The characterization of Venezuela as a petrostate has been instrumental in its historical configuration as a nation unable to achieve modernity. The span of Venezuela’s intrinsic relationship with oil has had an impact on the country’s economic and political spectrum and has also resulted in a set of effects and affects relating to the social history of Venezuela. This article analyses how the documentaries Pozo muerto (Rebolledo, 1968) and Mayami nuestro (Oteyza, 1981) represent oil as amnemonic instrument that chronicles Venezuela’s socio-economic ruin. To achieve this, the notion of memory is addressed as a plastic temporal operation, paying special attention to the subject–object articulation in both films. Produced during the 1960s and 1980s, these films record the socio-economic and political crossroads of a country for which oil has been the tool used to trace the mnemonic geography of its predictable debacle.