Fuelling the Nation: Imaginaries of Western Oil in Canadian Nontheatrical Film
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Background Canadian nontheatrical cinema has historically positioned natural resource extraction as intrinsic to the country’s economic development and national identity. During the 1940s and 1950s in particular with the discovery of Alberta’s vast oil reserves, industrial and documentary films about oil extraction associated petroleum with nation-building and modernization.Analysis This article examines The Story of Oil (1946, produced by the National Film Board of Canada), A Mile Below the Wheat (1949, sponsored by Imperial Oil), and Underground East (1953, sponsored by Imperial Oil) as examples of such “petro-films” following the oil booms in Turner Valley and Leduc, Alberta.Conclusion and implications The author demonstrates how these texts sought to position Western oil development in relation to contemporaneous resource industries, namely wheat agriculture and ranching. These films leveraged such comparisons to other regional “fuels” to situate petroleum within pre-existing national imaginaries about Canada’s twentieth-century resource economy, and normalize the oil industry’s land-use practices and transportation infrastructures like pipelines.Contexte Historiquement, le cinéma canadien non théâtral a établi un lien intrinsèque entre l’extraction des ressources naturelles, le développement économique, et l’identité nationale du pays. Durant les années 1940 et 1950, en particulier, avec la découverte des vastes réserves de pétrole de l’Alberta, les films documentaires et industriels sur l’extraction ont associé pétrole, modernisation et construction de la nation.Analyse Cet article traite des films The Story of Oil (1946, financé par l’Office Nationale du Film du Canada), A Mile Below the Wheat (1949, financé par l’Impériale), ainsi qu’Underground East (1953, financé par l’Impériale) comme représentatifs de ces « pétro-films » qui ont suivi l’essor des industries pétrolières de Turner Valley et Leduc, Alberta.Conclusion et implications L’auteur démontre comment ces textes ont cherché à associer le développement du pétrole dans l’Ouest avec les industries contemporaines du secteur primaire : agriculture du blé et élevage. Cette comparaison avec d’autres « carburants » régionaux a permis de situer le pétrole à l’intérieur d’un imaginaire national préexistant, construit autour de l’économie canadienne des ressources primaires au vingtième siècle. Elle contribue à normaliser les pratiques d’utilisation du territoire par les industries pétrolières, et leurs infrastructures de transport comme les pipelines.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".