What a super wee film. Thanks for posting it. As an aviation buff, it was great to get my first ever sight of the Spartan Cruiser II landing on Islay. The last of them was retired from service in 1942.
You can see this in Edinburgh City Art Gallery as part of the Glean - Early 20th Century Women Filmmakers exhibit. It’s attributed to Ruby Grierson, filmed in 1939, 19 mins with sound, on loan from BFI and shown with permission of Shell International Ltd. but out of copyright as director died in 1940, more than 70 years ago.
I love this genre of scripting and aged sound and background music. There's a quality that sets it all apart, a sense of the past. I looked up R I Grierson as I thought he did the ground breaking Night Mail documentary. Well, um, John Grierson did. However R I was Ruby Isabel, his sister, who also made documentaries but was lost when the ship she was on was torpedoed in the Atlantic in WW2. It looks like she and her brother had very active lives that were Socially motivated but hers was cut short.
Great film but it might be a bit older than the fifties. The film advertised at the cinema is “Life” with Michael Redgrave and Wilfred Lawson. This was released in January 1939. So, unless this was stock footage of a cinema, the film might actually be pre-war.
I've been looking up R I Grierson (Ruby Isabel) as I got her mixed up with her brother John who did Night Mail. I'm currently in one of these internet worm holes on them both but she was killed on Sept 17th 1940 so this documentary has to be before that.
Yes, it's fairly obvious from the vehicles and the clothing, and even from the names of the companies on show, that this is not a 1950's film. But it's interesting to see that even as far back as the 1930's the oil companies were producing propaganda to reinforce the idea that their products were an essential part of modern life. Of course, they would have said then, and probably sincerely believed, that this kind of corporate and product promotion was merely educational, but they only wanted to 'educate' the public abut selective aspects of their overall business. You'll notice that there is no mention of the places where this oil actually comes from, or the brutal oppression and intervention in those countries that was already deemed necessary to ensure and safeguard supplies of crude oil for the British Empire (as it was then) and the Industrialised Western nations who were reshaping their economies around it. Coal was still the king of electricity generation, rail transport, and much industrial/mechanical power at this time, but oil was already taking over the maritime sector and the growth of aviation and motor transport (both mentioned here) was well under way. I had an uncle who went to sea as a fourteen year old Cabin Boy around the time this film was made, and his first trip was on a tanker sailing to the Persian Gulf. He was too young to understand the nature of the system her was a small part of at the time, but his memoirs give a hint of the nature of imperialism and how it dealt with the 'natives'... even of places like Persia who had a great civilisation when the Britons were still running around painted with woad.
