A documentary in three sections, Frank Martin’s Cold Stack explores the impact of the energy industry on the landscape, environment and people: a cradle-to-deep-water-grave look at the changing landscape of consumption. 

The Kishorn fabrication yard, once having a cast of thousands, producing the concrete structures for oil rigs, is now staffed by a single caretaker. Through several voices, former workers, we feel the action, movement, now missing. It’s juxtaposed with images of stillness. But in that message, there’s an acknowledgement of change, a different motion. We move forward, through time and landscape, to see the end of an oil rig’s economic life. The final rest is at Cromarty Firth deep-water storage – cold stack. It’s a graveyard, that place where the carcass of commercial enterprise is dumped: small islands of disused platforms, stranded in nature. We end with a view of Ben Wyvis, overlooking the Cromarty Firth: a ridge of wind turbines. In stature there is a symmetry, an echo of the rig, legs in bedrock, anchored on land. The same motion, turning, generating power. What we see is transmission, conversion, change. A substitution of natural resources. 

Central to Cold Stack is the subjugation of nature. Visuals are anchored around place, space, resources: nature, rain, wind, cloud, deep open water, mountains. It’s a documentary of our impact upon the landscape and people. What we don’t see is recycling, reclamation. There’s a feeling of space junk, decommissioned satellites left in orbit, a dirty habit we need to break. 

Cold Stack is a poignant, crisp series of images, blowing understanding into the cycle of change, the lives affected and the legacy that remains to deal with. Frank Martin, doubling as director and camera operator, captures the stark, overshadowed humanity within the landscape.

Written by M D Swindells