The Story of Oil
1946 · 18m · Canada
Genres: documentary, historical
Tones: contemplative
A documentary follows oil work in Alberta's Turner Valley, from exploration and drilling by geologists and labourers through to production of finished petroleum products.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A 1946 NFB industrial doc about oil extraction—sounds like the kind of earnest institutional propaganda I'd normally skip, but there's something perversely honest about watching the state apparatus document the literal guts of resource colonialism without irony or apology.
This sits beautifully in the NFB's documentary tradition of the period, where formal rigor and observational patience elevate what could be mere industrial record into something contemplative; the restraint in tone and the careful sequencing from exploration through to finished product suggests a filmmaker thinking seriously about how to render labour and geology as subjects worthy of sustained attention.
What makes this work isn't the subject but the decision to hold on the landscape and the workers' hands—you can feel the cinematographer choosing stillness over spectacle, letting the oil derricks become almost sculptural rather than just extractive machinery.