Film’s Struggle Through the Ages: The 8th Annual Nitrate Picture Show

The only thing to discover at The Nitrate Picture Show is the past. With an entire slate of programming consisting of nothing besides rare nitrate prints, the festival is, by design, prohibited from showing any film made after 1952, the year nitrate film stock was discontinued in favour of acetate film stock. Hosted yearly by the George Eastman Museum in Rochester, New York, the festival is one of the few places where curious cinephiles can still feast their eyes on this discontinued medium. Today, nitrate cellulose film stock may loom large mainly for its dangers, which have become the thing of lore thanks to films like Inglorious Basterds (Quentin Tarantino, 2009) or even Sabotage (Alfred Hitchcock, 1936) that have played upon the highly flammable qualities of nitrate which led to its eventual discontinuation and the many devastating archive fires which have left long, lingering holes in the history of cinema.

A penchant for ruining lives and archives, however, is not the only thing nitrate has going for it, and the main draw of the festival for many cinephiles in attendance is the sheer beauty the film base affords the image. With a higher density of silver content and a more transparent base, the look of a nitrate print is more luminous, sharp, and bolder than a comparative acetate print. The effect is subtle, and it would be disingenuous of me to claim that I could always notice the difference but, in one brilliant demonstration, the festival consecutively screened one nitrate and one acetate print of Walt Disney’s classic Silly Symphonies cartoon, The Skeleton Dance (Walt Disney, 1929), without telling the audience which format was screening first or second. Asked by a show of hands afterwards who thought which print was which, an overwhelming majority guessed correctly, proving that even if the difference is slight, it’s still easily apparent. 

Deemed “a festival of film conservation, preservation, and archiveship” by festival director Peter Bagrov, the Nitrate Picture Show is in many ways also a celebration of cinema’s origins and past. A fact made abundantly clear by the inspired choice to open the festival with none other than D.W. Griffith’s 1916 masterpiece Intolerance, a film which Griffith himself in many ways crafted to be a historical monument and a total cinematic event.¹ Produced in the midst of The Birth of a Nation’s (1915) startling runaway success (over $60 million grossed on a $100,000 budget),² Griffith decided that the only option for a follow-up was to outdo that film’s epic sweep and push the medium even further than anyone had ever imagined it could go. Subsequently, he took a film nearly in the can titled The Mother and The Law (1919) and completely retooled it so that it would be merely one storyline of four in a time-jumping historical epic. The film moves along as a multi-pronged narrative that shuffles between the fall of Babylon, the crucifixion of Christ, the St. Bartholomew’s day massacre, and the aforementioned modern storyline of a mother, The Dear One (Mae Marsh) trying to save her son and husband, The Boy (Robert Harron) from mean-spirited social reformers and penal systems.

The result is a film that is an overwhelming showcase of cinematic technique, all ostensibly organised around the uniting themes of “intolerance” and “love’s struggle through the ages,” but more tangibly arranged simply in the service of the power of the film form and its myriad aesthetic and emotional possibilities. Griffith, who to his dying day claimed he never understood why anybody thought The Birth of a Nation was racist, was not a man of intense intellectual prowess; he did have however, to quote Jean Renoir, “the naivete of a truly great man” and whatever Intolerance lacks in common sense or intellectual coherence it supplements with such an intense, astounding cinematic vision that, more than 100 years later, it still stands as one of the most unique and impressive achievements in cinema.

Intolerance

Griffith built his Babylon as one to match the common myth of the historical city, one predicated on the quest for a universal language and suffused with an overabundance of ambition that could only result in disaster and legend. Griffith’s Babylon is a cornucopia of rapturous, decadent imagery replete with sets hundreds of feet tall and thousands of extras packing the frame, culled from skid row they even allegedly tried to actually kill one another during the battle scenes. Featuring the first crane shot; a dizzying amount of cross-cutting that would serve as the major inspiration for soviet montage; chiaroscuro lighting that would soon become associated with German Expressionism; and naturalistic performance styles that would take decades to fully come into favour – watching Intolerance is like watching the world being born. Or, if not the entire world, then at least the idea of a universal language of cinema.

In its attention to history and the prejudices of progress, it also proved to be an essential thematic curtain raiser for the festival, a neat encapsulation of the Nitrate Picture Show’s commitment to looking backwards and presenting the past, to showcasing, as Griffith might call it, cinema’s struggle through the ages. The festival seeks to highlight not just the films themselves, but also their exhibition and preservation histories as well. With twelve programs spread across one long four-day weekend, the festival’s line-up of 11 feature films and a dozen shorts are all selected not only for their aesthetic and dramatic merits, but also for their exhibition and preservation histories. Intolerance, for example, was introduced by festival director Peter Bagrov as not just a great film, but one with a story. The print we watched was struck by MoMA in the 1930s, sent to Germany a few years later where it was preserved, first by the Nazis, then by the GDR, before finally being sold to the Library of Congress during German reunification when the amount of archive space in the country shrunk. With every film introduced with a similarly lengthy recollection of its preservation history, watching a film at the Nitrate Picture Show is as much about watching a specific print as it is about having a cinematic experience, with every scratch and splice an event in itself.

In this way the festival stands distinctly apart even from other festivals geared toward cinema history like Il Cinema Ritrovato. There is no commercial function to the Nitrate Picture Show, no celebration of innovation or progress, no explicit sense of contemporary relevance at all. This is a festival that foregrounds the medium and the projection process and celebrates it as is and as it was. Loitering around the rather modest grounds of the single screen Dryden Theater which houses all of the festival’s screenings, it becomes immediately apparent that people are in attendance fully to experience and enjoy artifacts of cinema history. With tickets sold in weekend passes and the line-up only announced the morning of the first screening, the festival cultivates archivists and cinephiles who are committed to enjoying the medium and its history regardless of what’s screening.

Kikyō

That’s not to say, however, that the festival is devoid of any sense of discovery or that it’s simply a mausoleum to cinema history. On the contrary, if anything, one of the central sentiments I felt coming out of the festival was how much there is still to discover in cinema’s past. One of the most fascinating screenings of the festival was the Japanese film Kikyō (Homecoming, 1950) by Ōba Hideo, a mentor of Ōshima Nagisa and one of entertainment studio Shochiku’s leading directors of the time. Highly acclaimed on its release and beating out both Rashomon (Kurosawa Akira, 1950) and The Munekata Sisters (Ozu Yasujirō, 1950) in that year’s Kinema Junpo poll of the year’s 10 best films, Kikyō is today virtually unknown in the U.S. The screening at the Nitrate Picture Show was in fact the first known screening since the film’s 1978 U.S. premiere at The Japan Society.

The film begins as the story of a former naval officer (Saburi Shin) who becomes stateless during the war and befriends a sex worker in Singapore who later betrays him. Told in a very naturalistic, classical style with a few subtle hints of expressionism peppered throughout, the film truly takes off in its second half when the officer returns to Japan after the war and reconnects with his estranged daughter (Tsushima Keiko). As she goes looking for him at the Moss Temple in Kyoto the film launches into poetic high gear with soft focus, natural lighting, mystifying perspective shots, and a beautiful synth score all complementing each other to gracefully capture her anxious anticipation and timidity. Screened as the fourth film on a long day that started at 9:30am and ended at midnight, I won’t pretend that the movie captured my attention throughout, but this scene alone left an indelible impression on me, delivering one of the most surprising and essential experiences of the festival. It wonderfully demonstrated the unique experiences to be gleaned from the festival’s exploration of film archives, and that attention to nitrate is not simply fetishism but a unique means of preserving cinema history often neglected in favour of the restore, re-release on Blu-ray, and re-canonise paradigm that’s grown into an industry of its own over the past decade.

The festival also demonstrated its restless creativity and novelty in another early highlight, the nitrate shorts program which opened the first full day of the festival. Featuring a dozen pieces ranging from one minute to 20 minutes in length and ranging in genre from car commercials to cartoons, peep shows and beyond, the shorts program is an eclectic stew of curios that comes with no shortage of surprises. A highlight for me was Know for Sure (1941), a PSA on syphilis prevention directed by Lewis Milestone and produced by Darryl F. Zanuck. Milestone’s penchant for cinematic camerawork including dynamic dolly shots and expressionistic close-ups was a real treat, enhanced wonderfully by the astounding quality of the pristine print and the host of character actors like Ward Bond and Tim Holt who popped up. Matched with the corny educational film dialogue delivered in unintentionally campy monotones, it was also disarming in its casualness and capable of delighting in many different registers, from the ironic to the historic, and the melodramatic to the aesthetic.

Made in 1941 and indirectly advocating for eligible army enlistees to take care of their health, it was also, like Kikyō, one of the many films at the festival that directly or indirectly touched upon one of the two world wars. At an event where the films are organised and curated without any overt specific thematic intentionality, it’s fascinating to find the ways in which thematic similarities, overlaps, and resonances naturally and almost randomly arise between different films. If there was any organising unity to the festival, it was the spectre of war that appeared everywhere, from the chorus of heavenly angels which descend over the battlefields of WWI to issue a ceasefire at the end of Intolerance, to the incredibly dire post-Nazi Berlin on display in Roberto Rossellini’s Germany, Year Zero (1948). Even when confronted with films like Meet Me in St. Louis (Vincente Minelli, 1944) and The Strawberry Blonde (Raoul Walsh, 1941) which portray the excitement and romance of the turn of the century, it’s hard not to read war-time anxieties into their nostalgic yearning for a simpler past. 

From Mayerling to Sarajevo

Another intriguing approach to the war was witnessed in Max Ophüls’ De Mayerling à Sarajevo (From Mayerling to Sarajevo/Sarajevo, 1940), which portrays the ill-fated romance of Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand (John Lodge) and his Czech lover Sophie Chotek (Edwige Feuillère). Focused on the condescending snobbery and social constraints wielded by the Hapsburgs against Ferdinand and Chotek, the film traces Ferdinand’s years leading up to his infamous assassination, with the ominous inevitability of war looming large over the action, both onscreen and off. Forced to pause work on the film when he was drafted into the French army, Ophüls was only able to finish the film while on leave and subsequently rushed through the end of production in order to flee France and eventually make his way to America. The result is a film told in Ophüls’ esteemed opulent style with all manner of sumptuous set design and expressive tracking shots oozing a sense of aristocratic grace, yet often muddled between flippant montages and underbaked character development. It’s relatively clunky and yet the push-pull between fate, drama, history, and reality that’s happening both onscreen and off is nothing short of fascinating. Even if it’s not a success, there’s something fitting about a film where decadent and doomed European order is palpably crumbling before your eyes as the century’s Second World War is brought into focus. It offers a more distanced contrast to another film in the program, Jean Renoir’s Partie de campagne (A Day in The Country, 1936/1946), which was also left incomplete owing to the war, but is all the more affecting for the massive chronological gap subsequently left at its centre, which only deepens the pangs of bittersweet nostalgia running throughout.

The Nitrate Picture Show understands that conservation and preservation entail not only protecting the materials of film’s early and classic historical periods, but also in allowing them to continue their life in the present. Having attended the festival twice, what has struck me hardest upon leaving and returning to my more regular film-going habits is the sense of spiritual renewal I’ve felt towards my own cinephilia. Seeing these historic prints with such an eager, enthusiastic, and welcoming crowd feels like the epitome of the film-going experience and an exact encapsulation of why I base so much of my life around cinema. It’s refreshing, and the near opposite sensation to the exhaustion I feel after most festivals. It’s an event not to be missed.

Nitrate Picture Show
30 May – 2 June 2024
https://www.eastman.org/nitrate-picture-show

Endnotes