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BORDERS TEXTILE TOWERHOUSE
THURSDAY 2 – SUNDAY 5 MAY
10:00 – 17:00 / 43′ (hourly from 10:10, starting at 10 minutes past each hour)

Content warning: contains discussion of imperialism, colonialism.

FREE ENTRY 

PROGRAMME NOTES
by Michael Pattison

In Scenes of Extraction, Sanaz Sohrabi turns cinema on its head, inverting the central role that moving images played in colonial power’s twentieth-century longue durée to tell a ghost story mostly through stills. Conversely, this formidably researched work is one of exceptional movement. Collating and reproducing a range of archival materials from the British energy industrial complex and its effects on the people and land of Iran, the film maps the dense entanglements of racial capitalism in such a way that its own fixations feel like urgent discoveries. Deploying an essayistic voiceover, the film transmits its information with a barely concealed and entirely infectious torment. It’s as if to know anything at all about the genesis and legacies of British Petroleum is to be appalled: one can’t learn or be told this stuff without needing to pass it on. 

‘What do you see in the shadow of infrastructure?’ Sohrabi asks over archive ‘phantom ride’ footage proceeding along a railway track, its relentless, forward-facing motion underscoring the sense that indigenous, trackside worker-subjects are optically rendered as ghosts, left aside in favour of the more immediate agenda: oil. Sohrabi demonstrates an acute awareness that infrastructures in themselves function a bit like shadows – enabling things to happen, shaping lived experience, they are also rarely made visible in terms of their function or form. In this sense, Sohrabi’s work must construct its own framework of seeing – much like the regime it seeks to see. 

Archive is a verb, after all: an active, narrative process through which power is consolidated as much as it might be questioned. In the film’s opening moments, an image slowly fades in, its individual components digitally separated from one another before forming a broader picture. If this is to be a work of meticulous linearity, it also justifies rhetorical repetition: an argument whose constituent, iterative parts reinforce each other within a cohesive whole. And so images, like the modes of production they epitomise, come into being. Scenes of Extraction emphasises the image as metaphor, vector, verb: the imperial regime’s strategic framing of systematic extraction, for instance, as a question merely of modernisation – a trajectory constructed through the violent othering of language and the celebration of technological advancement.