ABSTRACT
Founded in 1907 and currently active in over 140 countries, Royal Dutch/Shell is one of the largest private-sector energy corporations in the world. Like other major companies, Royal Dutch/Shell, an Anglo-Dutch multinational, developed a keen interest in the moving image as early as the 1920s. Shell management recognized film as an ideal medium for reaching out and building public support for its activities. Over the years, Shell has produced hundreds of documentaries, many of them dealing with scientific and technological subjects. Beyond questions of scientific significance and educational value, the Shell films are of particular interest in that they reflect and serve to implement some of the company policies of a major global player in one of the key industries of the 20th century. Furthermore, in the case of Shell and particularly in the early films, company policies intersect with Dutch and British colonial interests, as they do with global geopolitical concerns in the later films, up to discussions of global warming in the films from the late 1990s. Accordingly, the Shell films may be read as exemplary media interfaces that tie some of the key economic and political discourses of the 20th century into a visual rhetoric which systematically links company interests to larger political and societal goals. While the limited scope of this contribution does not allow for a detailed discussion of the company’s communication strategies, of how these relate to the film medium and how they evolved over time, I will provide a brief history of the production, use, and purposes of Shell films, with an eye to future research.
