As a source for high quality sponsored films, British Petroleum is slightly
less well known than Shell, its long time competitor and sometime collaborator.
This is probably down to three significant differences between the two.
First, BP was relatively later into the game. There are scattered instances
of the company (under its early names of Anglo-Persian and Anglo-Iranian) having
been associated with films during the 1920s and '30s. And the umbrella body,
Shell-Mex and BP, set up to provide joint UK marketing and distribution for the
two oil companies, directly sponsored some 100 films from 1932 onwards. But of
the two competitors operating in their own right, Shell began its systematic
programme of film production in 1934, while BP's large-scale sponsorship was a
mainly post-war development.
Second, BP did not have its own production unit: all of the films were
outsourced to independent production companies, bringing a greater variety to
its film work, but also a less readily identifiable house style. And finally,
the Shell Film Unit, with its associations with Edgar Anstey, Arthur Elton and Stuart Legg, is easy
to relate to the core documentary movement, on which so much orthodox history of
British documentary film is focused. Although the two cannot be rigidly
separated, BP's work for the screen results mainly from collaboration with a
slightly different (and less appreciated) world of commercial documentary
production. Because BP's budgets came to be very lavish, virtually all the major
freelance industrial film units at work in the 1950s, '60s and '70s turned out
films for the company: to name just a few, World Wide Pictures, Greenpark
Productions, Merton Park, Verity Films, Ronald H. Riley, Random Film
Productions, Derek Stewart Productions, Anthony Gilkison Associates - even, on
one project, the DATA cooperative and, for animations, Halas & Batchelor.
Much of this work was channelled through the Film Producers Guild, the
consortium body which farmed out industrial film commissions to member companies
such as Greenpark and Verity.
That the resulting films were of frequently remarkable quality and high
international popularity is demonstrated not least by the fact that BP is one of
Britain's greatest Academy Awards success stories, with six nominations,
winning Best Documentary Short Subject for Giuseppina (1960). Shell's technical films being pretty well unbeatable, BP's frequently went in other
directions, with the general aim of presenting the multinational corporation's
human face. Of course, there were films dealing in technical oil industry
matters - the likes of A Modern Oil Refinery (1954) or Rig 20 (1952), a
reconstruction of an oil industry fire which was considered one of the most
impressive films on safety subject matter at that time. But more common were
lush, sometimes poetic travelogues of both the UK (Draig O Dras, aka The Proud
Dragon, 1970; Scotland, 1973) and territories with BP connections abroad
(Persian Story, 1952; Alaska - The Great Land, 1971). Exploration was a common
theme, often, of course, in search of oil - but BP also funded Foothold on
Antarctica, the 1956 official film of the commonwealth Trans-Antarctic
Expedition. Many BP films also affect internationalist social concern, as in
Three Roads to Tomorrow, a portrait of a changing Nigeria directed in 1958 by
Greenpark head Humphrey Swingler, or Eric Marquis' Food From Oil (1970), as well
as a number of environmentalist films made in the early 1970s. But alongside
these were arty montage based pieces like Divertimento (1968), and even light
purely fictional films such as The Cattle Carters (1962).
While many of the best industrial filmmakers found themselves on BP's books,
at least two were not only particularly prolific but had distinctive styles of
their own that were especially suited to the company's sponsorship. James Hill's
expansive documentary The New Explorers (1955) and his whimsical fictions
Giuseppina (1959) and The Home-Made Car (1963) were three of the company's most
popular shorts. Derek Williams was a far more sober writer-director, his BP
travelogues among the most thoughtful of the day, and his three BP ecology films
The Shadow of Progress (1970), The Tide of Traffic (1972) and Planet Water
(1979) still stand as powerful meditations on the fragile balance between
humankind and the world, whether despite or because of their origins as oil
industry contributions to the growing environmental debate.
As was the case with so many organisations, the pattern of BP's moving image
work shifted with the decline of 35mm and 16mm film and their audiences. From
the early 1980s, most productions were straightforward product commercials for
the general public, the majority of other productions being training and staff
magazine films produced and distributed on video formats within the
organisation. Yet marking the centenary of Anglo-Persian in 2008, BP
commissioned two impressive, large-scale documentaries looking at the company's
origins and history: apparently, in part, a conscious attempt to emulate (and
pay tribute) to BP's heritage as one of the world's leading sources of what was
once termed 'prestige documentary'. Such films are aimed not at direct product
promotion but at general improvement of an organisation's image through its
association with fine craftsmanship.
There is scope for heated, political debate about the motivation and impact
of such 'prestige' communication on the part of multinational corporations:
different ideological starting-points are likely to dispose viewers to different
conclusions. But the reasons that debate is worth having, in specific relation
to the British oil industry, are two-fold. First, its films (both BP's and
Shell's) were so superior, so often, to so much else in the field. Second, the
place of oil in the British and world economies has long been great, if
sometimes controversial. How one of the most important industries of the modern
world has made use of its major communications medium is a subject well worthy
of study.
Patrick Russell
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