When Bertrand Tavernier asserts that an 1896 Lumière Brothers’ film, Oil Wells of Baku: Close View, “may be the first ecological film ever made” (Lumière Brothers: First Films), he is, to a certain extent, reading the footage of burning oil wells from an eco-critical perspective. The film invites such a reading, one that centers on environmental concerns, because of what looks like devastating effects of drilling for oil. This thirty-six second “view,” shot by Kamill Serf with a stationary camera, shows huge flames and black smoke streaming from burning oil wells in Baku, Azerbaijan, seemingly sure signs of environmental disaster. But disaster looks more like spectacle in this closely shot scene, and both Serf and the film’s viewers serve as attentive spectators. Although the camera never moves during the film, the vibrant image it captures also captures its viewers.
The film appears to be strategically framed. The oil wells in the frame look like miniatures until the immensity of the oil derricks is emphasized by a human figure moving in the front of the center well. This figure looks minuscule as it walks away from the center derrick and out of the frame of the shot. The two tall derricks in the view behind the tiny striding male figure show us that the view was shot from a distance. This extreme long shot accentuates the power of both the tall derricks and the rising flames and smoke, smoke that darkens into the distance from the right side of the frame. We see enormous flames shoot up and clouds of heavy black smoke plume from the fire, but more smoke comes from similar oil well fires off screen. To the right of the center derrick, as far away as the horizon line, two blazes flame up from what look like vertical pipes. Gray and black smoke flows out of the fires in a plume that covers the sky. The enormity of these flaming plumes mesmerizes because their powerful blaze shocks us. But the raging flames also bring forth images of phoenixes rising from the flames and hearths stoked by Hestia, broaching the question, “Is this beautiful?” Within the context of our Western culture, such a scene looks fabulous because it is based in a mythology in which fire and its power are associated with beautiful rebirth.
The center derrick serves as the focus of the shot. This derrick is placed inside an enormous pit, as if to capture any excess oil flow. A platform connects the derrick to its outside enclosure and what looks like a pipeline to transport oil from these interconnected wells. A roofed building serves as the derrick’s foundation. In front of the derrick are what look like the frames of new derricks under construction. Vertical pipes that resemble bare trees pop up in every corner of the shot, usually in rows of four or five. A set of wooden stairs leads up to a scaffold on the left side of the center derrick. The second completed derrick sits on flat ground, with no scaffold—and only an enclosed building at its bottom. The center derrick, though, sets off the tall derrick to the left and the gray and black smoke to the right. The left derrick hides the source of the fire that bursts out from behind it. This fire is just one of three fires in the view: one to the left of center, the other two to the right and off screen. Smoke from the fires fills the background in the view.
All of this smoke and uncontrolled fire supports Tavernier’s assertion of this as an eco-disaster film. Such a disaster, from a current point of view, begs for an ecological reading. We have become committed to considering the consequences of uncontrolled oil well fires and gushers, and the fire and smoke look destructive to humans and their environment. More than just spectacle, these burning oil fields, these obfuscating clouds of smoke, this general conflagration of the natural world, signify humans’ rape of the landscape for personal gain—oil at any price to the natural world. But the figure walking in front of the derricks suggests another reading altogether. He moves without the urgency an ecological reading might spur. In fact, he walks in front of the derricks and the burning oil fields with quite a normal gait, as if he’s unconcerned about anything. But as the Lumières’ brief film offers no explanation for its fires, nor does its title: Oil Wells of Baku: Close View, it leaves today’s viewers wondering, is this a picture of business as usual or an account of eco-disaster? It is possible, then, to be caught in a conundrum with a film like this, forced to struggle in uncertainty as to whether the extremity of the screen depiction is meant to indicate about our environment and our way of living in it, or merely show with a certain casualness the world as received.
What the Lumière view “means” may be different now than it was in the late 1890s, but spectacular events continue to overpower environmental statements on film. So, what does the view tell us about what we would now call our “concerns about nature”? And what did the view tell its original viewers? This is an issue, to be sure, that has itself changed in meaning since the beginning of the twentieth century and that has come to have a principal focus for scholars, citizens, and viewers of entertainment today. When (if ever) does the destruction “wrought” by gushing oil wells—“monsters,” according to A. V. W. Jackson (40)—become seen as something other than a “spectacle” “surpassed only by the awful grandeur when fire adds terror to the scene” (40)? When, in other words, does a burning oil well gain the status of ecological disaster? When does it come to be perceived that the costs of such flames include not only money and human lives but also nature?
Oil Wells of Baku: Close View highlights what looks like a horrific eco-disaster, but the view of oil fires spurting up in 1896 sparks immediate visual attention and blunts attention to the ecological impact of the fires. Oil Wells of Baku: Close View stands out as an ecological film, an environmental film, and a view highlighting a history of wealth garnered from resources around the world. It also foregrounds a history of spectacle, and the history of one of the most contentious modern currencies. Images of gushing oil in later films like Giant (1956) and Oklahoma Crude (1973) and in television series like The Beverly Hillbillies (1962-1971) demonstrate the pervasive power of oil. And contemporary images of oil well and pipeline fires on the covers of newspapers and magazines attest to our continuing appetite for the spectacle that burning oil may produce. Reading these images through an eco-critical lens, however, can make the workings of the spectacular events transparent.
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