The Trip to Nitrate: The 9th Annual Nitrate Picture Show

A combustible medium is perfect for a combustible world. Nitrate celluloid was discontinued as the de facto base for film stock in the early 1950s because of its notoriously flammable quality. Massive splotches of film history are completely lost to ashes because of vault fires such as the one that ravaged Twentieth Century Fox in 1937, which destroyed almost all the silent films made by the studio. Nitrate creates its own oxygen, meaning water does nothing to tame it, and there are few solutions to a nitrate fire besides letting it burn. 

At the 9th Annual Nitrate Picture Show in Rochester, New York, the medium takes centre stage; the exhibition and celebration of nitrate prints is the festival’s raison d’etre. On my first day of the weekend-long event, Deborah Stoiber, collection manager at the George Eastman Museum, burned a canister full of spare nitrate film in the parking lot of the museum’s archive as a demonstration. Within five seconds the fire was a meter high. Within 15 there was nothing left but ashes. 

The Nitrate Picture Show is in many ways a means of reckoning with cinema’s inherent volatility – with the ways history, technology, material deficiencies, casual neglect, and simple luck all cohere to make any screening possible. It’s a way of viewing cinema that isn’t insulated in the air-controlled consumerist bubble of the multiplex or the cloying have-it-your-way coziness of the streaming experience. It’s an event that invites one to open themselves up to chance, discovery, and disappointment in exciting ways. With the lineup withheld until the first morning of the festival, one can’t even be certain there’ll be a single movie they like, but the experience is never less than illuminating.

As a festival of film conservation, the imprint of history is regularly foregrounded in the lengthy introductions that precede every screening and the discussions amongst the audience afterwards. It’s easy to read this historical sense both onscreen, like in the 1947 Ealing comedy Hue and Cry (Charles Chrichton), a boy’s adventure tale shot in the rubble of a war-ravaged London, or offscreen, like with Tsuma yo bara no yô ni (Wife! Be Like A Rose!, Mikio Naruse, 1935), one of the few Japanese movies of the era to survive on nitrate because it was also one of the very few to be distributed in the United States. Given the paucity of surviving nitrate prints that are still projectable – the print needs to have less than 1.5% shrinkage rate or else it can get caught in the projector and combust – the curation of the festival presents unique challenges. Much of the program is beholden to an inherent paradox in film preservation: very popular films are usually conserved first but overplayed and often too damaged to exhibit; meanwhile lesser-known titles aren’t as likely to be preserved, but their restored copies are often underplayed and in better conditions. 

You Only Live Once

This means that the festival’s programming hinges on a fascinating mix of artistic merit, technological novelty, and historical value that continually toes the line between popularity and obscurity. For every classic like La Ronde (Max Ophüls, 1950) and My Man Godfrey (Gregory La Cava, 1936), the festival’s canonical titles are more often third-tier works by first-tier directors. Fritz Lang, for example, was represented not by his 40’s noirs or German Expressionist films, but with You Only Live Once (1937), an unrelentingly bleak Bonnie and Clyde adaptation where every innocent move made by the main couple (Henry Fonda and Sylvia Sydney) only sends them deeper into a distinctly American hell of corruption, petty-mindedness, and remorseless violence. It’s a film bursting with endless visual creativity, from a chorus of frogs ironically serenading Fonda and Sydney on their wedding night to a foggy prison escape bathed in an immaculate white light that makes the prison gates look like the gates of heaven. In a lineup that comprised 12 films spread across four days, You Only Live Once was one of the biggest crowd-pleasers, a sensational movie-movie that produced the most audible reactions of the festival.

The festival’s boldest choice, however, came right at the end in a move of curatorial bravado that left audiences polarized. Billed as “The Blind Date with Nitrate,” the Nitrate Picture Show’s closing film is a tantalizing mystery that’s teased throughout the weekend, as all details such as title, year, director, genre, and nationality remain unknown until the film’s opening credits. Often reserved for obvious crowd-pleasers like Pinocchio (Ben Sharpsteen and Hamilton Luske, 1940) or The Third Man (Carol Reed, 1949), this year’s slot  went to a film so breathtakingly out of left-field that the choice almost constituted a move into the avant-garde: Nazi director Veit Harlan’s 1939 remake of Sunrise (F.W. Murnau, 1927), Die Reise nach Tilsit (The Journey to Tilsit). Initially met with audible crying and thunderous applause by those presumably ignorant of the film’s background, Tilsit was made by the same filmmaker behind the most notorious antisemitic movie of all time, Jud Süß (1940), a post-screening revelation that led to sustained disorientation and lengthy discussions that played out largely online across the following days.

A somewhat conventional melodrama that repeatedly touches the prongs of such greats as Dreyer, Borzage, and Hitchcock, The Journey to Tilsit is an often creaky, classical film that nonetheless manages to astound the spectator with awesome coastal landscapes, a surprisingly nuanced love-triangle, and inspired uses of camera movement and sound design. Unlike Sunrise, which quickly disposes of the husband’s vamp mistress to focus on the couple’s rediscovery of each other in the city, Harlan puts the emphasis on the romance between the country woman, Elske (Kristina Söderbaum, Harlan’s wife), her restless husband Endrik (Philip Dorn), and the Polish city-woman he’s having an affair with, Sapierska (Anna Dammann). While Söderbaum might be “singularly representative of the Nazi ideal,” as historian Antje Ascheid claims,¹ and Sapierska a clear ethnic other (the film was shot before Hitler’s invasion of Poland, but released two months after), Harlan is largely even-handed in his treatment of the two women, repeatedly empathizing with Sapierska’s impossible position as the other woman and lingering over her suffering.

Die Reise nach Tilsit (The Journey to Tilsit)

Tilsit’s aesthetic richness aside, the screening, introduced without a word on the film’s genesis or context, was a profound experience. The sense of whiplash I felt after connecting the dots was a fascinating means of assessing how heavily I’m influenced by my own prejudices and presuppositions. Like many in the audience, judging by the response on Letterboxd and Reddit, the idea of being somewhat duped into blindly enjoying a Nazi film is a rather uncomfortable one. Yet as Laura Mulvey once said, “destruction of pleasure is a radical weapon”² and few festival experiences have felt as imaginative and politically potent. It left me grappling with a few interesting questions: what does it mean to love a Nazi film? How is that different to loving countless Hollywood films that trade in ethnic, racial, class, and imperial stereotypes? We afford American films (and British, French, Russian, Italian, Chinese, etc) all sorts of ideological nuances and ambiguities that would seem flagrantly perverse if they were afforded a Nazi film, and yet is there any good reason for that beyond simple moral righteousness?

I’m distrustful of the need to separate the art from the artist, but I love the ways in which we can constantly swirl around the dialectic that forms between the two. Part of the task of the viewer is to attempt to reconcile the many lives an aesthetic object can take on with the unwaveringly fallible life of the artist behind it. It’s a task that’s always incomplete, but it’s part of what makes art invigorating and long-lasting. Festivals in the Trump era often claim political purpose only to deliver trite bourgeois commonplaces about #resistance and corporate-endorsed solidarity. Real change comes through provocation, and a political sensibility that is perpetually self-gratifying is unlikely to lead to any substantive, positive ruptures. History should have the power to shock, and a festival dedicated to film history should have a right, if not a mandate, to shock you with it. That a festival whose titles almost all predate the year 1952 could encourage more reflections than any contemporary-minded festival I’ve been to is a testament not just to the poverty of the latter, but the vitality of the former.

The Nitrate Picture Show’s ability to produce some of the most unique cinematic experiences around was fully evident long before the festival’s closing night drama. Less commented on, but equally as stunning, was this edition’s commitment to exploring the history of colour technology. Opening with the first ever three-strip Technicolor feature, Becky Sharp (Rouben Mamoulian, 1935), it was clear from the get-go that this was going to be a program that challenged the audience to watch films in different ways than we were used to. Touted in the introduction as a nearly avant-garde work for its garish use of colour, Becky Sharp largely underwhelmed me as a dramatic experience but held me rapt whenever I shifted my focus solely to its images. Narratively, the film is simply flat: the camera rarely crawls forward from a stagey proscenium-bound frontal view and Miriam Hopkins’ performance as Becky Sharp is relentlessly, monotonously shrill. And yet, as a colour space, a work that was intended to stun you with striking splotches of red and yellow, it’s utterly magnificent. 

Becky Sharp

Conceived as a demonstration of the aesthetic (and financial) values Technicolor could bring to cinema, Becky Sharp is primarily a technical showcase; it stands to reason that colour designer Robert Edmond Jones was billed above both the film’s writer, Francis Edward Faragoh, and cinematographer, Ray Rennahan. Unlike later colour films that strove for naturalism and subtle shifts in hues to guide the audience’s attention without distracting them, in Becky Sharp one is overwhelmed by colours at almost every moment. Hopkins’ bright yellow polka dot dresses, and the scarlet coats of the various British officers who intersect her orbit, do not enhance the narrative’s emotions, but rather provide the film’s only compelling ones. Perversely, this sidelining of character for purely visual textures actually enriches Becky Sharp’s themes and makes it a superior piece of art, even if a more oblique one. Based on William Makepeace Thackeray’s 1848 novel Vanity Fair, the film’s emphasis on physical values and appearances raises many of the same questions the source material poses on the value of wealth, style, and beauty. The decadent superficiality of the British aristocracy and the vulgar superficiality of Classical Hollywood become intertwined sites of breathtaking grandeur. 

This was something that I felt could only be fully revealed to me at the Nitrate Picture show, where one could see the film (and its colours) on the medium it was originally presented in. To attend the festival is, in a sense, to rekindle one’s attention to visual and technical textures, and to be encouraged to watch films in a more focused, less casual manner. The handful of follow-up screenings to Becky Sharp, which also emphasized colour processes, were a wonderful case in point. 

While the next morning’s screening of Canyon Passage (Jacques Tourneur, 1946) presented a stimulating contrast with its more naturalistic western vistas, the standout was the Nitrate Shorts block, which featured seven different colour processes across 13 films. Starting with a 109-year-old stencil-coloured print of a French film on caterpillars, Les Destructeurs de nos jardins (The Destroyers of Our Gardens, Pathé Frères, 1916), the program continued all the way to three-strip Technicolor with detours around other formats like Kodachrome, Gasparcolor, Cinecolor, Magnacolor, and Multicolor. The chance to parse through so many samples projected in close proximity to one another, all in their original format, and pick out subtle variations in colour development, felt like a once in a lifetime experience. It was a screening that revealed to me the textures of cinematic colour in wholly unique and astoundingly precise ways. 

Multicolor, a two-colour process represented by the final and sole surviving reel of a 1929 Fox Musical, Married in Hollywood (Marcel Silver), felt underwhelmingly monochromatic. Shot for realism and set on a dusty Hollywood backlot, the film looked drenched in a sickly green-ish grey that felt dull and wholly unnatural. Witnessing Two-Color Kodachrome featured in ten minutes of test footage from 1925, however, made me appreciate the possibilities of a two-colour system when divorced from realism and narrative motivation. Bright orange dresses gave off a spectral glow that contrasted beautifully with the pearly-white faces of various models. Two-minutes of various colours swirling inside a kaleidoscope at the end of the reel gave me a visceral, hypnotic response through their subtle, pleasant tones. By the time we got back to three-strip Technicolor with the travelogue film Florida, Land of Flowers (Russ Shields, 1940), that process’s superiority became apparent in wholly new ways. Flesh tones, foliage, flowers, and indigenous handcrafts were captured with such lucidity that even today’s most advanced digital technology wouldn’t match.

As a program dedicated to the exhibition of the 70-years extinct medium of celluloid nitrate, the Nitrate Picture Show might be written off by outsiders as a glorified academic conference aimed exclusively at archivists, programmers, critics, and film-on-film die-hards. But while the crowd might largely consist of white boomer and millennial cinephiles drawn from nearby New York and Toronto, it’s a testament to the programmers’ talents that the event transcends its niche appeal and can speak to larger philosophical and aesthetic questions while feeling so astoundingly fresh year after year. It’s no easy feat to engender such lively debates and fresh shocks with a slate of films that are largely aging into their 100s, and it also shows a large amount of trust in the audiences’ ability to appreciate films they might be initially repulsed by. The curators’ main drive is not to please audiences, so much as to advance the cause of cinephilia and film studies. Three years since my first trip in 2022, the Nitrate Picture Show continues to grow, setting new records for audience attendance and finding new aspects of cinema history to mine. It’s a thriving and vitally important event that has broadened its abilities beyond what I would have initially thought possible.

The Nitrate Picture Show
29 May – 1 June 2025
https://www.eastman.org/nitrate-picture-show

Endnotes