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Petrolia

Emily Richardson

2005 00:20:55 United KingdomEnglishColorStereo16:9Video
Tags:
Consumer culture, Environment, European Film/Video, Experimental Film, Landscape, Photography

Description

Petrolia takes its name from a redundant oil-drilling platform set in the Cromarty Firth, Scotland. The film looks at the architecture of the oil industry along the Scottish coastline where oil and gas supplies are predicted to run dry in the next forty years. Shooting on 16mm film, using time-lapse and long exposure techniques, the film presents a record of industrial phenomena - the toxic beauty of the refinery at Grangemouth, huge drilling platforms gliding across the water as they come in for maintenance and repair at Nigg, and the last dance of the shipbuilding cranes in Glasgow's harbour. Benedict Drew has created the soundtrack for the film using purely electronic, computer-generated sound that works on the threshold between silence and noise, just as the image works on the threshold between the visible and invisible.

This video is a single channel version of Petrolia. A three-channel synchronized composite is available here.

About Emily Richardson

Emily Richardson is a filmmaker and researcher examining the trace of human presence on particular landscapes and environments on the cusp of change.

Richardson’s films document sites of power and corporate interest at particular moments in time uncovering layers of narrative embedded in these contested landscapes, whether East London prior to the Olympics, abandoned military architecture of the Atomic Weapons Research Establishment of Orford Ness, the oil industry on the Scottish coastline, the contentious expansion of Sizewell nuclear power station, or the exploitation of the Far North.

Richardson’s work sits within a lineage of filmmakers addressing ideas about our relationship to and impact on natural and constructed landscapes and environments through a reflexive observational approach to making work using a cross-disciplinary methodology that includes walking, photography, filmmaking, sound recording, historical and archive research, interviews, books and podcasts.

Richardson's films have been shown in galleries, museums and festivals internationally including Tate Modern and Tate Britain, London, Pompidou Centre, Paris, Barbican Cinema, London; Anthology Film Archives, New York and Venice, Edinburgh, BFI London, Rotterdam and New York Film Festivals.