Abstract
The history of documentary abounds with images of energy production and consumption. Non-fiction formats have contributed considerably to framing the debates about the global development of the coal, oil, and gas industries, nuclear energy, hydroelectricity, biofuels, wind energy, and solar power. In the course of these efforts at representation and argument an iconography of energy production and consumption has accumulated which, with time, has become a great depository of images of spent energy, reviewing, recalling and reviving the projects and associations that are now past. This paper comes out of a broader project “Gothic Energy” exploring the documentary archive as the embodiment of spent energy. The kinetic energy of the moving image in the present reanimates the world around energy production and consumption including the conceptualisation of energy itself – the source of warmth, heat, light, and movement - at the time the film was made. Part of the function of documentaries on energy has been the reconnection of energy to its sources once it became more abstract in the domestic sphere through the introduction of electricity into the home. This reconnection is now part of a history of ruins, preserved architecture, scarred landscapes. The paper will hence focus on the accumulation of the ghosts of energy, focussing particularly on the introduction of electricity and its role in the changing architecture and infrastructure of the home, exploring the how the representation of clean and invisible energy sources for the population connected with the corporate desire to celebrate the achievement of the extraction of energy from the earth’s resources, reappearing in the documentary film archive as history.