Blood And Oil

BLOOD AND OIL, THE MIDDLE EAST IN WORLD WAR I (DVD)
Quantum Leap 

Release date: April 18th 2011
Certificate (UK): E
Running time: 112 minutes

Year of production: 2006

Director: Marty Callaghan

Cast: Marty Callaghan, David Fromkin, Edward Erickson, David R. Woodward

Basic archive graphics, tacky editing and poor image quality give Blood And Oil the appearance of a cheap television production: one of those programs for the bleary hours which is ironically both a diversion for restless insomniacs and an effective soporific for History classes.

But beyond its rudimentary aesthetic values, the film is a cogent account of an important but underrepresented episode in world history.

Marty Callaghan, who I can find almost nothing about, writes, directs and narrates this feature-length documentary about the military and diplomatic contests for power and resources in the Middle-East during the First World War and its aftermath.

While Great Britain and its colonial armies sought to drive back the forces of the Ottoman Empire, London was already considering how to advance its interests in the region after the war. As early as 1916, Allied diplomats were in talks redraw the map and institute imperial rule.

Britain was quick to identify the incipient significance of the Middle East to Western supply of an emerging energy resource: oil. In the power vacuum left by the retreating Ottoman forces, Britain led the charge to control strategically important territories all the way from Egypt to Armenia.

Victories and defeats, advances and retreats, allegiances and betrayals: what follows is like a complex genocidal game of Risk. Blood And Oil makes the point that the world has visited its conflicts on the Middle-East with precious little concern for the welfare of indigenous populations. Decades of intervention without regard to the complex cultural history of the region causes the frequent eruptions of turmoil we continue to see today.

With a well-researched script and relentlessly fascinating archive footage, it is a pity that such amateurish production values should detract from what is otherwise a lucid and intensive chronicle of events which have shaped the Middle-East.

Dominic Walker

Dominic is an English graduate, promiscuous dilettante and epistemological liability. He likes the sentimentalisation of loathsomeness, fetishized Teutonic Romanticism, the labour theory of value and Manchester United’s transcendent Bulgarian striker, Dimitar Berbatov. He abominates Certainty, curses The Wealth of Nations, and detests only mayonnaise more than asinine bathetic turns.

His favourite kinds of film are laborious, unyielding, laboriously unyielding, anything you’ve never heard of, and pornographic. At twenty-three, his achievements include A Spectroscopic Study of the Notion of Perineum in Jane Austen’s Later-Early Period, for which he won a MOBO award, and this sentence.

Documentaries

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