"Whether it is the petroleum needed to make the film movies are shot on or the tungsten necessary for studio lights, every film relies, to some degree, upon extractive processes. Indeed, Hollywood's rise alongside that of the oil industry spurred the economic growth of Southern California in the beginning of the twentieth century. In The Cinema of Extractions , Brian Jacobson defines early cinema as a world-making system comprised of an interwoven series of emergent technologies, resource economies, and new industrial practices. Cinema's primary product was not only the movies themselves but a way of thinking about the world. This way of thinking is one definition of the "cinema of extractions," a cinema that defined the world as manageable, usable, and manipulable-in sum, extractable. Jacobson combines the material and industrial history that shaped filmmaking with readings of films that are explicitly ( Wages of Fear , There Will Be Blood , etc.) and implicitly about the extractive process and its connection to film. The book also examines industrial films made by companies like Shell not only to dissect their message but also their formal qualities. In discussing the material conditions of both feature and industrial films, their forms, and historical contexts, Jacobson calls for a new approach to analyzing film, one that insists upon the value of reading texts in context; creates a dialogue between media and their material contexts, and applies this approach to industrial, corporate, and educational media as well as feature films, all of which, Jacobson argues, should be read together."--