The Price of Oil is an experimental animated film by Mani Mehrvarz and Maryam Muliaee of the Buffalo Documentary Project. The film is set to Wooden Cities’ performance of Frederic Rzewski’s piece of the same name, from their debut album, WORK.
Rzewski’s piece was inspired by a 1980 disaster in which the Alexander Kielland, a floating platform used to house oil-drilling workers in the North Sea, capsized, killing 139 people. The Price of Oil 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. Both [are] caught in a tragic design over which they have no control, manifesting itself on the one side as greed, and on the other as need.”
The animation was created through various stop motion techniques and programming in video editing software. As an archival art practice, this experimentation involved more than a three-month period process of research, curating and reworking more than eight thousand archival images/stills, all of which have been animated in response to the music piece.
The film has been having a great season, winning international awards:
- Mention Award, FIVA.9 Festival Internacional de Videoarte (Buenos Aires, Argentina)
- Special Mention Award, “The Unforeseen” 4th Annual International Experimental Film Festival (Belgrade, Serbia)
and being part of the official selection at the following festivals:
- Mexico City Independent Film Festival (2020)
- Now & After International Video Art Festival (2020)
directed by Mani Mehrvarz
animation by Maryam Muliaee
music by Frederic Rzewski
performed by Wooden Cities