This three-part documentary describes the adventure of black gold from the places of extraction in the Persian desert (The Origins) - where Bertolucci collects testimonies and nostalgia of Italian workers, in the context of a mysterious and mythical Islam - to the oil tanker that crosses the Suez Canal and takes him to Genoa (The Journey): and here the director cites Le bateau ivre by Rimbaud and Le voyage à travers l’impossible by Méliès; up to the oil pipeline that takes him to Switzerland, Austria and Germany (Through Europe), with a final parallel between Colonel Drake, the first oil industrialist, and the Melvillian Captain Ahab. «It’s true», explains the author, «it was a documentary on commission, but I made it trying to distance myself, whenever possible, from the temptations and rules of documentary film. I filmed the drillers as if they were the pioneers of an archaic western, the helicopter pilots as anarchic and individualist heroes, like the solitary characters of Godard or Only Angels Have Wings».
