This is a past event
Dr Annette Davison discusses Petrocapitalism in the media.
There is no shortage of audiovisual media about or situated upon offshore oil rigs in the North Sea: from short-form promotional media made by and for oil companies that celebrate the design and delivery of awe-inspiring structures required to locate and extract oil in such an inhospitable environment, to (short-lived) soap-operas that inform viewers about unfamiliar working patterns and dangers of offshore labour, including the impact on family life.
But in feature films and television drama, offshore oil rigs can also function as sites of psychological and/or supernatural horror. An imperilled crew are threatened by a malevolent organism released from deep below, the result of the company’s persistent extractivism as/and petrocapitalism.
Turning to exploration of the aesthetics of horror in the recent television serial, The Rig (Amazon Prime, 2023), I ask whether the institutional conventions and constraints of mainstream film and television delimit opportunities for the disruption of, and/or critical reflection on, a normalized acceptance of the persistence of petrocapitalism.
- Speaker
- Dr Annette Davison
- Venue
- MacRobert Building, MR028
- Contact
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For further information or to receive the Microsoft Teams link for this event, please contact Dr Christina Ballico.