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Translated by Anke Mebold
The purpose of home cinema: To enrich family life, to bring diversity to daily routine, to educate growing adolescents, to amuse the young, to entertain guests of the family.1
- Agfa sales brochure, 1937
In recent decades, the projection of film prints has become increasingly removed from the experience of cinema. Magnetic, electronic and digital formats continue to displace many traditional uses of photochemical materials. Yet the current marketing of video, DVDs anddownloads for in-home consumption is certainly not a novel phenomenon of media history. Throughout their history, manufacturers developed new markets for selling film products, whether for theatrical or nontheatrical use. Films for showing at home and films shot by amateurs were partof cinema from the verybeginning of the twentieth century. The success or failure of any of the many small-gauge formats entering the marketplace can often be linked to the properties of their carrier materials.
This article traces the history of the film material known as Ozaphan, concentrating on its manufacturers' marketing strategies and the specific physical and chemical properties of the material itself. For four decades this cellophane-based brand of motion-picture film was a carrier medium for German sales-library movies aimed at the home market. Contracts and inter-company agreements (which survive in the Bundesarchiv and elsewhere) reveal how this product was introduced to that customer base. The material properties of Ozaphan helped determine, among other things, how projectors were designed and how sellers of movies for the home selected content. To a greater degree than was true of the standard film bases (nitrate, diacetate and triacetate), the properties of Ozaphan also influenced corporate decision-making about its commercial exploitation.
Developed in France in the early 1920s, Ozaphan was a slow-burning positive film material based on the composition of its better-known predecessor, cellophane. In Germany it was actively produced and used from 1932 until the mid-1960s. Most was cut to a 16mm gauge, although an 8mm version was produced in the mid-1950s. Movies printed on Ozaphan stock were employed mainly in the home cinema arena.
In Germany, Ozaphan was a milestone of home entertainment, aiding the diffusion of film technologies into German households during the last century. Even with the recent swell of publications addressing the histories of amateur film...