One Image, Two Acts, Original title in Farsi: یک تصویر، دو برداشت , ”Yek Tasveer, Do Bardasht,” (available in HD, Apple ProRes & DCP with 5.1 sound), 44:38 minutes, (2020)
Certain B&W images above have been reproduced from the bp archive. Copy Right BP plc, BP International Limited, and the artist.
The establishment of Iran’s petroleum industrial complex in 1908 is entangled with the formation of media and visual infrastructures which propelled and sustained new ideologies and modes of identification with the emergent colonial modernity in Iran. Between 1908-1951, the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (AIOC) -currently British Petroleum (BP)- strategically utilized ethnographic film and photography production to promote and represent its colonial developments in Iran. Investigating the relationship between petro-modernity and photography and film as technologies of coloniality, “One Image, Two Acts” unpacks the spatial and cultural manifestation of this emergent image economy which operated in tandem with the larger petroleum complex.
With a particular focus on the historical ethnographic film and photographic surveys produced by the BP, “One Image, Two Acts” examines the formations of early modernist infrastructures of leisure such as cinemas vis-à-vis the broader social engineering project and asymmetries of power in the oil towns of South-Western Iran. Unraveling the social spaces of leisure in relation to industrial spaces of labor, this film connects and maps the cognitive and formal structures of modernist ideas of time, leisure, and desire during the oil company’s operations in Iran. This emergent oil encounter was not limited to the oil company’s colonial expansion; the multifaceted infrastructures of petroleum industry accumulated incrementally and temporally, produced political assets, and shaped politics along the way. This film examines the ways in which the oil company’s visual regimes of petro-modernity were reclaimed and countered by a growing anti-colonial cinema in which oil was a protagonist and cinemas had become the contested emblem of colonial development.
Reading the Iranian New Wave cinema against the backdrop of growing raw material sovereignty and nationalization movement, this film analyzes two integral films of this period, namely “A Fire” by Ebrahim Golestan (1961) and Amir Naderi’s “The Runner” (1984). It reframes oil not solely as an exchangeable commodity but rather as an archive itself; one that constitutes a web of imaginations, aspirations, and struggles. “One Image, Two Acts” is a coalescence of infrastructures, images, and archives of oil wherein cinematic time and geological time mobilize different sites, temporalities, and numerous material modalities.
Selection of recent festival screenings and exhibitions:
Crude Aesthetics Film Screening, Block Museum Cinema, Northwestern University, March 3rd, 2023
Screening program, Curated by Azin Feizabadi and Asrin Haidari, Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Sweden, Jan 2023
Screening program, Moussem Nomadisch Kunstencentrum, Brussel, Feb 2023
Video installation at Dream City Festival, Tunis, Tunisia, September-October 2022
Carpintarias de São Lázaro, “Back of my hand,” Curated by Sara Castelo Branco, Lisbon, Portugal, May-June 2022
Gabès Cinéma Fen Festival, Video program curated by Rabih Mroué, Gabès, Tunisia, May 2022
Official Selection and winner of main award mid-length international competition: Iran International Documentary Film Festival (Cinéma Vérité), Tehran, December 2021
Official Selection: 10th Cinecipó - Insurgent Film Festival, Belo Horizonte, Brazil, December 2021
Official Selection: International Documentary Film Festival of Buenos Aires (FIDBA), Argentina, December 2021
Official Selection: Cámara Lúcida - VI International Contemporary Film Festival, Ecuador, November, 2021
Official Selection: Middle Eastern Studies Association Film Festival, December, 2021
Official Selection and main jury prize: 30__70 International Documentary Film Festival, Italy, November 2021
Official Selection and winner of Silvestre Section best short film: IndieLisboa International Film Festival, Lisbon Portugal, August 2021
Official Selection and special jury mention: International feature film competition: Valdivia International Film Festival, Chile, October 2021
Official Selection: 17th Festival Internacional de Cine Independiente de La Plata Festi-Freak, Argentina, October 2021
Official Selection and honorable mention: International Competition 03: VIDEOEX International Film and Festival, Zurich, Switzerland, October 2021
SAVVY Contemporary, Berlin, August-September 2021
Official Selection: Ghosts and Apparitions Program, Sheffield Documentary Film Festival, United Kingdom, 4-13 June 2021
Official Selection: Short and Mid-length Program: 50th International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR), 2-6 June 2021
Reviews:
Best Artist Films of 2021, Senses of Cinema, 2021
Review of “One Image, Two Acts” (in Spanish) at FICValdivia Film Festival, Chile by Marisol Aguila
Review of Sheffield Documentary Film Festival (in French) by Occitane Lacurie and Barnabé Sauvage
Review of Montréal International Documentary Film Festival (in French) “Confronter l’Histoire,” by Rémy Besson
“Esto también pasará,” Review of “One Image, Two Acts” (in Spanish) at 17th Festival Internacional de Cine Independiente de La Plata by Blas Martín
»در دالانهای حقیقت/ نگاهی به مستندهای «بچههای اعجوبه»، «احتضار»، «آن شب» و «یک تصویر، دو برداشت, Review of “One Image, Two Acts” (in Farsi) at Iran Cinema Verite Film Festival by Shahram Ashraf Abyaneh
One Image, Two Acts is now acquired by DAFILMS. To watch go to dafilms.com
+ For a presskit and a viewing copy please kindly send me an email request. Teaser available here.