The Skeleton Dance (Walt Disney, 1929).
George Eastman Museum senior curator Peter Bagrov was buying time for a projector to be repaired before the Nitrate Picture Show’s opening-night screening of Intolerance (1916). He told the audience that a fellow archivist had once compared the event, held annually at the Museum’s Dryden Theatre, to a feast where the bourgeoisie dine on otherwise extinct animals. That archivist isn’t the festival’s only critic: I have heard others liken the wide-eyed worship of cinema’s mostly defunct physical materials to a necrophilia of sorts. After all, if nitrate prints are the last vestiges of an otherwise forgotten industry standard, the best indicator of what a film was supposed to look like, does their projection to enthused cinephiles over a long weekend in Rochester, New York, not constitute the defilement of some of film history’s most precious materials? Even if the prints do not go up in flames, every run through the projector—itself a piece of specialized equipment, found in just a handful of other venues in the United States—deteriorates the celluloid ever so slightly.
All major film productions were shot and shown on nitrate-base stock until 1951, when Kodak—founded by George Eastman and headquartered in Rochester—ceased production in favor of a less ignitable acetate base. Nitrate’s qualities endure in cultural memory and the lexicon alike; the transparency of nitrate base and the consequently radiant appearance of the projected image gave rise to the term “silver screen.” Accordingly, the first two questions everyone asks about watching a nitrate print are if it is safe and if you can see the difference. The Nitrate Picture Show’s continued existence answers the former, and it has tried repeatedly to answer the latter: Last year, the final reel of The Third Man (1949) was screened on both nitrate and safety stock, one after the other, so that audiences could compare the two. A safety reel of The Wizard of Oz (1939) was shown in the midst of an otherwise complete nitrate print because one reel was too damaged to project; the same happened with Pinocchio (1940) the year before. In each of these cases, however, the test was not perfect—either the prints were struck from different sources or the safety print was struck much later from a decayed negative. This year’s test had no such complications. Nitrate and safety prints of Walt Disney’s The Skeleton Dance (1929), made within a few years of each other and both struck from the original negative, were screened back-to-back with the order unannounced. Asked after the lights went up who thought the first print was nitrate, only a few of the approximately 500 attendees erroneously raised their hands. Whatever one might think of the ethics of projecting nitrate, its purported luminous silvers and rich blacks are not mere hype.
But the appearance of nitrate is hardly the most interesting thing about the Nitrate Picture Show. The program notes include details about each print—even how much it has shrunk—and pre-screening introductions turn an overview of a print’s life into both an art and a history lesson. Two years ago, Max Ophüls’s Liebelei (1933) screened on a print with all Jewish names removed from the credits due to Nazi censorship, but postwar American censors had made further cuts to that same print, excising a performance of the Austrian national anthem (banned after the war for its association with the Nazi regime) and a brief scene in which characters exchange a key (for less discernible reasons). This year—after much internal deliberation, according to Bagrov’s introduction—the only surviving nitrate print of Germany, Year Zero (1948) was screened despite featuring both Swedish and Finnish subtitles that took up roughly a third of the screen. The Nitrate Picture Show is not the romantic ideal of watching films “as they were meant to be seen,” and is in fact sometimes a way of watching far less of the film than was originally intended. In my thirteen years of unrelenting repertory filmgoing, though, I’ve never thought as much about how history imprints itself on cinema—as an artform, and on its materials—as during these screenings.
A Day in the Country (Jean Renoir, 1936/1946).
The Plow That Broke the Plains (Pare Lorentz, 1936).
Each print comes with its own history, as does the program selection. The most successful Hollywood films of the 1930s are rare inclusions because the prints were played so frequently that those that survived are no longer projectable (this year included a notable exception in Stella Dallas [1937]). The films themselves come from all over the world but represent a relatively small slice of time, usually the interwar period through the immediate postwar years, with the occasional film made during World War I. This year, I was tickled by how Jean Renoir’s lyrical A Day in the Country (1936/1946) fit into a festival program filled with more politically forthright films, including the aforementioned Germany, Year Zero, G. W. Pabst’s Threepenny Opera (1931), Carl Theodor Dreyer’s allegorical Day of Wrath (1943), and Pare Lorentz’s US government–commissioned The Plow That Broke the Plains (1936). Renoir embarked on this side project with a small group of friends, but it was left unfinished when he was called away to work on the much grimmer The Lower Depths (1936). In 1936, A Day in the Country was considered too slight to warrant the full studio backing that films with more urgent subject matter received; 88 years later, screened alongside these other films, it seems neither slight nor out of place, but a reminder of just how precarious the window for a personal project was between the election of France’s Popular Front government and the start of World War II.
Indeed, history is everywhere at the Nitrate Picture Show. Between films, attendees have time to visit the George Eastman Museum—the oldest photography museum in the world—and witness, among other treasures, a camera obscura. In addition, attendees are able to inspect and even handle (supervised, of course) films and talk to experts involved in their preservation and restoration. Each edition also includes two keynote lectures—this year, Bryony Dixon, curator of silent film at the BFI, described some of the archive’s recent work, and Library of Congress archivist David Pierce spoke to how digitization, decline in disc sales, and the imminent flood of films entering public domain will impact the future of film viewership. All of this makes for a weekend in paradise for those interested as much in the social, political, technological, and economic determinants of our relationship to cinema as in the images on screen.
Though there were many attendees in their 20s and early 30s, it’s disappointing that there were no teens or families in attendance and that most seemed to have come from out of town. Before the industrial boom that saw Kodak become the city’s top employer, Rochester was known as both the “Flour City” and the “Flower City” for its 19th-century industries. Today, both industries are dead, but the nicknames emblazon downtown’s trash cans, a cruel metaphor for what the passage of time can do. Kodak, its 4,000 remaining employees (down from 120,000 in 1973 and 20,000 in 2010), and its historical significance to Rochester and the film industry have not quite been consigned to the dustbin of history, but neither are they spotlighted in the city’s industrial heart. Instead, film history is localized mostly to the George Eastman Museum, which may be of little consolation for film lovers familiar with Vladimir Mayakovsky’s adage that art “must not be concentrated in dead shrines called museums [but] spread everywhere.” Still, it wouldn’t be right to call the Nitrate Picture Show a “dead shrine,” even if its history lessons are confined to the museum grounds. Surely the projection of these valuable materials is not a memorial but an extension of their life, a chance for them to be celebrated and loved rather than mummified?
Judex (Louis Feuillade, 1916).
Hoping for answers, I turned to Bologna’s Il Cinema Ritrovato, which, with its renovated theaters and free public outdoor screenings, also promised to give art life again. Its name promises neither a show nor a festival, but nothing short of “Cinema Rediscovered,” and it is attended not just by the descending swarms of filmworkers who, after their first experience with the festival, try their damnedest not to miss another, but also by many locals. There are even daily programs and screenings targeted toward kids and families, and I found myself sitting next to a child of about twelve for a screening of Anatole Litvak’s Lilac (1932). Whereas the Nitrate Picture Show uses a single screen and a fixed program, Il Cinema Ritrovato unfolds over a week and a half at a half-dozen theaters (plus several additional venues for talks and demonstrations) in the city center, so everyone is charting their own path rather than watching the same films at the same time. These films range from century-old prints to brand-new restorations that will tour the world’s most cinephilic cities in the coming months. This year had themed programs dedicated to stars (Marlene Dietrich and Delphine Seyrig) and directors (Litvak, Sergei Parajanov, and Kozaburo Yoshimura), and even years (1904 and 1924). Most compelling was a program that charted the path of color on small-gauge film, from tinted prints to additive and subtractive lenticular systems to color stock.
As with the Nitrate Picture Show, the movies themselves were secondary to their presentation. I began each morning with about an hour’s worth (generally one or two episodes) of Louis Feuillade’s Judex (1916), a unique opportunity to see a serial close to how it was meant to be seen: in a theater, with a crowd, and over many sittings. I agonized over skipping an episode to catch a 35mm screening of Parajanov’s The First Lad (1958), but I comforted myself that many contemporaneous viewers would have missed an episode and relied on friends to fill them in, as I did. Most revelatory was the festival’s decision to have a different musical accompanist perform for each installment of Judex. The contrast between Antonio Coppola’s darker, motif-driven piano accompaniment, Meg Morley’s lighter fare on the same instrument, and Stephen Horne’s careful integration of flute during a crucial sequence both brought out the deceptive depths of Feuillade’s work and emphasized how an audience’s experience would have been colored by the local theater’s accompanist.
Where the Judex musicians kept things relatively traditional, percussionist Valentina Magaletti took a bolder, more modern approach in her accompaniment of a program of Dziga Vertov’s Kino-Pravda 18, Abel Gance’s Au Secours! and Fernand Léger’s Ballet Mécanique (a documentary, fiction, and avant-garde work, respectively, all from 1924). Atypical accompaniment is an increasingly popular choice, but it can overwhelm the films in less capable hands. Magaletti’s interpretations supercharged them. Her drumming on Ballet Mecanique, in particular, made the film’s outlook on automation and technological progress feel as immediate as it might have one hundred years ago. For the first time, the film struck me as neither a repudiation of the mechanization of humankind nor a utopic embrace of technological efficiency, but a nuanced contemplation of life, beauty, and the fragmentation of our perception.
Napoleon (Abel Gance, 1927).
The festival’s pièce de résistance was the first half of Gance’s Napoleon (1927) which was preceded by a 35-minute introduction about its recently completed restoration. (The second half of the seven-hour film was saved for this month’s Cinémathèque Française screenings.) The opening scene, of Napoleon engaged in a snowball fight against a larger group of older boys, is a blitzkrieg of cinematic ingenuity that animates Napoleon’s own tactical genius, a reminder of when movies—industrial, lifelike, and massively popular—seemed infinite in their possibilities. Extremely rapid cutting, dissolves, multiple exposures, and various camera tricks—a camera strapped to a sled in one shot, a mirror angled in front of a lens to allow the camera to remain stationary in another—depict Napoleon as he casts reflections off his belt buckle and raises a hat on a stick to ascertain the enemies’ position and lead his troops to victory, yet none of these techniques are for mere display. Each is as natural in its deployment as the close-ups and cutaways in D. W. Griffith’s Intolerance, so precise and thrilling that the prodigy general on the screen, directing his troops in their mission, seems to merge with the one offscreen. It is one of the finest sequences ever committed to celluloid, a realization both sublime and dispiriting because, a century later, cinema has only rarely reached that bar. It hardly matters that scenes of Napoleon in Corsica and of British military strategizing pale next to such exquisite set pieces; even they exemplify the same sense of cinematic infinitude, the dream of a cinema that could author history. Gance sought to meet the moment with as complete a depiction of Napoleon as could be imagined, with Napoleon planned as the first of six films about the man. At a touch under four hours, the taste had me longing not just for more Napoleon but for a time when its immensity felt possible.
I imagine I was hardly alone in these feelings. Both Nitrate and Ritrovato are—along with the San Francisco Silent Film Festival, TCM Fest, the Pordenone Silent Film Festival, and others—stops on an alternative festival circuit, one defined not by reviews and sales of new films but by a cinephilia less professionalized but at least as passionate as that on display at the major international festivals, and perhaps therefore more romantic. Maybe there really is something necrophilic about screening nitrate prints and old films for the world’s globe-trotting cinephiles, and even (or especially) in my reaction to them, a longing for a time when cinema was at the center of our culture and overflowing with unrealized possibilities. But as I sat in the open-air Piazza Maggiore in one of Europe’s oldest cities on the penultimate night of Il Cinema Ritrovato, watching Catherine Deneuve gallivant across the screen in Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964) with as much wonder and love in her eyes as I had in mine, I fell in love with the movies all over again; I also thought about the Erasmus scholar I was staying with who told me he had been attending the Piazza screenings each night, perhaps falling in love with them for the first time. Then I returned home, greeted by the news that the voices of Judy Garland and James Dean had been drafted into the AI army in the name of a quick buck, and I realized what necrophilia really is. Whether these festivals are making converts or merely preaching to the choir, they offer a sanctuary from the endless commodification of everything we love and a reminder that the past, as William Faulkner said, is never dead, nor even past—at least as long as it can stoke the feeling I had for a long weekend in Rochester and ten days in Bologna.