ABSTRACT
The premiere of Desert Venture, a colour film promoting the transformative endeavours of the Arabian-American Oil Company (ARAMCO) in Saudi Arabia, is a prime example of how “ephemeral authorship” can be highly relevant to the study of industrial film. Desert Venture was promoted at its premiere and in other contexts as the work of Robert Yarnall Richie, a photographer and filmmaker with a well-established professional reputation within the oil industry. ARAMCO suggested that Desert Venture was the creative product of a “frontiersman” who exemplified many qualities outlined in Frederick Jackson Turner’s “The Frontier in American History” (1893), and in 1930s “nation-building” Westerns, mirroring the celebration in the film itself of the new American oil frontier in Saudi Arabia.
