fire is only seen twice in Clouzot’s film. The first scene lasts 50 seconds, and during part of that time it is only seen in the background as one of the workers talk to O’Brien on the phone. The scene has elements of dark humour too, when the man turns to an injured man lying beside him, bandaged from head to foot with only one eye un-covered, saying: “The boss sends you his regards”, cutting to a “reaction shot” of the mute man.133 The man on the phone then leaves his tent to attend to the fire and we see it up close, with black smoke filling the screen. The second time is in the scene in the end when Mario reaches his goal. This scene lasts three and a half minutes and is more dramatic than the first, presumably because the situation has worsened, showing somewhat chaotic images of the fire and workers doing their best to control the situation.134 In other words, not even five minutes fill up the screen time with images of the disaster that is the starting point of the action. This is in line with the overall narrative strategy, which also explains the lack of explosivity when Bimba and Luigi die. In the last scene where we see Luigi and Bimba, Bimba is shaving, explaining to Luigi that it is a family habit to face even the most fatal situations with a clean appearance, a premonition of upcoming events. In the next scene, Jo is busy rolling a cigarette when the tobacco suddenly blows away, followed by the sound of an explosion that is also seen ahead of them in the distance. Both men freeze for a second, and just as the two men are kept in the dark as to what actually happened, so is the audience.135 The (emotional) connection that the audience has built up for the two men is not followed through in that sense, and besides it being a narrative strategy, it illustrates how quickly and easily death can come. The unsentimentality and lack of drama also mirrors the oil company’s grim lack of respect for human lives: Bimba and Luigi’s lives are sacrificed, and not much fuss is made about it. The most dramatic scenes are arguably the oil scene that causes Jo’s death, and Mario’s death scene. In keeping with the constraints of the genre, these characters remain the main points of interest, and consequently, their deaths are the main disasters, even though the fact that all four of them die “punishes” an audience that has invested time, hope and emotion in them.

133 00:38:09 134 02:14:46-02:18:15 135 01:54:57-01:56:30

Helgesson Ralevic

According to Nixon, spectacular images stand in sharp opposition to the representation of slow violence. Echoed in the argument brought forward by Murray and Heumann in their piece on Oil Wells of Baku, in order for a film to truly represent eco-disaster it would require that concern for nature is communicated. Even though the fire in the Lumière short undoubtably has implications for nature, and even though viewers today might pick up on that aspect, Murray and Heumann assert that it is ahistorical to assume that it was the intended message. The same could be said about The Wages of Fear. It de facto depicts eco-disaster through its subject matter, but there is not much in the images that suggests that such a message was communicated to a contemporary audience. On the other hand, Murray and Heumann’s approach risks becoming auteur-centric, in search for intention. Whatever Clouzot’s intention, the film effectively visualises one aspect of the conditions for a certain energy regime, an in extension; the Anthropocene. Even though a scene like the one in which Jo nearly drowns in oil might seem provocative to a spectator today, since Clouzot used real oil in order to create a reality effect, it nevertheless evokes something about our destructive entanglement with oil. The haunting images invites an allegorical reading of a culture that is entwined with oil to the degree that it almost suffocates itself. About our ever growing entanglement with oil, Frederick Buell writes that: “[t]he petrochemical industry, development of which started after World War I, but which only blossomed after World War II, created a huge new array of products to add to its consumer repertoire. […] Oil thus now reappeared as an agent of chemical and social metamorphosis. Bodies literally became oily […]”136. It brings the petroleum unconscious to daylight, if you will, and through its visualisation of the Anthropocene, becomes a critical tool in understanding oil dependency.

As a cultural product of its time, The Wages of Fear does not stand apart from the cultural demand for spectacle, and as a large budget genre film, it feeds upon an audience’s demand for tragedy, drama and tension. I would not argue, however, that The Wages of Fear turns eco-disaster into spectacle. The nature of catastrophe in this case seems to be something less definable. As with a lot of early cinema, spectacle or attraction was prioritised over narrative coherence, making it quite uncontroversial of Murray and Heumann to label Oil Wells of Baku “spectacle”. But by looking at the way Clouzot represents catastrophe, spectacle does not seem to be the purpose in his film. There is the question of exposure: not much attention is given to the catastrophic events in the first place. Besides the quantity of catastrophic images, if you will, these is the question of quality, the nature of the catastrophic event(s). The few

136 Frederick Buell, 290.

Helgesson Ralevic catastrophic instances from The Wages of Fear described above are certainly not decorative, to borrow from Lee’s categorisation; they fill dramatic effect and communicate a feeling of seriousness, reinforced by the grave atmosphere in general. The film can be argued to communicate both concern and visual appeal, but the concern is rather directed at the humans involved, and not for nature. A crucial element to how serious the catastrophic event is conceived is communicated through the characters or figures on screen. The different versions of masculinity displayed in the different films embody different levels of risk. As Murray and Heumann argue, it is the presence of a human figure in front of the burning tower in Oil Wells of Baku that conveys a sense of “business as usual”, rather than uncontrollable disaster. In Louisiana Story and Thunder Bay the situation is toned down thanks to the professional and hero-like figures represented by the oil workers. In Sorcerer, but even more prominently in The Wages of Fear, there is no room for the main characters to act heroically – no matter how skilled, brave and manly they are, the situation is too dangerous. Part of the difference also lies in the fact that the accidents themselves carry different meanings. In Clouzot’s film, it equals death. In Oil Wells of Baku, Louisiana Story and Thunder Bay, the risk of accidents or other forms of catastrophic events are communicated as being a small price to pay for what is provided in return. Just like Murray and Heumann find that smoke signals prospect in 1896, the symbolism stays intact with the oil-covered Steve who communicates victory and prospect at the end of Thunder Bay, in comparison to the oil-covered Jo who communicates death in The Wages of Fear, clearly representing different sides of the oil industry (compare figures 5 and 6).

Despite their otherwise large differences, as films about specifically oil, The Wages of Fear, Oil Wells of Baku, Louisiana Story, Thunder Bay and Sorcerer all include one or many catastrophic or spectacular events. Indeed, oil culture seems to be haunted by catastrophe. In Oil Wells of Baku, this event constitutes the whole film. In Louisiana Story, the explosion that occurs in the second half of the film is the most dramatic event in the film, even though it soon gets handled and the professionalism of the oil men are emphasised. In Thunder Bay, attempted sabotage is prevented, thus avoiding what could have been a catastrophic event. Creating narrative tension by opening to this possibility does, however, prove how vulnerable the operation is. The most dramatic events include a violent storm and an oil gusher at the end of the film, although this is communicated as a moment of victory (despite the fact that only Steve and a couple of others stay, becoming covered in oil, as the others run). Just like in Sorcerer, drama also comes in the form of a storm and a violent nature, providing the men

Helgesson Ralevic with a situation in which they can prove their manliness. In Sorcerer, the explosion at the oil field is the catalysis for all the following action. In The Wages of Fear, oil as catastrophe is present not only in the scenes involving explosions and fire, but all four deaths are to different degrees deductible to oil: one because of an explosion on a journey commissioned by oil company, one getting stuck in a pool of oil and as a result being driven over by truck, and one dying by driving. An exposé of different deaths by oil.

In comparing oil culture to coal culture, Frederick Buell notes that “catastrophe did not simply remain on the periphery of exuberance. It became […] an integral part of the exuberance of oil”137. Exuberance in extraction culture mirrors the way oil, often in large amounts, erupted from the earth, as well as the boom-and-bust nature of oil business, in comparison to the more stable coal industry. In terms of social life, oil exuberance paved the way for a consumerist capitalism rooted in growth that gathered paces with the Great Acceleration. Both are exceptionally well manifested in Thunder Bay with its populist message of oil as enabler of endless growth. Stability was replaced with exuberance, also characteristic of the historical moments of modernity with its accelerated change, as discussed by Koselleck.

To varying degree, the films feed upon a certain cultural and aesthetic appeal, something we might call the charisma of oil. Oil as element in these otherwise diverse films motivate one or many catastrophic or spectacular events, which seems to confirm Nixon’s critique of the media logic that awards spectacle. We are attracted to oil as a culture because of the drama it promises; a promise that is embedded within a culture of exuberance. The unholy alliance between catastrophe and exuberance takes the form of excess is in terms of film production – examples from The Wages of Fear include the construction of the set that becomes Las Piedras, as well as the large amounts of oil that was poured out for the scene in which Jo nearly drowns. This culture of exuberance also has aesthetic implications for the way oil is represented on film, namely the spectacle-oriented aesthetics that has been assessed in this chapter. Part of this consists of the mere scale of oil-related motifs, particularly the oil towers, that moving images occupied with oil in some way or another are bound to represent. Like Towers of Babel, these huge constructions position man as small in comparison to the powers that are at play, often emphasised through the positioning of the camera that gazes up at the towers. Films like Louisiana Story and Thunder Bay demonstrate that man is able to tame such powers, whereas The Wages of Fear emphasises man’s powerlessness. Placing a human

137 Frederick Buell, 282.

Helgesson Ralevic figure in front of the burning tower in Oil Wells of Baku not only signals “business as usual” as Murray and Heumann suggests, but also underlines man’s smallness, which augments its dramatic effect. Part of it lies in the recurrent fires, explosions and other oil-related accidents. Clouzot both feeds upon and distances himself from this aesthetics of catastrophe. The spectacular is downplayed in favour of narrative economy, tension-building and an imitation of the authentic. The Wages of Fear therefore opens to the possibility of representing slow violence or eco-disaster by not attaining to the spectacular. However, concern for nature is not communicated, although the film de facto represent eco-disaster. Moreover, catastrophic events are present, and it could be argued that Clouzot uses the context of oil culture as a pretext to convey a particular post-war mood, the same way that film makers like Anthony Mann and the Lumière brothers use oil culture to create spectacular images.

Helgesson Ralevic

Chapter 4. Visualising the Anthropocene: Final Discussion

I have devoted this thesis to The Wages of Fear, a film that I believe worthy of scholarly attention, and especially so in a time that forces us to re-evaluate a one-hundred-and-seventy- year-old infatuation with petroleum. This relationship goes ultra-deep (in the words of LeMenager), so deep that it can be described as a “petroleum unconscious” (in the words of Bartosch), and in order to unravel from this harmful dependency, a necessary first step is to reach that petroleum unconscious, if you will. Following Bartosch, this is done through cultural analysis of petro-fiction. By approaching The Wages of Fear as petro-fiction, my objective has thus been to get glimpse of this relationship, more specifically: to see how it visualises the Anthropocene.

Frederick Buell states that “[e]nergy history is significantly entwined with cultural history”138, a premise that has informed my argument in this thesis. Culture does not exist in a vacuum. Rather than looking at contemporary film to get a grasp of how climate breakdown is reflected through film culture, my approach has been historical. Oil Wells of Baku is illustrative of the fact that oil has been represented as dramatic motif since the very birth of cinema, and The Wages of Fear continues in that tradition. By situating Clouzot’s film in a contemporary theoretical paradigm, I have followed in the footsteps of other ecocritically oriented film scholars who re-consider film historical cases in terms of their engagement with nature. An underlying presumption here is that cultural products change over time and take on new meanings in new cultural contexts. This can be demonstrated by “reading against the grain”, that is, showing how a film can be analysed in opposition to its mainstream reading. But it can also be expressed in less drastic ways; historical distance may emphasise certain aspects of a film. This is how I have approached The Wages of Fear, by looking specifically at oil as motif and carrier of meaning. It has been my attempt to balance a historically grounded reading of the film in which I historicise oil as energy regime in order to get a better picture of the way the film relates to the energy historical circumstances that it builds its drama on, as well as emphasising why such a reading might prove fruitful to a spectator today, and how the film thereby may invite allegorical readings and take on new meaning.

138 Frederick Buell, 273.

Helgesson Ralevic

In comparison with literature, that is the main focus of scholars like Bartosch, Buell and LeMenager, film as subject to ecocritical analysis is more multifaceted, as has effectively been pointed out by cinema scholars like Bozak and Willoquet-Maricondi. Not only is film’s involvement with nature far more complex that literature’s, thus providing the medium as such with a big obstacle in its potential to represent phenomena like slow violence and eco- disaster in a non-ambiguous way; there is also the illusion of transparency with the film medium, that arguably shapes the spectator’s perception regarding nature and human’s relations to it to a larger extent than literature. Both its strength and weakness as medium lies in the visibility dimension; both in its ability to visualise that which otherwise exceeds our sensory apparatus, whether you call it a hyperobject, a petroleum unconscious or the Anthropocene, but also in its tendency to fall under a media logic that rewards spectacular images, as pointed out by Nixon.

I have read The Wages of Fear in terms of oil in multiple ways. First, I have considered how the mix of internationally constructed film genres and styles contribute in conveying the specifics of this piece of petro-fiction. Secondly, I have looked at the transportation motif and the way that social identities – masculinity in particular – is constructed in the film. Lastly, I have considered the charisma of oil that The Wages of Fear, and some other historical representations of oil and oil culture, alludes to, and whether or not this allows for the instances of catastrophe (that are present in all films discussed) to communicate concern or if they are simply represented as spectacle.

As a product of a specific historical time, the film expresses what can be read as an anxiety towards an unknowable future, and a reaction against “the accelerated speed by which it approaches”139, to quote Koselleck, largely communicated in its fatalistic mood. Only a few years into the Great Acceleration, the film opposes dominant ideology that regards oil as enabler of expansive economic growth, therein expressing some of the contradictions of its time. It is not irrelevant to consider the experience of war that turn the film into a “post-war social noir”140 according to Vincendeau, and perhaps even weigh in Clouzot’s own criticised position during it, followed by his harsh exclusion from film production. As a reaction against accelerated modernity, the film can be read as expressing a certain nostalgia towards a changing masculinity ideal. If Martin in Thunder Bay represents petro-masculinity – the speculative businessman – Clouzot portrays Mario, Luigi and Bimba as hard-working men of

139 Koselleck, 48. 140 Vincendeau, 50.

Helgesson Ralevic a different kind who are punished and exploited by this new energy regime, and thus stripped of the possibility of being heroes. One could also detect a nostalgia for a time in history when France held a different geopolitical position, threatened by the dominance of the United States after the second world war, as expressed in the way the Americans are represented. Even the fact that the film is shot in black and white can be apprehended as an expression of nostalgia.

It has not been my mission to demonstrate that The Wages of Fear is an ecologically progressive film. Clouzot’s film has consumed nature through its production (the pouring out of oil!), distribution and exhibition, and turned material reality into – for lack of a better word – entertainment. There is not much in the images that suggest that a concern for environmental destruction was intended or communicated to a contemporary audience, although it is interesting to note that the landscape is not gendered, nor depicted through a consuming gaze. By exposing oil culture as violent and corrupt, the film provides a critical ground from which to examine the foundations for an oil-dependent society, even though that dependency is reflected in the production as well as in the story, too. The catastrophic events and the explicit critique expressed in the film – its exposure of the production side of oil, the violence and the exploitation of labour that it is conditioned on – provides a gateway into a more expansive critique that can perhaps only be fully grasped and articulated today. The film has thus attracted new levels of meaning through the historical distance that mark the film’s release to this thesis being written in 2020. Smoke no longer signals prospect, oil gushers no longer signal wealth and well-being; their iconography has been inverted and can today be seen as a tip of the iceberg that is the catastrophe of a fossil fuel-induced climate breakdown. As such, the catastrophic events in all films encapsulate a larger catastrophic event that we are faced with today. The theme of man playing with powers larger than himself seem to have carried with it seeds of knowledge of our own destruction all along.

In many ways, The Wages of Fear can be seen as an antithesis to its contemporary Thunder Bay, in everything from its politics to its appeal, depicting two different sides of oil business. What I do wish to stress, however, is that all the five films I have discussed also have something in common: they include elements of catastrophe, which appears to be an inherent motif in oil films, and part of their appeal, one of the many expressions of their involvement with oil. The nature of catastrophe in these films differs, however. In films like Louisiana Story and Thunder Bay, they are used as a way to prove the bravery and professionalism of the main characters. In The Wages of Fear, it is used as a way to prove man’s powerlessness.

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That is where they differ in terms of turning eco-disaster into spectacle: Clouzot’s film is in my opinion not guilty of either.

It might be argued that the film only uses the context of oil industry in order to tell the story of four white men and their perilous journey, and that this is its sole concern. This is an insufficient reading, in my opinion. It does not explain the lengthy introduction and Clouzot’s ambitious attempts at producing a sense of authenticity in the non-Western location. Furthermore, I would say that there is too much in the story that is dependent on its precise context, moving beyond Sander’s assumption that film noir expresses a grim view of life in general. The very condition for the mission – that a company can casually hand out thousands of dollars in wages, and consequently make desperate people perform the most horrific tasks – testifies to both the often exploitative nature of oil business, as well as the grand scale of capital involved.

The dual missions in this thesis have been to provide a historical context in order to ground my reading historically, and secondly, to stress what a contemporary discourse can bring out in a historical case. These are intertwined, in my view, and therefore difficult to separate, but it is nevertheless important to stress since I have neither been interested in solely deducing Clouzot’s intention with the film, nor reading it against the grain. The size of this study only enables a limited number of films that I have compared The Wages of Fear with. A further study containing a larger selection of films would prove if the conclusion that catastrophic imagery is inherent in oil films still holds. Other openings that this thesis might provide include the study of what could be called “climate noir”, meaning the connection between film noir and themes of eco-crime or eco-melancholia, both in historical cases and in new films borrowing from the conventions of film noir. On a different note, I believe the performer and actress Darling Légitimus, playing Rosa, deserves scholarly attention. A deeper study of her career would, I am sure, provide interesting insights into the history of French film industry and the way semi-colonial subjects were handled and represented, presumably shedding light on geopolitical issues regarding France’s changing role as colonial power. Furthermore, I believe the study contributes to the field of ecocriticism by exemplifying how the application of a modern theoretical framework onto a historical case can be balanced with a historically rooted reading.

To return to the main questions: as a historical document visualising the Anthropocene, what do we see through The Wages of Fear? There is, to begin with, the reasonably trustworthy depiction of an American oil company setting up business in a third world country. The way

Helgesson Ralevic that the American camp is separated from the rest of the village; the way that construction in Las Piedras seems to have been initiated but later abandoned; the way that the oil company has its own police; the way that large sums of money and big risk is involved; all these details rhyme with the picture oil historians like Black paint of the oil industry as infrastructural operation. Moreover, the film visualises the environmental injustice of the Anthropocene by representing violence towards nature (the fire, the oil spill), violence towards women (Linda), violence towards third world people (the local workers who die) and violence towards workers (our main characters). The film thus illustrates how a critique of the Anthropocene needs to be rooted in an understanding of the mechanisms of an exploitative and unjust economic system. Lastly, the film effectively spells out a cultural entanglement with oil through explicit references as well as implicit aesthetic ques. This study thus circles around a larger set of questions, reminiscent of Nixon’s inquiry, to which this thesis has no direct answer: how can film depict oil culture in all its destructiveness, in a way that is critical and independent? Does a relevant critique need to be independent? Can film ever be independent of nature? The image of being stuck in a truck leaves the spectator with a strong metaphor for the Anthropocene. Effectively, to be living in the Anthropocene often feels like being stuck in a prison of our own destruction. As a culture high on fossil fuels, we are speeding down a faulty road in an enclosed space that forces us to keep our eyes on the road and keep going, although we would rather escape. Destiny in the Anthropocene appears inescapable.

Helgesson Ralevic

Appendix

Figure 1: Medium close-up of Rosa together with Bimba. 00:19:30

Figure 2: Mario framed through film noir-shading. 00:04:54

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Figure 3: Linda thrown into mud as Mario and Jo drive away. 01:01:31

Figure 4: Victorious peeing ritual. Man as geological force. 01:54:15

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Figure 5: Victorious Steve drenched in oil. 01:36:14

Figure 6: Suffering Jo drenched in oil. 02:06:49

Helgesson Ralevic

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Filmography

A River Runs Through It (Robert Redford, 1992)

Lord of the Rings (Peter Jackson, 2001-2003)

Louisiana Story (Robert Flaherty, 1948)

Nanook of the North (Robert Flaherty, 1922)

Oil Wells of Baku: Close View (Puits de Pétrole à Bakou: Vue de Près, Auguste and Louis Lumière, 1896)

Princess Mononoke (Hayako Miyazaki, 1997)

Singin’ in the Rain (Gene Kelly, 1952)

Sorcerer (William Friedkin, 1977)

The Blue Planet (Alastair Fothergill, 2001)

The Fast and the Furious films (1955-2009, different directors)

The Hitch-Hiker (Ida Lupino, 1953)

The Horse Whisperer (Robert Redford, 1998)

The Wages of Fear (Le Salaire de la Peur, Henri-Georges Clouzot, 1953)

Thunder Bay (Anthony Mann, 1953)

Violent Road (Howard W. Koch, 1958)

Helgesson Ralevic

Stockholms universitet/Stockholm University SE-106 91 Stockholm Telefon/Phone: 08 – 16 20 00 www.su.se