Content area
Full text
Blast from the Past George Eastman House s new annual celebration keeps a venerable but vibrant medium alive
IN 1948, EASTMAN KODAK INTRODUCED A NEW MOTION-PICTURE STOCK that used transparent plastic film made of cellulose triacetate to back the gelatin emulsion. This new base was a replacement for nitrocellulose, the standard material used for film since the dawn of moving pictures. The discovery of an alternative to nitrocellulose that met industry standards for durability and cost-effectiveness was an innovation greatly to be desired, for nitrocellulose-"nitrate," for short-was notoriously flammable, burning at a combustion rate 15 to 20 times that of wood. In layman's terms, it blew up real good.
This trait resulted in numerous fatal projection booth fires of the sort dramatized in Giuseppe Tornatore's 1988 weepie Cinema Paradiso. One notorious example: in 1927, at Montreal's Laurier Palace Theatre, a nitrate fire, the nitrogen oxide gases it produced, and the panicked stampede that followed resulted in the death of 78 children, as well as, shortly afterward, a law forbidding anyone under the age of 16 access to cinema screenings, which remained on the books until 1961. (The movie playing that day was the unfortunately titled Stan Laurel comedy Get 'Em Young.) Nitrocellulose, aka guncotton, was also an ingredient in the military firearm propellant cordite, and the scarcity of surviving material from the adolescence of American filmmaking might in part be explained by the fact that much early cinema was put to the task of shelling the Kaiser's trenches.
The new cellulose triacetate, known as "safety" film for self-explanatory reasons, quickly replaced nitrate, whose manufacture ceased altogether in 1951. Once the changeover was complete, there's nothing to suggest that there was a public outcry comparable to the faint din that's been raised by diehard cinéphiles as DCP, having blitzkrieged the first-run houses, has begun to edge out 35mm in independent and repertory venues.
In a sense, then, those attending the first Nitrate Picture Show, a 10-feature, all-nitrate event held in early May in the George Eastman House's Dryden Theater in Rochester, New York, were all taking a bit of a gamble-and not just because the program's bill of fare was not announced until the last moment, or the risk, however slight, of death by fire....