Playfully referring to the program of radical reform of socialism in Czechoslovakia at the end of the 1960s (so-called “socialism with a human face”) and at the same time to the potential of environmentally conscious imagination in state socialism, this lecture aims to rethink industrial and agricultural film as a specific form of mediation of the human/nature/technology complex. It will primarily focus on films that have produced political rationality and aesthetics of energy and contributed to the neutralization (or questioning) of extractivism. Eastern European films celebrating coal miners, depicting the construction of large hydroelectric power plants and refineries, mapping the welding of transnational infrastructures such as oil and gas pipelines, explaining the construction of nuclear power plants, or revealing the possibilities of solar energy, as well as those communicating various energy crises, allow us to examine the connections between extractivism, energy, labour, and the environment differently than from the traditional perspective of the capitalocene, offering also a different map of geopolitical energy relations than between the West and the Global South.

This lecture will therefore offer a reframing of these concepts and dynamics through an Eastern perspective, while emphasizing the importance of studying the aesthetics of utility media as an essential complement to global material and intellectual histories and critical infrastructure studies. Drawing on a broad corpus of films spanning raw material sources and decades of the second half of the twentieth century, it will ask whether we can conceive industrial aesthetics beyond processuality, techno-optimism, and acceleration.