The Price of Oil was written by the American composer Frederic Rzewski in 1980, and was inspired by a contemporary disaster in which the “Alexander Kielland,” a floating platform used to house oil-drilling workers in the North Sea, capsized, killing 139 people. The piece consists of an interplay between two characters, an oil dealer in the Rotterdam spot market and a worker/survivor of the disaster. The two characters never meet, but both, in the composer’s words, “make up complementary parts of a superstructure which governs their individual behavior, and whose functioning, in turn, depends upon their active presence. The video was made in an experimental process of assembling and incorporating eight thousand stills, and through a combination of stop motion techniques and computer programing. The historical images were taken from various old newspapers and magazines and reworked to bear a reference to the natural disasters, wars, political scandals, death tolls, and murders that in some direct or indirect ways suggest a link to the issues of the oil and their aftermath. The video is an archival art practice that brings to attention how the artists through their experimenting with the archive and mobilizing the archival materials can challenge the established narrative of the history and reality.
cast & credits:
Mani Mehrvarz, director and editor
Maryam Muliaee, animation
Evan Courtin, narrator
Rebecca Marin, dealer
Ethan Hayden, worker
Steve Lattimore, John Smigielski, drums
T.J. Borden, Dylan Gechoff, Ian Kerr-Mace, Megan Kyle, tooty-tubes (winds)
Evan Courtin, Nicholas Emmanuel, Michael McNeill, Stephen Solook, Katie Weissman, whacky-pipes (percussion)
Brendan Fitzgerald, instrument builder & conductor
Ethan Hayden, score realization
Engineered, edited, mixed, and mastered by Chris Jacobs
Co-edited by Ethan Hayden and Brendan Fitzgerald
Awards:
Mention Award, FIVA.9 Festival Internacional de Videoarte, Buenos Aires, Argentina, 2019
Special Mention Award, The Unforeseen – International Experimental Film Festival, Belgrade, Serbia
—This film is traveling for festivals now and will be available online soon—