A National Film Board of Canada production

Metal creaks, excavators crunch and workers weld against an alien landscape. Witness the last days of decommissioned oil and gas platforms as they’re dismantled in Karl Lemieux’s experimental short.

Some 12,000 oil and gas platforms remain at sea. What happens when one reaches the end of its life? In an experimental audiovisual journey to the shores of Scotland, acclaimed filmmaker Karl Lemieux (Godspeed! You Black Emperor, Quiet Zone) documents the painstaking process of dismantling these industrial behemoths. Metal creaks, excavators crunch and workers weld against desolate landscapes, captured on 16-mm film manipulated with photochemical processes, and amplified by Swedish artist BJ Nilsen’s haunting sonic landscape. The result is a ritual that seems both alien and undeniably Earthbound.

I’ve always been fascinated by industrial architecture. The utilitarian nature of industrial structures creates shapes, volumes and textures that you don’t find in residential or commercial buildings. From this perspective, oil platforms are incredibly weird. They resemble giant steel monsters made of tubes. It’s so interesting to see several in the same place.  

I’m also interested in the fact that they are a symbol of excess and industrial destruction—of the extraction of fossil fuels—and that platform workers face extremely dangerous conditions. So I found being close to these structures a little chilling. 

I grew up in Kingsey Falls, Quebec, a small industrial town with more factories than houses. Right next door is Val-des-Sources and an open-pit asbestos mine. It’s a hole over two kilometres in diameter and nearly half a kilometre deep, surrounded by mountains of mining waste. I was fascinated by the “Anthropocene” even before we had a word for it. I’ve always known that the human transformation of nature was problematic; that we are a kind of cancer on the planet.  

Of course, we are affected by the environment we grow up in. And sound is part of that, too. At home, in the summer, I remember that we didn’t open the windows facing the factory because it was so noisy. I grew up with that industrial hum. I don’t know if it’s related, but I like “noise music” and abstract sound art. I find it comforting and it’s very prevalent in my films.  

When you consider that it takes more than a year just to dismantle the base and six legs, and that there are currently over 12,000 working platforms pumping oil and gas out of the Earth, it puts the job we have in front of us in perspective. We’re talking about a climate emergency, but we’re doing almost nothing about it.  

Even if we just stopped building them altogether and concentrated our efforts on dismantling them and moving away from fossil fuels, it would be a step in the right direction. But is taking a step enough when we should actually be running? No, but if humanity is to survive what’s coming, I think it’s important to stay hopeful and focus on the monumental task at hand.  

With my documentary films, I’m trying to make people think about environmental problems and the state of the world, both present and future. It’s hard to understand something when we can’t see it or it doesn’t affect our daily lives. Maybe that’s also where my desire to film these strange places comes from.