There is a scene in the first third of Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist (2024), which sees László Tóth (Adrien Brody) shoveling coal after being fired from a remodeling project by an irate Harrison Lee Van Buren (Guy Pearce). Knowing as we do that Tóth is a famed architect, the dirty work of coal seems all the more demeaning. Tóth, however, doesn’t see it that way; rather, he is grateful to have any job and does not immediately capitulate when Van Buren returns with a check for back pay and an air of contrition. The Brutalist might be considered a part of the “Cinema of Extractions”, possibly even an entry in the eco-criticism canon.
Indeed, while reading Brian Jacobson’s The Cinema of Extractions: Film Materials and Their Forms, I thought of this moment in The Brutalist and the symbolism behind Corbet’s use of coal as the raw material of design. How often do we consider the materials of which cinema is a product? What about the “raw materialism” of film and “media’s industrial supply chains”? Is coal “just” a form of carbon, or the byproduct of “extractive industries” and their “cultural technologies”?
Inspired by a Charlie Chaplin quote in The Chaplin Revue (1959) about California’s transformation by “the three horsemen of the apocalypse: oil, movies, and aeronautics,” Jacobson has written an interdisciplinary work that seeks to unpack a unique causal relationship. The discovery of oil and its funding of the fledgling aeronautics industry set the foundation for the development of the first major film studies in early 20th-century America.
Jacobson argues that early cinema also saw its extractive origins as a potential product too, creating more products (films) of extraction (covering everything from oil to steamships). This is his “cinema of extractions … the historical conditions from which cinema emerged and through which it has continued to operate in its industrial forms.”
Meticulous and well-researched, The Cinema of Extractions shines when Jacobson’s almost child-like enthusiasm cuts through the cheese. This included topics as varied as projectionists debating carbon positioning and arc lamps in weekly trade magazines like old-school Reddit; new ways of looking “past the screen” to unpack films and television; and detailed discussions of many early cinema classics including D.W. Griffith‘s The Lonedale Operator (1911), Lois Weber’s Sunshine Molly (1915), Joseph D. Grasse’s Flowing Gold (1924), and Carl Urbano’s Destination Earth (1956), an oil-focused animation from American Petroleum Institute.
However, there are moments of pure academic writing in The Cinema of Extractions that can be difficult to decipher They remind me of doctoral theory seminars, which is where this material will most likely find a home: “much like [film ecocriticism] in its early iterations, to focus only on representations or, when attentive to materiality, to produce ontological or neopositivist claims without connecting them to moving-image media texts.” What?
Ironically, Jacobson concludes that his text, as part of the history of cinema of extractions, “can make for rather dispirited reading, much less close analysis. I have seen the most engaged classes worn down by weeks of watching such films and reading their histories.” NGL (as my students often write now) – I slogged through this book (even at a slim 159 pages of main text).
The most important lesson from The Cinema of Extractions is to make more effort to understand and process films. As a confessed film nerd, I find this book puts many things in context, particularly “cinema’s power not merely to represent but also to participate in the creation of a world.” That statement really spoke to me; why do we see films only as the product of a set of processes and not as a vehicle for more exploration? Jacobson dubbed this a “worlding process”, and it is one of the many interesting contributions presented in this volume.