South Africa’s Life Line is a short documentary film produced in South Africa in the 1950s, after the South African National Party was elected by the white electorate in 1948 and established an apartheid state. The film both propagates the central importance of oil to life in South Africa in the mid-twentieth century and promotes Caltex oil and its by-products, including Caltex petrol. Caltex had been established in the United States in 1936 as the California Texas Oil Company, a combined business venture between the Texas Company (later known as Texaco) and Standard Oil (later the Chevron Corporation), that expanded globally including to South Africa. The film was produced by the powerful Schlesinger Organisation’s production company, African Film Productions (AFP), that held a virtual monopoly over the production of nonfiction films in South Africa up to the late 1950s. This was due in large measure to the relationship that I. W. Schlesinger had forged and sustained with successive governments since he had first entered the entertainment industry in 1913. Moreover, his organization, and AFP in particular, had a long-standing reputation in the production of nonfiction in both English and Afrikaans. Apart from international award-winning and government-sponsored documentary films, the Schlesinger Organisation had pioneered what became the longest-running newsreel in the world, African Mirror. AFP was thus well poised from 1948 through the 1950s for the continued award of commissions 226from industry and the South African government after the National Party came to power....