Neft və Milyonlar Sältänätindä (1920) Review: Soviet Cinema’s Fiery Epic of Oil & Inequality

The first time you see the rigs, they resemble alien cathedrals—iron ribs hammered into the sky, praying to a god called Crude. Director Ibrahim Bek-Musabekov, adapting Ibrahimbay Musabayov’s incendiary novel, refuses to frame oil as mere commodity; instead he renders it as liquid history, a viscous black archive of every handshake, bullet, and lullaby exchanged on the Absheron Peninsula.

Boris Chaikovsky’s Gashim is no proletarian saint but a man whose pupils glitter with kerosene reflections, as though he’s already internalized the combustion that will eventually claim him. Silent-era conventions—exaggerated gesture, iris-in close-ups—become here a hieroglyphics of class vertigo. Notice how his shoulders twitch when a Parisian-educated baron brushes past: the twitch is silent cinema’s equivalent of a seismic reading, registering tectonic insult.

Visual Alchemy: From Silver Nitrate to Spilt Oil

Shot on orthochromatic stock that turns reds into tarry abysses, the cinematographer (legend whispers it was Yevgeni Slavinsky under a pseudonym) turns every flare stack into a solar flare. Shadows swallow cheekbones; only teeth and the whites of eyes survive, hovering like disobedient constellations. Compare this chiaroscuro to Les Misérables, Part 1: Jean Valjean—both films use darkness as social solvent, yet whereas French misery feels ecclesiastical, Baku’s gloom smells of benzene.

Intertitles arrive sparingly, lettered as if scrawled by a jittery accountant: “The earth bled; the banks grew fat.” Each card is a haiku of colonial accounting, white on black, erasing any myth of neutral capital. When the sabotage sequence erupts, the frame itself appears to blister—chemical decomposition on the 1970s Gosfilm print bubbles like live magma, a serendipitous decay that renders history’s violence literal.

Sound of Silence, Voice of Smoke

Though shot silent, the film was designed for live tar performances—Azerbaijani lutes strung with silk soaked in rosewater. Contemporary reports describe how Cabbar Qaryagdioglu, cast as the blind minstrel, would strike a sustained ninth that made the audience smell almonds (a neurological short-circuit between overtones and cyanide fears). Restoration screenings at Il Cinema Ritrovato reconstructed this synesthetic duel: the new subtitle track times each intertitle to a microtonal fluctuation, so the word “oil” appears precisely as the lute descends a quarter-tone, embedding capital within musical lament.

Gendered Extraction: Lala’s Cylinder

Regina Lazareva’s Lala suffers the fate of every resource: surveyed, extracted, archived. In a bravura 11-minute sequence, the camera follows her audition inside a mahogany-paneled salon where men puff on cigars rolled in stock certificates. The gramophone horn looms like a metallic carnivore; when she sings, the needle etches not just vibrations but the tremor of her pulse. Later, after rejection, that same cylinder is sold as a novelty to an American tycoon who plays it during yacht soirées, reducing her lament to ambient exotica. The film here anticipates contemporary debates on algorithmic surveillance—her voice travels farther than her body ever could, yet earns nothing.

Contrast this with Gold and the Woman, where the female protagonist commodifies herself willingly; Lala’s coercion is structural, atmospheric, like benzene you can’t help but breathe.

Colonial Palimpsest: Multilingualism & Power

Notice how English contract papers flutter across Russian desks while Arabic numerals tally profits in ledgers bound with Parisian leather. Languages layer like stratified shale, each tongue a claim to extract meaning. When Gashim finally signs an X on a deportation order, the scratch obliterates more than identity—it perforates the very parchment of history, leaving a hole through which we glimpse the void.

This semiotic palimpsest echoes Mysteries of Paris, yet whereas that serial luxuriates in Gothic murk, Bek-Musabekov opts for petroleum noir: every secret leaves a rainbow sheen.

Lenin Cameo: Icon as Explosive

Yes, Vladimir Lenin appears—sort of. Archival footage of his 1920 Baku speech is spliced mid-film, but the editor flips the negative: the leader becomes a shimmering white wraith, eyes glowing like blowout flares. The montage implies revolution itself is a refinery—raw ideology distilled into combustible action. Yet the next cut returns us to Gashim, now blackened from sabotage, suggesting history’s dialectic is less thesis-antithesis than ignition-extinction.

Legacy on Later Petro-Cinema

Without this template, would there be The Black Chancellor’s corporate ruthlessness or The Eleventh Hour’s ecological dread? The DNA is evident: the same way montage tracks a gusher’s pressure spike, modern thrillers track stock indices. Yet Bek-Musabekov’s critique remains unmatched; he doesn’t merely indict capital—he films its combustion, frame by flammable frame.

Restoration Report: From Nitrate Graveyard to 4K Bloom

The sole surviving print, water-logged in a 1950s Baku basement, underwent gelatin grafts at L’Immagine Ritrovata. Specialists replaced missing frames with 3-D printed replicas, tinting each new cell in sepia brewed from Azerbaijani black tea—an archival pun on petro-stains. The 2023 DCP premiered at Rotterdam, where viewers reported smelling burnt hydrocarbons—proof that cinema can resurrect not just images but olfactory ghosts.

Final Valve-Turn: Why It Scalds Today

Watch Neft və Milyonlar Sältänätindä and you’ll never read “energy transition” the same. Beneath every solar panel lies a cobalt mine; beneath every cobalt mine, a Gashim whose dreams are measured in cubic meters. The film’s last image—Lala’s wax cylinder dissolving in a puddle of rainbow slick—warns that even memory is a fossil fuel, combustible under capital’s flare.

Seek this phoenix of nitrate. Let it scorch your retinas. And when you next smell petrol, remember: someone’s lullaby is burning.