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Pipeline Cinema explores the intertwined histories of documentary film and the oil industry in mid-twentieth century Iran and Iraq. Reading against the grain of oil company archives, Mona Damluji reveals how wells, pipelines, pumping stations, and refineries were sites of cinematic production and exhibition, at once normalizing and challenging neocolonial extraction. Shining a light on cultural workers and labor movements, this book offers a distinctly humanistic lens on an otherwise dehumanizing petroleum industry.

Mona Damluji is Assistant Professor of Film and Media Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

"After Pipeline Cinema, it will no longer be possible to talk of the British documentary film movement without reckoning with the West's extractive oil regimes in Iraq and Iran. Plunging into oil's archives, Mona Damluji gives us a stunning, original, and unforgettable portrait of the lives of those in the global South tasked with legitimating petroeconomies through film."—Priya Jaikumar, author of Where Histories Reside: India as Filmed Space

"It is widely understood that oil companies are in the business of shaping the narrative of petrocapitalism and its consequences, but Damluji explores the image world of imperial oil through an utterly original analysis of documentary films made by the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company in Iraq and Iran. At once a cinematic history of documentary oil films and a sophisticated reading of the cultural work performed by corporate film in creating both local audiences and a link between oil and national progress, Pipeline Cinema asks us to think anew about the world that fossil capitalism has made."—Michael Watts, coeditor of Subterranean Estates: Life Worlds of Oil and Gas

"Damluji's powerful and poetic account of petromodernity's cultural infrastructures charts new cartographies of Iran and Iraq, chock full of archival findings, methodological invitations, and conceptual innovations. Revealing wells, pumping stations, and refineries as places of cinematic encounter, art and friendship, foreclosure and possibility, Pipeline Cinema is a new and indispensable lens on fossil fuel extraction and its afterlives."—Sherene Seikaly, author of Men of Capital: Scarcity and Economy in Mandate Palestine

"Pipeline Cinema is a meticulously researched love letter to the author's great-grandfather and a reflection on how creativity, resistance, and unexpected solidarities grew up within (and despite) petromodernity. The book offers a nuanced history of how Iraqi and Iranian cultural expression inhabits modern energy."—Stephanie LeMenager, author of Living Oil: Petroleum Culture in the American Century

"Damluji's deeply researched book gives a vivid account of a film culture forged in the crucibles of oil extraction and resistance to colonial power. It is a model of interdisciplinary petrocultures scholarship and a vital contribution to reorienting the field from Western oil-consuming contexts to the sites of production in the Middle East."—Brian Jacobson, author of The Cinema of Extractions: Film Materials and Their Forms

"Damluji's work illuminates the nexus of oil and film, bringing into view an overlooked series of links between imperialism and media in Iraq and Iran. Pipeline Cinema reveals how pivotal these places were to the development of a global fossil-fuel culture—and of resistance to it."—Arbella Bet-Shlimon, author of City of Black Gold: Oil, Ethnicity, and the Making of Modern Kirkuk