Universiteit van Amsterdam
Faculty of Humanities, Department of Media Studies
MA: Preservation & Presentation of the Moving Image
Preservation-Skepticism and Self-Destructiveness of Films in the Current Revival of Nitrate Film Projections
Aleksas Gilaitis
Supervisor: Giovanna Fossati
Second Reader: Christian Gosvig Olesen
June 15th 2016 Table of Contents
1. INTRODUCTION 3
1.1 OVERVIEW 3 1.2 AIMS AND OBJECTIVES 4 1.3 STRUCTURE AND LIMITATIONS 5 1.4 BACKGROUND AND THEORETICAL OVERVIEW 8
2. HISTORICAL AND THEORETICAL CONTEXT 14
2.1 ORIGINS AND HISTORY 14 2.2 ‘PRESERVATION-SKEPTICISM’ 21 2.2.1 WHAT WAS CINEMA 22 2.2.2 PERFORMATIVE CINEMA 23 2.2.3 THE NOTION OF LOSS AND OBSOLESCENCE 25 2.2.4 CHERCHI USAI’S DEATH OF CINEMA 27 2.3 HARE VS. TORTOISE 29
3. CASE STUDIES 34
3.1 OVERVIEW 34 3.2 THE NITRATE FILM FESTIVAL, BELGRADE 35 3.3 THE NITRATE PICTURE SHOW, ROCHESTER 42
4. COMPARISONS OF THE CASE STUDIES 47
CONCLUSION 55
BIBLIOGRAPHY 57
2
1. Introduction
1.1 Overview
“In February 1951, the Eastman Kodak Company announced that its manufacturing plants had discontinued production of nitrate cellulose film, and had begun using triacetate as the only base for photographic motion pictures from then on. Half a century after the event, little has been said or written about the significance of this technological shift for the history of visual culture; compared to the so-called ‘digital revolution’ and its promise of a Brave New World of the moving image, its consequences were barely detectable by the public of the time, and taken for granted by the exhibitors. Nitrate burns, acetate doesn’t: was that the only reason? To what extent did audiences really care about the difference between the two carriers? If they didn’t, how about the preservationists? […] it’s quite hard to find a single instance in their [archives] internal correspondence of curatorial mourning, a word of regret, the hint of a doubt that something important was about to be lost forever.”1
Prior to the mid 1950s, all commercial films around the globe were made and copied on nitrate flammable film stock. After the take-over of safety acetate film stock, previously common nitrate film distribution and projection drifted into a legal grey zone, or even outright illegality. In many countries it became illegal to screen, transport or even possess nitrate films. Hundreds of films since then have been destroyed, completely repurposed to make other items, or, in the luckiest scenario, held and in some fashion preserved in archives for future generations. Nitrate went
1 Paolo Cherchi Usai, “Film as an art object” in Preserve then Show, ed. Dan Nissen, Lisbeth Richter Larsen, Thomas C. Christensen and Jesper Stub Johnsen, (Copenhagen: Danish Film Institute, 2002), 24
3 from everyday use in the projection booth to an almost forgotten and unused base in less than a year. For decades nitrate films were considered strictly conservation- only objects; used mainly as sources of information for preservation, and eventually, as the primary source for digitization projects. However, in recent years, there have also been events devoted to the public projection of nitrate prints. The very same films and prints that were banished from the projection booth over 60 years ago have had the opportunity to experience new life. But what has changed? And how long can we expect such a “revival” to last?
1.2 Aims and Objectives
This thesis will take a close look at current discussions pertaining to the base of nitrate film, and more specifically at the current practices being employed for nitrate projection. Whilst a number of contemporary film archivists and scholars have explored the materiality of cinema and the importance of the contextual framework of early and classical cinema in writings2, some have instead attempted to further the discussion between active and passive film preservation by introducing annual events concentrated on nitrate films. I will analyze two of these annual events in particular that operate in the shadow of the highly restrictive legal boundaries for nitrate projection. Furthermore, I will explore conceptual ideas about viewing the so called ‘original’, later suggesting that non-nitrate prints or digital copies of nitrate-born films are simply not the same. ‘The Original’ of a film is a very broad, controversial and widely debated term, but in this thesis it relies on the framework of “film as original”, which “offers strong arguments for stressing the importance of the original film artifact (i.e. the very
2 Tom Gunning has explored the contextuality of early film in his “The Cinema of Attractions: Early Film, Its Spectator and the Avant-Garde” (Wide Angle, Vol. 8, nos. 3 & 4 Fall, 1986) and “And Aesthetic of Astonishment: Early Film and the (in)Credulous Spectator” in Film Theory: Critical Concepts in Media and Cultural Studies, Volume 3, by Karen J. Shepherdson, 2004; Material aspects of film analyzed by Jonathan Walley – “Materiality and Meaning in Recent Projection Performance” from The Velvet Light Trap, n. 70, Fall 2012, etc.
4 artifact made at the time of the film’s original production and distribution)”3. Additionally, in contrast to the widely practiced transference of original film to different carriers, I stress the importance of “maintaining as much as possible of the original format of the film”4. By comparing the two film festivals and looking into their motives and goals, this thesis seeks to connect such practices with the film preservation ideas of respecting the original aim of film – to be screened as long as it is possible, and challenge the usual view of nitrate prints as archival-only objects, never to be run through a projector again. Furthermore, I will question the role of nitrate screenings in our digital environment and will position nitrate film projections as a weapon to fight the rise of digital cinema. These ideas will be connected with other similar theories, which I define in this thesis as “preservation- skeptic”. Likewise, I intend to continue to discuss the nitrate projections in relation with the iconic archival debate between Henri Langlois and Ernest Lindgren. This will provide a broader perspective on the debate as to whether or not nitrate prints should be projected, and if not, opposing arguments that remain valid today more than 60 years after the end of its production. I will argue that festivals like the two case studies featured in this thesis celebrate disappearing media in an unorthodox fashion similar to that of Henri Langlois and his celebratory screenings of nitrate films in the 1950s and 1960s.
1.3 Structure and Limitations
The second chapter examines the theoretical and historical background of nitrate projection practices. First, I briefly explore the settings of such phenomena throughout the first decade of the cinema, and follow this thread up until the decline and immediate switch of the nitrate base to safety film stocks in the early 1950s. Nitrate’s popularity and public image is heavily reliant on its flammability and illegal
3 Giovanna Fossati, From Grain to Pixel: The Archival Life of Film in Transition. (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2011), 113 4 Paul Read and Mark-Paul Meyer, Restoration of Motion Picture Film. (Butterworth- Heinemann, August 14, 2000), 1-2
5 projection in most of the countries in the world. With this in mind, I introduce a timeline of nitrate’s restrictive usage and how it has changed since the late 19th century. The nature of the projected nitrate image, which at that time accounted for cinema as a whole, was immensely influential on its early success. Every nitrate film related fire that occurred in the late 19th century damaged the reputation of the medium and opened a debate on the status of the medium. In this chapter, I connect the negative press-related headlines of historical nitrate related fires with the analogous headlines of contemporary nitrate film projections, where the possibility of danger is used to stir up excitement and separate these events from the more common screenings of alternate formats. I attempt to look beyond the heavily analyzed and discussed ban of nitrate film projections to the transitional period between the 1950s and 1980s, and posit this period as the link between the nitrate era and so called New Film History, which arguably started after the 34th International Federation of Film Archive (FIAF) congress in Brighton in 1978. I continue the chapter by establishing the term “preservation-skepticism”, one intended to refer to various efforts made towards highlighting the original materiality of cinema, and to some extent push back against the increasing reliance on digital methods of preservation and projection. Skepticism in this case is not a movement against the whole concept of film preservation and film archiving, rather it’s a renewal of support for traditional preservation methods. This movement, as I will later describe, is best understood through several writings by the Senior Curator of Motion Pictures of the George Eastman House, Paolo Cherchi Usai. His academic writings on ethics and aesthetics in film preservation, as well as his criticism of the diminishing respect shown towards the original form of films, serve as the basis for several of my thesis arguments. I especially associate this term with an approach that focused on film materiality, original form and format and attention to the passive preservation of film prints. All these ideas are presented within their wider contextual surroundings in several categories further divided into sub- chapters. I introduce the theme of long-gone cinema in the sub-chapter ‘What Was Cinema?’; the performative aspect and idea of the impossibility of showing the same film twice in ‘Performative cinema’, the contemporary reuse of decomposition and
6 disappearance in ‘the Notion of loss and obsolescene’; and perhaps most importantly, the notion of a ‘model image’ of perfect quality and film as a self- destructive medium in Cherchi Usai’s The Death of Cinema5. In chapter two, I look back on the ‘Hare vs. Tortoise’ debate between Henri Langlois and Ernest Lindgren, which I more extensively analyze in the last section of the chapter. The debate is well represented by Henri Langlois, his active film projections at Cinémathéque Française after the anti-nitrate laws were imposed in a number of countries, and Ernest Lindgren’s actions to seclude and isolate film archives' access for better care of film prints. This debate shows how the preservation-skepticism and recent practices of public nitrate projections can relate with this now considered iconic, half-century old dispute. The third chapter presents the two case studies sequentially. First, I present the Nitrate Film Festival in Belgrade, Serbia, and second, the Nitrate Picture Show in Rochester, USA. Due to the lack of publicly available information about these festivals and the aims and ideas of their curators and programmers, chapter three is heavily based on the interviews with Paolo Cherchi Usai – Senior Curator of George Eastman House, and Aleksandar Erdeljanovic – the Head of Archive of Jugoslovenska Kinoteka that I made in the summer of 2015. Since this thesis is heavily centered on the practices of Henri Langlois, who stood behind his screenings as the sole representative, I will filter Usai’s and Erdeljanovic’s personal opinions and perspective through a similar lens. Considering that they represent the only two festivals in the world that contribute towards the revived tradition of nitrate projections, their opinion in this case is significantly influential in the field. In this chapter I use the information obtained during the interview to present the festivals, their national and cultural backgrounds, a quick glimpse of their historical backgrounds and the opinions about the subject from their initiators. The fourth and final chapter brings together the threads of my research and presents a comparison analysis of the two festivals. The differences between them are presented in relation with the global current trends of archival film festivals and
5 Paolo Cherchi Usai The Death of Cinema, (London: British Film Institute, First Edition, August 1, 2001)
7 with the general historical context of nitrate film projections in both Serbia and the USA. This chapter is followed by a conclusion where I return to the research aims of this thesis, and subsequently summarize how my case study analyses do or do not cohere with: current perspectives on nitrate film projections, early and recent film archival practices, film projection traditions and the timeline of the cinema as a whole.
This thesis has a number of limitations. As my approach to the subject heavily depends on case studies constructed almost entirely through the use of interviews, interviews that only involve these two nitrate projecting venues, it lacks a broader perspective that could yield further insight. In addition, my personal observations only relate to the Nitrate Film Festival in Belgrade, which I visited and attended in 2015. On the other hand, any information on the Nitrate Picture Show was based on the aforementioned interview with Paolo Cherchi Usai, and several reviews and comments made by visitors of the first festival in 2015. For a more thorough analysis of the differences between the festivals it would have been beneficial to have first-hand experiences with both. Nevertheless, I hope that I have presented a balanced analysis concerning the limitations of nitrate projection and extended the general academic knowledge of such an overlooked subject in the fields of archival film studies and film festival studies.
1.4 Background and theoretical overview
Like Henri Langlois, Paolo Cherchi Usai has a passion for nitrate film beyond its visual quality. During “The Last Nitrate Picture Show", which was held by FIAF at the British Film Institute in the year 2000, Usai gave a speech about his own personal nitrate experience 6 . The speech combined details about his first unintentional encounter with nitrate together with an exploration of sexual
6 Paolo Cherchi Usai, “An Epiphany of Nitrate” in This Film is Dangerous: A Celebration of Nitrate Film, ed. Roger Smither and Catherine A. Surowiec. (Bruxelles: Federation Internationale Des Archives Du Film (FIAF), 2002)
8 attraction and the visual thrill that accompanies seeing something secret. However, what left the biggest impression on him was the smell of the nitrate7, a very special smell now so familiar to those in the archival world. Though early written accounts noting the peculiar smell of the film can be difficult to come by, Henri Langlois, an undoubted expert on nitrate projections, was one of the few who did. Penelope Houston describes Langlois:
“He had a truffle-hound’s instinct for sniffing films out: the most loyal subscribers to the legend were prepared to believe he could literally smell them."8
In 2000, attendees and presenters of The Last Nitrate Picture Show in shared their passion for nitrate projection, glorifying the celluloid base for its unique quantity of silver, its alluringly dangerous flammability, its smell, its special relationship with forgotten carbon-arc projectors, perforated screens and its ephemeral aura. To trace back the history of the rise of the modern film archival world and its transformations, one must note the landmark year 1978 and the 34th congress of the FIAF, which took place in Brighton, UK. The event gathered what was at that time the largest collection of early cinema in the medium’s history. Over time, the conference has “gained an almost mythical status”9 and is now considered to be an essential factor in the birth of a new era of Film History. The myth grew as time wore on, and by the late 2000s and early 2010s many young scholars who have only read about the Conference seem to have adopted its status without further question10. The image of the Brighton Congress is every bit as iconic as the figures of Langlois and Lindgren, who are considered to be pioneering symbols in the archival world. Nearly a half-century ago, their conflict established basic archival principles
7 Paolo Cherchi Usai, “An Epiphany of Nitrate”, 129 8 Penelope Houston, “Fortress Archive” in Keepers of the Frame: The Film Archives. (London: British Film Institute, 1994). 49 9 Fossati, From Grain to Pixel, 104 10 Philippe Gauthier, The Brighton Congress and Traditional Film History as Founding Myths of the New Film History. (Université de Montréal/Université de Lausanne, March 2012), 1
9 that remain relevant when assessing the grounds of current preservation practices. Yet the most significant aspect of the Conference was again the large compilation of early films from the late 1890s and early 1900s borrowed from a variety of archival sources. Though early cinema was not completely unknown/unseen before 1978, and some light was shed on its vitality in earlier events (notably 30th FIAF congress in Montreal and Ottawa in 1974; Edinburgh International Film Festival in 1977; 2nd Annual Purdue Film Conference at Purdue University in 1977) 11, the Brighton conference was the largest attempt to show early cinema at that time. It generated a number of articles and books on the subject that eventually formed a new academic field centered on analytical studies of early cinema. These scholarly studies were a key component in the establishment of a new terminology, one that reemphasized the importance of the preservation of early films. Much like the 1978 FIAF conference in Brighton is now widely considered to have been a crucial step both in the formulation of the New Film History12 and the film archival movement as a whole (including an increased number of restoration projects and the founding of several archival film festivals), the 56th FIAF conference held in 2000 might be considered the tipping point for nitrate film projection. That same year also saw the screening of a historically essential program of Biograph films at Le Giornate del Cinema Muto13. each of which demonstrated the need for a more thorough understanding of the context in which such films were created. The 56th congress of the FIAF in London appears to have been every bit as grand as that which took place in 1978. It is still too early to say if the aftermath of the 2000 conference will equal that of the one in 1978, but even if it ultimately does not have quite as notable an impact on theoretical/academic analyses in the field, it has already warmed influential film archives and curators to the idea that films with
11 Gauthier, 1-2 12 Wanda Strauven, “Media Archaeology: Where Film History, Media Art, and New Media (Can) Meet” in Preserving and Exhibiting Media Art: Challenges and Perspectives, ed. Julia Noordegraaf, Cosetta Saba, Barbara Le Maitre and Vinzenz Hediger. (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. 2012), 61 13 Giovanna Fossati, “Multiple Originals: The (Digital) Restoration and Exhibition of Early Films” in A Companion to Early Cinema, ed André Gaudreault, Nicolas Dulac, and Santiago Hidalgo. (Malden: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), 552
10 a nitrate base can and should be screened for cinephilic or educational purposes. Even if nitrate projections in Serbia (and perhaps elsewhere) took place long before the 56th congress, international attention to the flammable base and the slow revival of projection events can clearly be connected with this particularly unique occasion. One especially memorable event at the 56th congress was the screening of
Abel Glance’s Napoleon with a score by Carl Davis14, a film that has become a celebratory emblem of the post-1978 era of film preservation. Even more importantly, the congress held “The Last Nitrate Picture Show”, where selections of films were shown from nitrate prints. Its title “The Last Nitrate Picture Show” was intended to raise awareness of the part of film history that is stored on this potentially dangerous and endangered material However, the myth that these films were unwatchable and highly decomposed was shattered in just a couple of days. Paolo Cherchi Usai remembers:
“The epiphany was still there, alive and well, and those who witnessed it with me shared my view that such epiphanies can and should be repeated.”15
Over time Cherchi Usai’s wishes for nitrate screenings to be repeated have been increasingly fulfilled and now, in 2015, archival film lovers and early nitrate aficionados have the opportunity to attend at least ten public nitrate screenings in around the world, including two nitrate only festivals and several more single screening opportunities considered to be on an ‘archival only base’. While exploring this issue Giovanna Fossati, film archivist and chief curator at the EYE Museum in Amsterdam, Netherlands, mentions that a number of archival curators such as Paolo Cherchi Usai, Alexander Horwath and Mark-Paul Meyer have variously underlined the notion of “authenticity” that only the analog projection of analog film can provide 16 . Taking their argument further, she writes, “authenticity is fully
14 British Film Institute, Annual Review. (London: British Film Institute, 2000/2001), 18 15 Usai, “An Epiphany of Nitrate”, 128 16 Giovanna Fossati, “Multiple Originals”, 564
11 experienced only when an original (vintage) print is projected”17. These arguments are heavily dependent on the belief that the visual aesthetic of the nitrate prints are different from all other material forms, and some say superior 18. Even if it visually differs from the acetate/polyester print, it is hard to determine if the general public would appreciate or even recognize this difference given that the aesthetic qualities of recent polyester 35mm prints are becoming forgotten in this digital age. The popularity of digital cinema and the gradual disappearance of analog film projections could call into question the relevance of film materiality altogether. If it does matter for at least a few select audiences, then does that materiality (the physical context of the film) matter more than content (the cinematographic specialties, aesthetics and storytelling)? Much like other events that prize the performative and material aspects of archival cinema, nitrate film screenings stress the ‘how’ and ’when’ of film watching over the ‘what’ of any particular film’s narrative. To justly present my general direction and arguments on this subject, I must first mention several archivists and theorists who share somewhat similar thoughts on current trends of film preservation and likewise defend the necessity of screening early cinema in a manner that is as close as possible to its original form. Such “movement” I will here label as ‘preservation-skepticism’. Although I do not intend to strictly categorize these particular people, at least some of the ideas shared in their writings can in one way or another be associated with this movement. My intention is not to focus on the claim that the scholars I will reference disagree with the idea of film preservation in general, but to further explore some of their criticisms that specifically concern the too narrow approach of many of today’s active preservation practices. The term is much better understood with regard to the relatively modern trend of preserving a film’s content by migrating it to other forms and formats; in large part as a means of making the film
17 Fossati, “Multiple Originals”, 564 18 British Film Institute. “The Smouldering Screen: Kevin Brownlow on the lustre of nitrate” by Kevin Brownlow, 29 April 2014, Accessed 15th May 2016. http://www.bfi.org.uk/news/smouldering-screen-kevin-brownlow-lustre-nitrate
12 more accessible for public screenings. The fruits of active preservation are often more visible due to the general public’s engagement with films in various digital formats (e.g. Blu-Ray, DVD, etc.), thereby fostering a lack of appreciation on the part of casual observers for the less immediately noticeable benefits of passive preservation. Furthermore, because passive preservation is increasingly considered to be part of the digitization and/or migration process, the analog prints naturally become less accessible, while the quick transition of cinemas to digital only projection has served to further this trend. The tradition of passive film preservation for the purpose of extending print accessibility and projection, for as long as possible, generally opposes the ideas behind several of the more common activities of active preservation. This is doubly so if the conversation is about the accessibility of rare and original prints. Even if any current film archivists were capable of denying the importance of readily accessible archival prints, blurring the line between the archive-only and projected material for some may be seen as anti- preservationist or stemming from a ‘preservation-skepticist’ practice. For the purposes of debate, one could impose a simplistic opposition between active preservation vs. passive preservation, and drawing such radical opposing lines in archival theory connects us back to the two iconic film archivists, Henri Langlois and Ernest Lindgren. Their debate, based on strongly established yet opposing ideas and principles of what film preservation generally is, has already been analyzed by several academics. It is hard to find two other archivists in history who so politely but resolutely defended their own principles to save the heritage of the cinema. In the shadows of the ongoing screenings of archival cinema, one might associate the Langlois tradition with nitrate projections and respect for original film formats. On the other hand, practices like digitization and digital projection are the arbiters of a time which Lindgren long waited for, a time when the longevity of film heritage relies on multiple forms and formats. During the many years of analysis of their defiance, the rivalry between the two has gained several names such as “The
13 battle lines between Langlois and Lindgren”19, “The Archive Paradox”20, and most frequently, “Henri Langlois – hare/Ernest Lindgren – tortoise debate”21
During their careers they managed to draw very distinct lines between their respective understandings of what an archive is and what the archive should primarily do. If one (Lindgren) was a strict preservationist who sealed his archive from outside use and waited for better times to come for the safe access to preserved heritage, the other (Langlois) unintentionally made the profession of the archivist popular by openly exploiting films from his archive and spreading knowledge about cinematic heritage simply by projecting it on the screen and sharing it with fellow film lovers.
2. Historical and theoretical context
2.1 Origins and history
The nitrate film base has played an important role in early film history. As the major film base during the first half of the history of cinema, it was naturally the only one used for commercial studio productions. Its infamous and secretive status is largely the result of various unfortunate accidents caused by its high flammability, the ceasing of its production in the early 1950s, and projection/transport restrictions in many countries with rich cinematic history. Admittedly, some part of this myth has been strongly exaggerated by a media that has taken the conversation surrounding the under-analyzed topic of the materiality of certain film bases and used it to create a nostalgic aura22 or fetishism23 amongst young generations of
19 Michael Binder, Light Affliction: a History of Film Preservation and Restoration, (Lulu Press, 2014), 72 20 Ruth Beale, Lindgren & Langlois: The Archive Paradox, (London: Ruth Beale and Cubitt Artists. 2011) 21 Houston, “Fortress Archive”, 49 22 The term aura is mostly used by Walter Benjamin to define the last notion in an age of mechanical reproduction, found in: “Material Properties of Historical Film in
14 cinephiles. The titles from the reviews of rare nitrate projections are never subtle and often emphasize the danger it potentially poses and its unique, event-like nature:
“Film From the Ashes”24(The Verge)
“This Version of Casablanca had the potential to kill us all”25(The Verge) “Don’t Try This at Home: Skilled Projection Required”26(LAC group blog) “This Festival is Dangerous”27(Rochester City Newspaper)
The general rarity of these events and the possibility that certain nitrate prints might only be screened once in their lifetimes are two of the major aspects that sell tickets28. The fact that it is literally impossible to see a silent film in the theater twice and get the same exact experience, makes film from the silent era inherently unique. Unlike later sound films, and, most importantly, current digital- born cinema, classic and silent films are always changing, developing, being rereleased in various versions, while final-cuts are being reprinted on film prints of various qualities and gauges. Additionally, silent films are always being shown with different live scores. Such a temporary performance can be compared to a theatre
the Digital Age” by Barbara Flueckiger, 22 November 2012, Accessed 15th May 2016. http://www.necsus-ejms.org/material-properties-of-historical-film-in-the-digital- age/ 23 The term used by Paolo Cherchi Usai to define his own personal physical relationship with nitrate films. 24 The title from “Film From the Ashes: A Beautiful but deadly art is reborn at the Nitrate Picture Show” by John Lingan. Accessed 15th May 2016. http://www.theverge.com/2015/6/17/8792169/nitrate-picture-show-film- conservation-festival 25 Underlined quote from “Film From the Ashes” 26 Title of the column from “The Nitrate Picture Show: A Festival of Conservation – Highlights of 2015 Event” by Danny Kuchuck. Acessed 15th May 2016. https://lac- group.com/overview-of-the-nitrate-picture-show-a-festival-of-conservation/ 27 The title of “This Festival is Dangerous” by Adam Lubitow, 29 April 2015. Accessed 15th May 2016. http://www.rochestercitynewspaper.com/rochester/this- festival- is-dangerous/Content?oid=2528439 28 Stefanie Schulte Strathaus, “Showing Different Films Differently” in The Moving Image, (Volume 4, Number 1, Spring 2004), 7-8
15 performance, one that simply cannot be repeated a second time. Such a profound similarity with one-time shows or theater performances gives every such screening added value. It also accrues an extra layer of appreciation from attending audiences that are used to comparing the visual qualities of home-cinema Blu-Ray versions with digital versions screened in a public cinema. Nitrate film screening is now one of those movie theater events where the context of the projected film matters as much (or even more) than the film’s narrative content. If one is to refer to such events centered around their context, one can mention basically any silent film screening with live accompaniment, as well as projections with early carbon-arc projectors like those in Il Cinema Ritrovato since 2013, screenings of interactive B- movies in cheap popcorn theaters, highly restricted nitrate base films in the screening venues serving as this thesis’ case studies, screenings of irregular film gauges that range from the highest quality 70mm to 8mm home-movies, and even drive-in cinemas like those in provincial cities across the USA. These events collect audiences by presenting films through traditional, and sometimes very rare or seemingly forgotten, methods. In the wake of the now established and still growing dominance of digital projection, nostalgia for fading traditions of watching cinema in a theater and on celluloid film becomes an overriding motivation to return to the “silver screen”. As the list of cinemas that are leaving behind their film projectors grows, every film screening in the remaining film-projecting venues becomes a more valuable rarity. One of the rarest of the previously mentioned events are nitrate film projections. The restrictions for the projection nitrate film are usually unclear and vary from country to country. The projection of nitrate today highly depends on the national laws and archival policies of the nation’s archives and cinematheques. Some of these (e.g. Britain and France) made quick and radical decisions to ban any actions related to nitrate films outside the knowledge of the archives, while others never changed the policies since the end of the nitrate era. Nevertheless, the transfer of feature production from nitrate to acetate in the 1950s was supposed to be the quick decline of nitrate stock. In France, the so-called ‘anti-nitrate’ law was passed in December of 1950, which “would make it eventually illegal to show,
16 transport or even possess nitrate film”29. Many countries followed France’s example, some in the same year, some much later (the National Film Archive ((NFA)) in Britain had somewhat similar restrictions in the early 1970s). In theory, this law eventually did work to some extent in many of the biggest archives in Europe and North America30. However, in practice, nitrate films were casually screened even in countries where this ‘anti-nitrate’ law supposedly enforced. For example, in one of the early annual festivals of Silent Cinema in Pordenone, some of the prints sent from the Danish Film Institute were nitrate31. In Italy, the projection of nitrate prints by that time was, as it still is now, illegal. Hence, to minimize the possible danger of projecting flammable film in a closed movie theater, the films were subsequently shown in open-air screenings. Ironically, nobody in the audience was informed why these films were screened outside, nor did any of the festival staff reveal that the projected films were highly flammable32. This happened in the late 1980’s, when even Cinémathèque Française – considered the last fortress for nitrate
– had followed the rest of the western world in stopping their nitrate projections. The aforementioned public screening of nitrate prints from the Danish Film Institute is one of only a few that was eventually revealed in one form or another to have taken place. Note that I am only referring to the public screenings, which does not include the closed-circle screenings by private collectors who still project nitrate in their homes under the responsibility radar33. Overall, as Giovanna Fossati mentions,
29 Houston, “Fortress Archive”, 43 30 anti-nitrate laws were never established as international laws, policies and restrictions were set by the local governments or archival communities. Not all of such information is documented and can only be interpreted by generalizing documented examples 31 Usai, “An Epiphany of Nitrate”, 130 32 ibid. 33 Kyle Westphal, “Burned Out: The Nitrate Legacy” by Kyle Westphal, 2 October 2013. Accessed 15th May 2016. http://www.northwestchicagofilmsociety.org/2013/10/02/burned-out-the- nitrate-legacy/ and Anthony Slide, “A Personal Odyssey” in Silent Players: A Biographical and Autobiographical Study of 100 Silent Film Actors and Actresses. (University Press of Kentycky, 2010)
17 the projection of these artifacts of cinema history is “usually illegal”34. I must stress the description ‘usually’, which perfectly summarizes the ambiguous status of nitrate film projections in the western world 35. This status leaves space open for various exceptions and accidental or hidden events, but by and large these sorts of screening are widely understood cross the line of legality. The history of nitrate’s illegality and various overreactions against its screenings, as I have already mentioned before, is mostly a result of its flammability. Similarly to the coverage of the flammability of nitrate film today, media outlets were not silent about this aspect of nitrate in the early days of cinema. Unfortunately, instead of successfully pulling audiences to cinemas, it cast a negative shadow over the rising film industry and encouraged audiences to keep away from it. And in fairness the potentially lethal nature of nitrate was not to be taken lightly. Scholar H. Mark Gosser writes of, “The fatal fire of 4 May 1897 at the Bazar de la Carité in Paris, which claimed the lives of at least 120 people…along with the fire in a fairground tent at Stafford Market, [and] were certainly factors that caused the introduction of the London County Council Act of 1898”36. The London County Council Act of 1898 initiated cinema and theater licensing, and encouraged proper storage, registration and inspection of film prints in the territory of London city. In the wake of the London County Council Act of 1898, restrictions and laws to make film projecting a safer and more regulated activity followed one after the other. The Act in 1898 was followed by one in 1900, and later by the 1909 Cinematograph Act37, which “required all premises where nitrate film was present and to which the
34 Fossati, “Multiple Originals”, 554 35 The cases of nitrate projections outside the North America and Europe are often not documented. Especially until 1990s and 2000s. Due to high concentration of FIAF members in the western world, one can interpret that archives from outside of it, which were not members of FIAF during the decline of nitrate film were generally lacking any information related with restrictions of its usage 36 H. Mark Gosser, “The Bazar de la Charité Fire: The Reality, the Aftermath, the Telling” in Film History, (vol. 10, no.1, Cinema Pioneers, 1998) 37 Vanessa Toulmin, “Phantom Fires: An Evaluation of the Evidence for Nitrate Fires in Fairground Cinematograph Shows” in This Film is Dangerous: A Celebration of Nitrate Film, ed. Roger Smither and Catherine A. Surowiec. (Bruxelles: Federation Internationale Des Archives Du Film (FIAF), 2002). 109-111
18 public were admitted to be licensed by the local authority”38. Various regulatory acts eventually spurred technological innovations and led to a larger scale development of non-flammable acetate base. These acts also gave rise to the use of safety stock for theatrical film exhibition way before the mandatory conversion in the 1950s39. With such a direct connection between regulatory acts and nitrate projection, I believe that the decline of nitrate film, at least theoretically, started as early as the first related fire in 1897. The most infamous nitrate fire occurred in the previously mentioned Paris Charity Bazaar, but also “among other places, the Cinémathèque Française in Paris, Eastman House at Rochester, New York(which is one of few places that still project nitrate), and particularly disastrously, the Cineteca Nacional in Mexico City, when lives were lost and much of the Mexican film record burnt”40. Most of these fires did not occur during film projection. Instead, they were caused by improper storage conditions or a simple lack of careful preservation. That is why most of the nitrate collections today sit in isolated, strictly regulated bunkers, far away from inhabited areas. Writings about fires started during nitrate projection, on the other hand, are harder to come by. Even if fires during projection did occur from time to time, the potential risk of a major fire resulting in loss of lives or large portions of film heritage was minimal. This was especially the case after the early 1900s, when film projection became a much more regulated activity than it had been in the earliest stage of cinema. However, the public image of the nitrate film base has radically changed in several ways, most apparent when comparing the years before and after the 1950s. It’s important to point out that before the 1950s, excluding some rare exceptions, no other film base was used to make and duplicate the commercial cinema for movie theater projections. In that case the notion of celluloid film being flammable and
38 Leo Enticknap, “The Film Industry’s Conversion from Nitrate to Safety Film in the Late 1940s: A Discussion of the Reasons and Consequences” in This Film is Dangerous: A Celebration of Nitrate Film, ed. Roger Smither and Catherine A. Surowiec. (Bruxelles: Federation Internationale Des Archives Du Film (FIAF), 2002). 203 39 Enticknap, 203 40 Penelope Houston, “Introduction: Fragile, Expensive and Dangerous” in Keepers of the Frame, (London: British Film Institute, 1994). 2
19 dangerous was taken as something of a given. Only after the conversion and after the ‘anti-nitrate’ laws did people get the chance to compare and question the superiorities of one or another film base. The most important and famous feature of nitrate has always been its explosive nature. As we saw, during the first decade of the 20th century its flammability was on the verge of damaging the whole film industry by inciting reactionary laws and frightening potential audiences. Eventually, after WWII, nitrate was officially and globally changed to other film bases. Its decline first started with the cancellation of production, then by restricting or banning its projection and transportation. After several decades of nitrate films being kept out of projection booths or projected only in unregulated occasions, the archival revival (sometimes called “the renaissance of silent film studies”41) in the 1980s re-exposed the obscured issue of nitrate’s flammable heritage. The topics of contextuality and materiality eventually took a large portion of the academic interest in film preservation studies. The contextuality of cinema extracts and uses surrounding information and artifacts that explain where, when and how cinematic culture should be understood in relation to its historical and geographical context. It contains historical connections with the materiality of cinema, in particular film as a short-lived material object and the ephemeral state of the technology used in different stages of filmmaking and showing. The film base and its central role in nitrate film projections became the context which audiences need be familiar with in order to fully appreciate nitrate events and understand their cultural value. The earliest of revival of nitrate prints via public projection took place around the late 1990s, while most of the rediscovery, projection and awareness of early color films grew throughout 1990s and 2000s. Rare carbon arc projections became public during the 2010s and became the annual event during the festival Il
41 The main events that marked the beginning of this renaissance were the 1978 FIAF international conference Cinema 1900-1906 and the presentation of Kevin Brownlow’s reconstruction of Abel Gance’s Napoleon (France, 1927), in two versions debuting in September 1979. (From “Silent Strategies: Audiovisual Functions of the Music of Silent Cinema” by Marco Bellano in Kieler Beiträge zur Filmmusikforschung, (vol.9, 2013),46
20 Cinema Ritrovato in Bologna. This short historical timeline brings us to the present, when prohibitions and bans are remembered via the effort towards the revival of archival cinema in the 2010s.
2.2 ‘Preservation-skepticism’
Concerning the tradition of screening classic and early cinema in its original format, specifically - and most importantly for this thesis - a highly restricted nitrate film, only a few contemporary archivists and film preservation theorists stand on the side that allows for its originally intended use and projection. Thus, when one is talking about screening vintage, unique prints, we must return to the iconic argument between Henri Langlois and Ernst Lindgren – “To show is to preserve vs. To preserve is to show.”42 Though many archives and archivists have now managed to find a comfortable balance between active preservation and print accessibility (or between the Langlois and Lindgren approaches towards film preservation), some archivists and/or curators still appear to be sympathizers of one of the opposing sides in this iconic debate. Most famously, a Langlois-like approach is represented by Paolo Cherchi Usai in his book “The Death of Cinema”. What I want to stress the most here is the specific usage of nitrate base films, namely in relation to their inevitable temporality and relatively short-life. Such a subject fits well with the idea of a group of archivists, one I have labeled preservation-skeptics, joined together in an active fight against the rise of digital cinema and the fading of traditional cinematic culture. This group respects not only the content of film history but context as well, including the tradition of celluloid projection, silent film accompaniment, etc. In this sense, the aforementioned43 context and materiality of cinema stand together with its inevitable decay and disappearance. Indeed, nitrate celluloid is just one element of film history destined to eventually disappear. To
42 Clyde Jeavons, “The Moving Image: Subject or Object” in Journal of Film Preservation 73 (Bruxelles: Federation Internationale Des Archives Du Film (FIAF), 2007), 43 see page 20
21 understand problematic nature of the broader field of film historicity, I will briefly introduce the related ideas of the archivists I have identified as “preservation- skeptics”.
2.2.1 What was cinema
To understand the materiality of cinema and the motives of film archivists and academics who emphasize it’s value, it is important to return to the famous question by André Bazín – ‘what is cinema?’. Alternatively, to compliment the title of Paolo Cherchi Usai’s book “The Death of Cinema” and its pessimistic but realistic message, we could use David N. Rodowick’s rephrasing of Bazin’s question to “what was cinema?”44 Such a cruel usage of the past tense can infer different things depending on the various stages of film history. Rodowick describes cinema as “the projection of a photographically recorded filmstrip in a theatrical setting”45. Under this presumption, no other media such as cassettes, discs or other forms and formats capable of carrying cinema’s content can be put under the same name. This could be extended even further by considering the wide variety of photographic bases. For example, cinema prior to 1950 projected on a non-nitrate base cannot be considered to be the same film as it originally was on nitrate. Giovanna Fossati, in respect to this subject, defends the distinct visual qualities of a film’s original form thusly:
“Experiencing the projection of an early film via its restoration on modern film stock gives a distorted impression of its inherent material characteristics in terms of density, contrast, and colors”46.
Moreover, film director, theoretician and painter Peter Greenaway mentions that “the end of cinema was…the 31st of September, 1983. That supposedly is the
44 David N. Rodowick The Virtual Life of Film. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007). 25 45 Rodowick. 25 46 Fossati, “Multiple Originals”, 554
22 date when the zapper (or the remote control) was introduced to the living rooms of the world”47. Interpreting Greenaway’s statement, one can understand his view of the key feature of the cinema as being the immobility of the audience and their lack of its control over the moving images they see. Film restoration, the change of format or even the control given by the ‘zapper’ is something which “fights against its [cinema's] death” and is “a significant intervention into its being as a historical object”48. Such theory strengthens the importance of the context in which cinema is made. Knowing the historical timeline of cinema related inventions and their role in changing the audiences’ vision could allow for a better appreciation of the medium’s past and its singular technologies. Following this line of argument, one can assert that watching an early TV show on a laptop with the possibility to pause and replay whenever the individual wants does not provide the same viewing experience as that of the original. Similarly, a film from 1920s, if projected from modern 35mm print with an optically added modern score, in many ways changes the essence of cinema of from that respective era.
2.2.2 Performative cinema
In some of her writings Barbara Flueckiger criticizes the restoration practices that digitally simulate and intervene in photochemical processes. These include the stabilization and de-flickering of the image, which raises the issue of the subjectivity of the restorer and the fact that it is technically impossible to restore the film exactly as it might have originally been49. The defining component of this critique by preservation-skeptics of digitization and digital restoration processes is not only its influences on film as an interpretable text, but also its transformation as a material object and performative
47 “Peter Greenaway: Cinema is Dead, Long Live Cinema”, Youtube video, Posted 5 October 2010. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6yC41ZxqYs 48 Flueckiger, “Material properties…” 49 Fossati, From Grain to Pixel. 88
23 instance50. The individual often providing an introduction to the screening, in addition to the musical accompanist and the variable visual quality of every film print are but a few of the factors that explain the value of cinematic performance. While changing the film format or digitizing a film rarely affects its narrative content, such changes transform the film as a material object and its nature as a cinematic performance. In an ideal setting, restoration is “the methodological moment in which the work of art is appreciated in its material form and in its historical and aesthetic duality, with a view to transmitting it to the future”51. Unfortunately, real world settings can compromise a film’s aesthetic and historical material form at the same time. When films are being digitized or migrated they often encounter the limitations of newer formats, which leaves some immobile qualities of the original (or previous form) behind. In that sense every migration and/or transfer puts the film at risk of becoming something new. With this in mind, one can only imagine how many transfers some of the earliest films have gone through. The audio-visual qualities of a film’s newly restored Blu-Ray release may hardly resemble the original qualities of its celluloid form. It is important to emphasize that film screenings haven been and continue to be a performance as well. The materiality of a filmstrip and its visual content are not the only ways a digitally migrated or restored copy might differ from the “original film”52. Every film screening, especially during the early days of cinema, had some sort of interpretive interactivity. Sometimes it was musical accompaniment, sometimes a narrator and sometimes it was part of a theatrical performance compilation in the tent. There is no doubt that the cinematic setting of a particular time is even more fleeting than the film itself. And even if a film restoration/reconstruction barely ever considers the performative elements of a
50 Flueckiger, “Material properties…” 51 Cesare Brandi, Theory of Restoration, (Istituto Centrale per il Resta, 2005), 231 52 the term ‘original’ can be understood in various ways – as the director/producer intended to show, as the oldest surviving copy shows, etc., but in this thesis I use the framework of “film as original” stressing the importance of film as an artifact and the closest version to the one screened during the premiere, defended by Giovanna Fossati in Grain to Pixel, 113
24 film’s presentation, these elements do not suddenly become non-existent. Giovanna Fossati in her article “Multiple Originals: The (Digital) Restoration and Exhibition of Early Films” mentions two quite different projects – Mutoscope Biographe film programs presented at Le Giornate del Cinema Muto in 2000 and the unique project Crazy Cinématographe, which celebrated the “film as performance” framework inspired by early cinema exhibition practices 53 . If one perceives a film reconstruction as a new interpretive performance, she says, then that film screening can be understood as a new interpretation in the same way that “a representation of a play by Shakespeare is a new interpretation, whether it is performed in Elizabethan settings at the New Globe Theatre or in a modern setting”54. However, when talking about the experience of the projection of a restored version of a film, one must admit that during the years between early cinema and “now,” perfectly “authentic” technical conditions became obsolete, illegal or in some other way technically impossible. This, not to mention the eventual incorporation of technological objects such as additional sub-title screens, superior sound systems, digital media, etc. that were not even imaginable at the time of the film’s premiere but are now so commonplace.
2.2.3 The notion of loss and obsolescence
Technological obsolescence is another major issue which is often mentioned by representatives of the film archival world. Obsolescence and rapidly evolving technical development result in all kinds of re-formatting, restoration and reconstruction processes. This is usually primarily occurs due to a shortage of equipment capable of keeping aging formats alive. In relation to the tradition of analog film projection, there is no doubt that recent transfers to digital equipment and the subsequent disposal of analog projectors make analog film untenable in a
53 Fossati, “Multiple Originals”, 552 54 Fossati, “Multiple Originals”, 553
25 growing number of venues. Likewise, considering how regulated projections of nitrate prints usually remain, only a handful of venues are nitrate-capable. The lack of capable venues in this case forces archives to digitize their collections and eventually only use digital copies. And while the complete disappearance of analog film projection will not occur anytime in the near future, one of the most popular solutions to analog’s steady decline is digitization (frequently in support of film restoration and reconstruction projects). This is the reason why Vinzenz Hediger calls the final product of such practices an “improved original"55. Yet this phrase in some sense already contradicts itself, as the “original” (if we are talking about the actual original, i.e. the origin of its later versions), by being “upgraded” or improved, loses its inherent value as an authentic “original”56. As we have already established several aspects of film historicity, Hediger’s self-contradictive argument can be adjusted, separately and as a whole, to every single part of the cinema. In that sense, Hediger's strongly worded statement that, “…the original is always lost”57, can be reasonably interpreted as a belief that the performative element is lost right after the first screening. If the first master copy is approached as the “original”, it should never even be projected, only allowing its copies to lose their visual qualities, sound sharpness and generally perfect condition once it is first threaded through the projector. Without this approach, the “original” master is eventually lost when both the material and the technology that can project it. The notion of loss in retrieving the original or some sort of death of cinema (or film) altogether returns time and again in the writings of many of the above mentioned film theoreticians like Peter Greenaway, Paolo Cherchi Usai, Penelope Houston and Giovanna Fossati. Some filmmakers also use the aesthetics of loss as a basis for their own work, like Bill Morrison, Gustav Deutsch and Peter Delpeut, just to name a few. They all primarily work with silent cinema material originally captured on nitrate stock. The visually unique quality of its decomposition results in an aesthetically complex
55 Vinzenz Hediger “Original Work Performance. Film Theory as Archive Theory” in Quel che Brucia (non) Ritona: What Burns (Never) Returns: Lost and Found Films (ed. Giulio Bursi and Simone Venturini, 2011). 2 56 see footnote 52 57 Vinzenz. 13
26 distortion of the underlying image. The loss of the archival material and audiovisual art in these works is but one of its multiple meanings – as the savior of the source material’s remaining visual information; as a tool to raise awareness about the decomposition of nitrate films, and of course as the material for artistic expression.
2.2.4 Cherchi Usai’s Death of Cinema
Paolo Cherchi Usai is well aware of the many problems related to the physical ‘death’ of cinema (or film) and the continual disappearance of tools used to create or show that cinema, as he has expressed in various articles and books. In his book The Death of Cinema, he discusses the loss and natural decay of filmic heritage from a more ontological/existential point of view than a more broadly physical one. In the first chapter of the book, the author states that “Cinema is the art of moving image destruction”58. From this point forward the conception of the cinema that he elaborates is applicable to both the subject of art history and the subject of the archive. On a similar note, Jacques Derrida describes the archive in his Archive Fever as that which, “produces memory, but produces forgetting at the same time”59. This philosophy embraces film from a similar vantage point as one would the human body. It’s inevitable mortality makes the expected lifespan artistically valuable and precious. Usai relates cinema to oral expression, saying that: “extinction of moving images is considered as normal as the corruption of an oral tradition, or the vanishing of other ephemeral forms of human expression”60. Cinema is ephemeral, or at least it was during the more than 100 years of celluloid prior to the birth of digital formats. In all these years, cinema’s existence was born out at the expense of itself, since from Usai’s point of view its purpose is fulfilled only when it’s being watched, while at the same time being slowly destroyed. In his theory, he introduces the term ‘Model Image’, meaning the perfect image, which some consider to be the
58 Usai, The Death of Cinema, 6 59 Jacques Derrida “Archive Fever” (transcribed Seminar) in Refiguring the Archive (ed. Carolyn Hamilton and Verne Harris, Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2002), 54 60 Usai, The Death of Cinema, 17
27 goal of every screening of the film. Theoretically, the closest encounter to the ‘Model Image’ occurs during the first viewing of the film. So, that particular event is set as an impossible goal to achieve during every other following screening. This is applicable to every aspect of early cinema screening – screen, projector, room, lights, general atmosphere, sound, film print, etc… - that I have mentioned before. Thus, the only place to preserve the experience of the ‘Model Image’ is in the memory of that particular audience. This theory strengthens the idea of film being a performance, with every screening different from the other. Usai says:
“Link between the ephemeral nature of the image and its exhibition in a number n of showing mistakenly perceived by the viewer as events which are identical to each other”61
Hence, as film is constantly changing or dying, an interruption to this process can be seen in a similar fashion to that of the search for eternal life. Therefore, restorations, as one of the best-known methods to increase the lifespan of a film “are at best alien, if not contrary, to the unstable nature of the carrier”62. ‘The Model Image’ hypothesis is based upon the existence of films that are immune to decay. One could guess that the digital carrier is what he had in mind. The theory though is not necessarily attached to one precise form of carrier. Even though elsewhere63 Usai tends to stress the temporality of nitrate prints, here he expressively demonstrates his disbelief in the longevity of the digital form as well64. That disbelief complements ideas of ‘digital being just another emulsion’65 by Mark-Paul Meyer and Giovanna Fossati, creating a bond between celluloid and the digital form
61 Usai, Death of Cinema, 61 62 Usai, Death of Cinema, 67 63 Paolo Cherchi Usai’s writings in Burning Passions: An Introduction to the Study of Silent Cinema and Silent Cinema, an Introduction 64 Usai, Death of Cinema, 13 65 Mark-Paul Meyer, “Traditional Film Projection in a Digital Age” in Journal of Preservation 70, (Bruxelles: Federation Internationale Des Archives Du Film (FIAF), 2005). 16
28 not only in the linearity of the historical changes of emulsions, but also in a somewhat nihilistic sense of cinema's destiny to become history. Paolo Cherchi Usai himself is one of the leading figures of the current field of film preservation. As the long time senior curator at the George Eastman House in Rochester, USA, and previously as the director of Haghefilm Foundation in the Netherlands, he is responsible for many of today’s major preservations projects. After getting familiar with his opinion as a preservation academic and grouping him within preservation-skepticism, one must further consider him as a traditional film archivist, one who actively works on film preservation and digitization projects and, after defending the natural death of film, works on supporting its digital immortality. In some of his projects, the most well-known of which is the restoration of the Orson Welles film “Too Much Johnson”, he has stood on the opposing side of his own arguments in favor of film’s temporality and mortality. “Too Much Johnson” was the unfinished and never finalized project by the famous Orson Welles – a film that was actually never made and never meant to reach the big screen. In that case, its restoration and premier, which took place in 2013, can hardly go along with the acceptance of its ephemeral state, temporality or even non-existence66. However, he has simultaneously been one of only a few people who have not only seen hundreds of nitrate base films but has as well defended its projection, overruling the often-implied illegalities. From this perspective, it seems like the contradiction between his writings and his practice (excepting his role in Nitrate related events) resemble the historic debate between Henri Langlois and Ernest Lindgren.
2.3 Hare vs. Tortoise
Ernest Lindgren was the director of the National Film Archive in London
(1934 – 1973), while Henri Langlois was the director of Cinémathéque Française in
66 “Team effort restores a ‘lost’ Welles film” by Michael Phillips, 8 August 2013, Accessed 15th May 2016. http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2013-08- 08/entertainment/ct-mov-0809-talking-pictures-20130808_1_welles-pordenone- much-johnson
29 Paris (1938 – 1974). These two iconic film archivists represented two major film archives in Europe, and ironically their actions and ideologies towards their job were radically opposed to each other. As Clyde Jeavons aphoristically described their debate :
“To show is to preserve,” said Langlois.
“No,” said Lindgren. “To preserve is to show.”67
Unlike in the age of digital archiving, the time of celluloid as the only medium to preserve was a debate of special importance. Analog prints, unlike digital copies, have a very vivid and noticeable feature to change after every projection. It is usually being affected with scratches from a mechanism in the projector while being transported by the projectionist themself. Furthermore, film prints in many occasions deteriorate while being stored in unsuitable climate conditions. Due to various chemical activities, celluloid – especially nitrate and acetate – is relatively chemically unstable. However, during the era in which the aforementioned debate took place, individual archivists had much more freedom to act under their own ideas and beliefs, and even though Lindgren had already started combining the rules for the preservation Code of Ethics for FIAF, many archivists did not really follow it and instead followed their own intuition. Though neither Langlois nor Lindgren were ultimately right from the perspective of the somewhat balanced and moderate preservation practices at the present, Langlois as a defender of a high rate of accessibility in contrast to a greater attention towards preservation was (and is) much more criticized by contemporary archivists and film academics68. On the other hand, Lindgren’s attention to the original artifact “in almost antiquarian sense”69
67 Jeavons, see page 20 68 David Francis, “From Parchment to Pictures to Pixels Balancing the Accounts: Ernest Lindgren and the National Film Archive, 70 Years on” in Journal of Film Preservation 71, (Bruxelles: Federation Internationale Des Archives Du Film (FIAF), 2006) 69 Caroline Frick, “Saving Cinema: The Politics of Preservation”, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 171
30 showed a potential to preserve film heritage for a long-term future. Hence, his obsession with film artifacts and his attitude towards being more of an archivist than a collector and showman laid the groundwork for the FIAF Code of Ethics of preservation, strongly defending the untouchable status of a “master copy” and its sanctity. Even though the “master copy”70 can mean quite a lot of different things depending on the various periods of cinema history it was created in, looking at the first half of that history mostly yields a nitrate print, which is either the earliest generation surviving print of the film, or simply the copy with the largest amount of surviving information in it. Furthermore, if we talk about silent cinema, projection prints from that era often contained more information than original negatives as the title cards and tinted/toned colors were added when editing projection prints. However, it is in most cases a unique flammable print, which in the shadow of the Langlois vs. Lindgren debate, can be either preserved or shown. In the early stage of film archiving, the only print that archives had, was the master copy, sometimes even the only surviving print. Considering the fact that film heritage was in major part stored on a highly flammable nitrate stock, precise conditions for preservation and a strong attitude against screenings of these films were logical. On the other hand, for Langlois, "an archive which did not show its films was simply an impossibility”71. Even though his work did not look into the long-term future, by showing his archive's films in the tiny room of Cinémathèque gave the chance for local filmmakers, archivists and cinephiles to actually see cinema in its original form (in this case archival prints). It was a highly appreciated and respected activity amongst the then active French New Wave directors and the team from Cahiers du Cinéma, who eventually became good friends with Langlois himself and casual attendees to Cinémathèque organized screenings72. Right after 1951, when the production of nitrate film stock stopped, the shift to the new celluloid base raised new issues for the archives to deal with. What should be stressed here is that
70 often used as synonym to the ‘original’. Master copy – the closest to original(or original) copy from which copies can be made, explained by Paolo Cherchi Usai in his The Ethics of Film Preservation, 50-56 71 Houston, “Fortress Archive”, 50 72 Houston, “Fortress Archive”, 51
31 any films which were being produced or copied for further use gained a new form, new looks and a new perspective towards film preservation. The shift from nitrate to acetate introduced the question of ‘what is original?’ and the issue of original form (and original film base), which since then was one of the major debates in the world of film preservation. One could even compare this shift with the shift from analog to digital that we are experiencing in the present times. Mark-Paul Meyer says:
“Digital is just a new emulsion. And this new emulsion will also create a new visual language”73
Mark-Paul Meyer, in the quoted article, optimistically pictures the digital form as a result of a natural development of cinematic forms. In that perspective, he tries to set a different value of the digital format putting it in the timeline of historical film emulsion. It creates the image of it as more friendly for the notion of film materiality and its physical presence. However, I want to stress the other side of this same comparison. Unlike how Mark-Paul Meyer states, digitization is however one of the major debates in the archival community, highly written about, especially in relation with digitization of originally celluloid based film. On the other hand, the film base shift from nitrate to acetate is rarely mentioned in academic works about the related time period. In this shadow one can repeat Mark-Paul Meyer’s statement, that acetate film in 1950s did “create a new visual language”, just as digital did in last two decades. As I have already mentioned, together with the new form, or shape came the concept of the original format, which cannot be undervalued or forgotten.
Langlois though did not take the changing world and new variety of formats seriously and simply continued screening films in the form that Cinémathèque had. In this way, whether Langlois was aware of it or not, he was screening master nitrate copies of nitrate era films way after some of the neighboring countries had
73 Meyer, 16
32 even banned such projections74. However, these screenings were public events that gave the audience the chance to see films on the print that represented the time of its creation. On the opposing side, Lindgren’s archive, standing on the side of the “to preserve is to show” ideology, after 1951 could not have screened any of its archival prints on nitrate, since preserved films already had its duplicated copies on other bases for projection and the ones which didn’t were simply not allowed to be screened. Film duplication has always been one of the major preservation processes in this field. While master copies are considered the best source for the films content, in strictly preservation orientated institutions they automatically become unprojectable and used only for duplication or restoration. In some archives even the first duplicated copy is kept for further processes, leaving only third or fourth generation copy as the one which is acceptable to reach the projection booth75. Such a competition between these two archival legends and the chaotic and unorganized character of Langlois unexpectedly made him into the defender of accessible cinema. Furthermore, his active role in screening the collection made him into the defender of screening the originals, in this particular case meaning original form. This first generation of film archivists are greatly echoed in the practices of most of the contemporary film archivists76. However, industry is shifting to a new medium. Though the shift which creates the possibility to preserve almost everything is challenged by various anti-preservationist ideas. David Lowenthal states:
“Preservation itself reveals that permanence is an illusion. The more we save, the more aware we become that such remains are continually altered and
74 the anti-nitrate laws in UK in 1950 was followed by several other European countries in the following years. 75 Paolo Cherchi Usai, “The Ethics of Film Preservation” in Silent Cinema: An Introduction. (London: British Film Institute, 2000), 52-54 76 Frick, 171
33 reinterpreted… Advocates of preservation who adjure us to save things unchanged fight a losing battle, since even to appreciate the past is to transform it.”77
Following Lowenthal’s words we can say that without access film history loses its purpose. Hence, Lowenthal’s quote here extends the Lindgren vs. Langlois debate into the world of digital representation, where the content of the film travels between different forms and different material stages, using refreshing, emulation and migration78. It brings the crucial requirement for an archive to be accessible to much more current and complex digital dimension.
3. Case studies
3.1 Overview
In 1991 FIAF, with the financial assistance of UNESCO, released a short book on Nitrate and its handling called “Handling, Storage and Transport of Cellulose Nitrate Film”, which contained data from a questionnaire to all of FIAF archives about the legality of the nitrate projections in their premises. It stated that “twenty- five out of fifty-two archives can project nitrate films both in their cinemas and on their premises”, while “sixteen archives cannot project nitrate films at all”. However, “archives in 20 countries declared that nitrate film can be freely transported by road”79, and it showed the gradual decrease of transportation availability by other ways of transportation.
77 David Lowenthal, “Changing the Past” in The Past is a Foreign Country, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 410 78 refreshing, emulation and migration – terms used to describe changing of file formats, software or hardware in digital preservation practices. Howard Besser, “Digital Preservation of Moving Image Material” in The Moving Image, March 2001, 49-51 79 FIAF, Handling, storage and transport of cellulose nitrate film, 1991
34 Which are the archives considered able to project nitrate films in 1991 and how many of them actually practiced such activities since 1991 is unknown. However, from documented and promoted nitrate projections there are five venues in the USA which are equipped to handle nitrate prints and have practiced it at least once: James Bridges Theater of UCLA in Los Angeles, CA; The Library of Congress’ Packard Campus Theater in Culperer, VA; LACMA’s Bing Theater in Los Angeles, CA; AFI Theater at the JFK Center in Washington and Dryden Theater of George Eastman House in Rochester, NY. In addition to the venues in the USA there are three venues in Europe, which have at least several times since 1991 publicly showed nitrate prints: BFI Southbank theater in London, UK; La Cinémathèque Française in Paris, France and Jugoslovenska Kinoteka in Belgrade, Serbia. However, only two of these institutions – Jugoslovenska Kinoteka and George Eastman House have established annual festivals where nitrate prints are screened and such screenings are celebrated year after year, expanding the vision on nitrate projection outside the tradition of an irregular unique event. These two venues here are my case studies to explore and understand how nitrate films are treated and perceived in somewhat long-term annual events like The Nitrate Film Festival and Nitrate Picture Show. Even though the titles of two festivals suggest their similarity and somewhat similar aim, the differences are greater than what one might expect. The Nitrate Film Festival, which was established in 1999 is not solely about nitrate film projections, but it aims on presenting nitrate film era in much broader sense than Nitrate Picture Show in Rochester. The latter is younger but is more concentrated on nitrate prints, their “conservation” and access for projection. The difference of aims in these two distant institutions inspired this analysis and comparison.
3.2 The Nitrate Film Festival, Belgrade
Jugoslovenska Kinoteka (from here on referred to as Kinoteka) is definitely the most active film archive in the whole Balkan region. It is the largest in size in the
35 area and as well the most capable to show the content of its archive due to long practiced tradition of nitrate film prints and its special projectors in the booth. It owns the nitrate collection of almost ten-thousand titles which consists of films from all over the world. By keeping and using its collection for all the possible purposes, Kinoteka is a defender of the tradition of nitrate projection. Such a tradition is not publicly practiced in the entire East and South Europe due to legal boundaries or technical capabilities. Nevertheless, the nitrate collection of Kinoteka is the most used in the continent, if not in the whole world. Its films are used for the same purpose as they were made for and that is to be shown, which is one of the main ideas behind the preservation-skepticism80. The circumstances, that these showings happen to be very rare events in the international perspective, does not really matter when we talk about purpose of cinema in much wider sense. The venue, where half of the regular screenings (including all of the nitrate projections) take place, is situated only a few minutes’ walk from the national parliament house. It has been there since 1953 and during its more than half a century of active life underwent several renovations and technological upgrades. After all this time it is still showing and regularly presenting the classic cinema from local collection. Recently Kinoteka has opened a new building with a permanent cinema apparatus exhibition and two venues for screenings. Expansion and modernization allow an archive’s collection and activities to be more visible. Luckily for the preservation-skeptics some of the traditions, including a 16-year-old nitrate film festival, are not left behind in the time of digital expansion of cinema. The current (2015) Head of Archive in the Serbian national archive Kinoteka is Aleksandar Erdeljanovic, who has been working in this archive since 1995. First as the main researcher for the foreign films, and then, since 2001 as the head of the archive. Erdeljanovic himself had started the programming part of the monthly schedule of Kinoteka’s cinema already in 1997, where every month it had
80 the author defines the preservation-skepticism movement in chapter 2.2
36 approximately three films projected from archive owned nitrate prints. He is as well the most active archivist from the former Republic of Yugoslavia. His work is mostly connected with many discoveries of early film footage from and about the countries of the former Republic of Yugoslavia. His long living passion to show films from closed vaults and make his archive more and more accessible should not be underrated. Erdeljanovic has a very distinct academic/professional background prior his involvement with the national film archive. After finishing his degree in political science he worked various jobs secretly developing his love and passion for cinema. During the golden age of Kinoteka he became a regular visitor to its cinematheque, and in such a way became an active young cinephile. His career turned upside down when he won a TV quiz show about film history. As he explains that moment:
“And when (the) quiz was finished, they gave me a car, some money, and the general manager of Kinoteka asked me if I want to be their main researcher for the foreign films”81
While holding the position as the main researcher he found out about the quantity of films kept in the nitrate vaults and intentionally started his slow mission to show those gems to the audiences. He admits to compare his passion to show films with legendary Langlois ways of managing the archive. He says :
“we have diamonds, but diamonds are closed in the bunker”82
Such a pure passion to show and to watch stands behind the Nitrate Film
Festival. When asked about his reasons to use unique nitrate copies for projection he stated – “if the nitrate is in solid technical condition to be presented, why not?”83.
81 Aleksandar Erdeljanovic, Personal interview, June 2015 82 ibid 83 ibid
37 However, at the same time he strongly stressed that “every nitrate copy must be copied”84. Whether his passion to connect the nitrate vault with the projection booth came from simply practical reasons to actively include every corner of Kinoteka’s institute in the Serbian movie-goers life and expand their cinematic knowledge, or from the conscious wish to keep his archives’ status as a unique nitrate-screening institute, is hard to tell. The Nitrate Film Festival in Belgrade was definitely not established for selfish reasons. Republic of Serbia (and former Yugoslavia) has never had any accidents or problems with its nitrate collection so legal governmental restrictions with its treatment and projection were never really introduced. Furthermore, the tradition of projecting nitrate prints in Kinoteka goes back much longer than 1999, when the Nitrate Film Festival started. Knowing that nitrate projections in most of the European countries are illegal, Kinoteka holds the title of being one of only two venues in the continent which makes these globally rare public events. It shares this responsibility only with the venue in London where nitrate projections takes place on very rare occasions and gets a lot of attention from both - local cinephiles and highly regulated technical staff and fire department. The head of archive in Kinoteka during the interview never mentioned what it was like before his coming to the archive and his organized nitrate film festival. However, Slobodan Arandjelovic – the programmer of the Kinoteka during the 1980s mentioned85 that nitrate projections were not less common than it is now, even the opposite. Since projection of the nitrate in Serbia has never been restricted or banned, it also has never got as much attention as in other western countries, where anti-nitrate laws were very much present and became a discussion subject for the whole archival world. Serbia, on the other hand, never stressed the changing attitude to project archival nitrate prints. As it always has, it never stopped such activity. Mr. Arandjelovic mentioned86 that in his regular daily program of Kinoteka
84 ibid 85 Slobodan Arandjelovic, personal communication with author, June 10th, 2015 86 ibid
38 he usually included a shocking number of up to 30 percent of all the film program shown from nitrate. In this case, lack of care about the anti-nitrate laws present in the west, but not so much in the eastern block of Europe let the tradition survive without much extra attention. If we could count this practice of nitrate projection before it became more publicly vivid since the late 1990s as globally unseen or secret but legal practice, we can only guess how many archives and cinematheques around the world was (and maybe is) doing the same without reaching public media. What is more, former programmer of the Kinoteka claims that the tradition was practiced during the 1980s 87 without really questioning its importance when he was in charge of Kinoteka’s cinema. Though pride of being somewhat unique came only after a decade, when the actual knowledge about the nitrate base and its restricted projections abroad reached the staff of Kinoteka and the aspect of the film copies’ base and preservation state started to matter in organizing the program. The Nitrate Film Festival is the oldest annual public event which since its beginning in 1999 has projected films from nitrate prints and has always been mainly about it. Due to the lack of nitrate prints and difficulties to get them from abroad The Nitrate Film Festival nowadays is not concentrated solely on projecting nitrate prints. Even though originally it started as such, eventually it turned into a festival, which is showing films from the nitrate era – films until the early 1950s. From 2015, the 17th edition, the festival broke its requirements of the films being only from the nitrate era and expanded its view to a wider understanding of archival films with its “youngest” film being from 1974. Nevertheless, the unique nitrate print projections have never abandoned this annual event. Every year at least a few nitrate films from the Serbian national nitrate collection are being screened. Together with several nitrate film projections, the Nitrate Film Festival gives the opportunity to get familiar with the nitrate film era in much broader sense. Ten days of two or three screenings per day consists of films from various archives. Nearly one fourth of them are silent films, accompanied by one local long-time
87 ibid
39 collaborating film accompanist who has been working in the festival for nearly ten years88. Even though the festival has its separate printed program, there is no system of accreditation (or festival-pass). Each screening in the festival has the same status as any other screening in Kinoteka – a standard numbered ticket is sold for each screening. The contextual (performative) aspect of each film is almost solely dependent on the guests from other national archives, who sometimes present films and their national or international importance. The local prints rarely get such attention. The festival is split between two Kinotekas’ cinemas, presenting one (late evening) screening a day in its new, larger venue. Interestingly, two nitrate projections during the festival in 2015 were not introduced or got any special attention. Hypothetically, for a non-familiar outsider, who accidentally happened to be in one of those screenings without carefully reading the program, it was a screening as any other. The rest of the program is almost evenly screened from digital formats and 35mm copies. Even though the Nitrate Film Festival is not well known in the international community, it is one of only a few archival film festivals which started before the year 2000, making it one of the oldest festivals of the kind presenting unique films from all around the world and giving an exceptional chance to see films from nitrate prints from the national archive collection – films that rarely can be seen outside of Serbia.
The technical performance during the nitrate projections in Belgrade is solely dependent on the skills and knowledge of people working in the projection booth and in the vaults. Since such a practice is not new, the confidence with treating and projecting nitrate prints is high and projectionists are experienced with the particular projector and its friendship with flammable material89. The Philips FP56 35mm projectors, which are used during the festival, are the same since the Kinoteka has opened its doors first in 1950s. Comparing them with contemporary projectors, they are more reliable to project flammable prints. They have closed containers where the reel is kept during the projection, so in the
88 ibid 89 observation made by the author during the visit to Belgrade in 2015
40 remote event of a fire the flame would not easily spread throughout the projection booth. These projectors were built shortly after the switch from nitrate base to acetate base in the global film industry. In early 1950s projectors were still built with the consideration of projecting nitrate films. Kinoteka has another building in the city center, where most of the contemporary films are being screened. One of the venues there is as well suitable for projecting 35mm on newer projectors from the 1970s where film reels are not isolated in the containers as in the Philips projectors. Due to this difference between the projectors and generally more experience of handling the nitrate prints in the older venue, it is highly preferable to keep these projections there, while most of the screenings of contemporary cinema from the Kinoteka takes place in the newer location. Unfortunately, the festival, as well as its nitrate projections gets quite a poor attendance rate. It is not well known by locals nor by foreign archival film lovers. The nitrate projections do not really get more attention than regular Kinoteka’s program, raising the question for the archive, whether its mission of bringing the collection of nitrate vaults to the cinema screen is actually worth the effort, as well worth the danger and natural damage incurred by the prints during these projections. During the Nitrate Film Festival in 2015 there were around 20 film projections, of which two were of locally preserved nitrate prints. Excluding several more popular classic films that were screened in the new venue as special events, all the screenings received very low attendance rate (no more than 15 people per screening). The two nitrate projections received somewhat similar popularity as others. To compare with the program outside the 10-day festival in June, one could expect that the regular program is even worse. For example, in 2015, just after the festival, Kinoteka started showing daily John Wayne retrospective which were attended by mostly the same audience as the festival90. Such an observation could mean that there is some number of loyal Kinoteka’s visitors, which combines the
90 observation made by the author
41 majority of casual visitors, either we talk about the regular daily screenings, festivals or rare and unique screenings of the nitrate base cinema.
3.3 The Nitrate Picture Show, Rochester
One of the archives which experienced one of the early accidents related with nitrate film flammability91 is the George Eastman House in Rochester, New York, USA. Such an accident did not stop this active archive. Now it is one of the largest archives in USA, especially well known amongst archivists and early cinema lovers for its preservation activities and contributions to save the film heritage of the early days. The archive runs the Selznik school of film preservation and restoration, which is one of only handful of schools in the entire world that trains specialists of audiovisual preservation. Being one of the most active archives in the film restoration field, it is as well the place where a big portion of current archivists is being trained. Such an academic environment to study film brings even more value to its archival collection of nitrate prints. The George Eastman House was founded in 1947 and started building its nitrate collection and specialized vaults for it as early as 1952. These vaults were the first of their kind at the private museum and were incredibly important to keep the preservation standards of these usually legally unprojectable prints higher than it was. Remembering the year of 2000, when “The Last Nitrate Picture Show” took place in London, the Dryden Theater in Rochester was the venue where a part of these nitrate films, which were scheduled for the then upcoming event in London, were tested. Cherchi Usai was the one who saw these nitrate prints before the public audiences did. In 2015 he erased the word “last” from the title of the event in 2000, and started another annual celebration of the nitrate films called “The Nitrate
91 Houston, “Introduction”, 2
42 Picture Show”, claiming that it was and is not the last show to see films on the flammable film base. Cherchi Usai’s background comes from art history. His academic interest switched during his preparation to write a doctoral dissertation on restoration of medieval paintings. That’s when he discovered the lack of “sophisticated scholarship in the restoration of the moving image”92. Furthermore, having the academic skills in fine arts restoration, he was surprised that restoration of cinema does not get the same treatment. That’s when he established his goal “to treat cinema as one of the fine arts”93. Being a skillful film preservationist, conservationist, restorer and archivist he became an expert of early film and has had a chance to see and analyze hundreds of films in its original form and format. Furthermore, he is one of the founders of the oldest Silent Film Fetival “Le Giornate del Cinema Muto” in Pordenone, which since its foundation in 1982 contributed to keep and raise the standards of silent film screenings. When asked about his personal knowledge about nitrate prints, he came back to the comparison between looking at huge numbers of fine arts examples and watching the same numbers of films in various forms and emulsions:
“So when people say, well, what’s the difference (between nitrate and acetate print)? A film is a film…My only answer is ‘How many nitrate prints have you seen?’”94
For him it does matter whether film is shown in its original form or not. And it does matter that a film is used for its natural purpose – projection. Furthermore, a print must be conserved95 in the best possible conditions, which will allow it to be watched and re-watched hundreds of times without causing
92 Paolo Cherchi Usai, Skype interview, July 2015 93 ibid 94 ibid 95 word ‘film conservation’ used by Paolo Cherchi Usai and in relation to the Nitrate Picture Show in Rochester is equivalent to ‘passive preservation’. ‘Conservation’
43 major decomposition or need for reproduction. Generally, Paolo Cherchi Usai says that he had to “get rid of the notion of cinema as an art of reproduction in order to appreciate the distinctiveness of the projection of the original print”96. Such a philosophy contributes a lot to the idea of Usai’s established “Nitrate Picture Show”, where film conservation and its longevity is celebrated by running nitrate prints through projector and watching them on the big screen, as it was originally made to be used. However, in contemporary standards of film preservation, nitrate film print, especially the so called "master copy", is only the source for new copies. Making new copies is the only way to keep the content of these "master copies" safe for uncountable numbers of projections with relatively little amount of loss. As Cherchi Usai states, film reproduction (or copying) is unnecessary97. Preservation- skepticism under such statement can as well be called pro-conservationism, where the main defensive statement could center around currently undervalued longevity of film prints and in same respect concerns of raising standards of film projection and handling. The founding curator of the George Eastman House James Karr once said:
“The nitrate originals should be used when there are negatives to get the best possible prints. The original positives should be looked at as long as it can be put through the projectors, otherwise you're not talking about films. You're talking about facsimiles.”98
Cherchi Usai, in this stance, shows the long time tradition of respecting all components of cinema - the original environment, equipment and the carrier. Furthermore, his contribution to project nitrate as well respects the ideas and practices of the predecessor of his institute and keeps the long-living tradition which has been defended since the times when the institute was established. derives from the field of preservation of fine arts. General discussion about passive and active preservation – see page 12-13 96 Usai, Skype interview 97 ibid 98 George Eastman House, program for The Nitrate Picture Show 2015, 2
44 Talking about regulations that the projection booth of The Nitrate Picture Show has to meet, the fire department requirements are expectedly high. As Paolo Cherchi Usai explains the regulations in short:
“In USA we need to have at least two people at the projection booth. We can keep a very limited amount of film in the booth for safety reasons…The projection booth must have two exits…”99, etc.
Furthermore, he mentions that “…sometimes rules are only symbols, they do not really make the difference, but they make people feel safer…”100. Considering that nitrate film has almost explosive flammability and that it is practically impossible to put the nitrate fire out: “some of the precautions are not particularly useful”. For example, required water sprinklers in the nitrate vaults after all has only symbolic meaning. However, the checks to see if the fire regulations are met and everything is in order are done by the staff in the cinema. Until 2015 the George Eastman House did not have any annual event where the nitrate collection would get the highest attention, though it occasionally projected the flammable stock in its private Dryden Theater. Sometimes publicly, sometimes only for students, but the collection can hardly be called forgotten in its vaults.
The Nitrate Picture Show is strictly concentrated on the idea of film conservation101, leading it towards the idea that film prints, if kept properly can last much longer than it usually did. Interestingly enough, in its first year in 2015 the festival itself was announced more than half a year before it took place, though the actual program was kept in secret until three days before the event. Since the tickets were sold out months before the program was announced, the festival fulfilled its mission to be more about the nitrate emulsion than about what film is on that emulsion. Furthermore, the films that eventually were announced are not some
99 Usai, Paolo Cherchi, Interview by author, Skype recording, July 2015 100 Usai, Interview 101 term ‘film conservation’ description – see footnote 93
45 rarities that nobody has ever seen before, but mostly very well know examples of classic cinema. The move to screen popular classics again stresses the message that this film festival is trying to convey. Assumingly the attendees did not come to see the Casablanca that they have already seen before, but to see Casablanca in a way they have never seen it. Since the successful 1st entry of Nitrate Picture Show in 2015, this festival increased the list of well-known and established archival film festivals, which is dominated by the most famous Il Cinema Ritrovato in Bologna, Le Giornate del Cinema Muto in Pordenone and the San Francisco Silent Film Festival with another location in the USA. The nitrate film is projected through Century projectors, which are sitting in the Dryden theater since it has opened in 1951. These machines are “closed head” projectors, isolating the entire projected film reel from the rest of projecting booth. Furthermore, it has an additional anti-fire mechanism, which helps to prevent fire from spreading to the entire reel in case of an accident. The projectors are equipped specifically for nitrate projections concerning their highly flammable nature
In the next chapter I will discuss the differences and contrasting approaches that these two festivals have. I apply both a theoretical, historical approach, first introduced in chapter two, and first-hand observations and interviews in order to analyze the roles that both venues hold in relation to such a narrow field as current nitrate projections. It contains an analysis of the curatorial and promotional decisions on both sides of the globe and how the chosen approaches towards the audience and towards the nitrate film itself positions nitrate film projections in a global and national context. Finally, I will evaluate how the contextual and material side of the film presentation matters for the understanding of cinematic culture and history and how does it fit in the digital world of today.
46 4. Comparisons of the Case Studies
One can hardly imagine that the general cinema audience would choose such niche events as the Nitrate Film Festival in Belgrade or the Nitrate Picture Show in Rochester as their destinations. The young and ambitious Nitrate Picture Show has already established a respectable status amongst other major archival film festivals. Professional visitors of Il Cinema Ritrovato in Bologna or Le Giornate del Cinema Muto in Pordenone have quickly discovered a unique event across the ocean and incorporated it into their schedule. The success of this festival can be based on the sold-outs for both 2015 and 2016 editions. Considering the fact that Rochester is a costly and difficult to reach destination for any European film lover, one question arises: why the Nitrate Film Festival in Belgrade, which identically to its American brother screens the nitrate prints on the silver screen, offers a longer and much wider spectrum of cinema, not as costly, and is already more than 15 years of age, can hardly be called sold-out but rather empty? The nitrate film screenings can hardly be called known by foreign archival film lovers, nor locals. Basically, the regular audience is the same as the one coming to the regular Kinoteka’s screenings. Firstly and most importantly, the difference lies on the quality and intensity of public image. One could compare these festivals with Henri Langlois’ screenings in his almost selected audience in cinémathéque in Paris after the decline of the nitrate era. Henri Langlois mission was to show cinema to the new generations of filmmakers, film academics and then quite elitist cinephiles in France. I believe his contribution made to the French New Wave and later to the New History of Cinema was not based only on hopes of successful attendance to his screenings. His cinémathéque and Langlois himself has established himself as an important figure in then contemporary French film-world. With such belief one could state that he was fulfilling the demand of the cinema that only the Cinémathéque Française could have offered from its collection. The demand of nitrate film festival today can only be measured after it takes place. It’s commercial success, reviews, comments in public media can relate with the demand of forthcoming next issue of the annual event. However one must first attract the
47 audiences and potential regular customers. The Nitrate Picture Show got a lot of attention amongst the casual attendees of other archival film festivals, from its first year becoming one of the major destinations to visit for the archival film festival regular audience. Such favorable and quick popularity could be understood through the differences between national financial situations and the huge difference between targeted audiences in Rochester and Belgrade. Furthermore, in Serbia most of the publication and advertising about the festival hardly reaches any place outside Belgrade and limits itself with only Serbian language media. On the other hand, the George Eastman House targets the well-established and vividly living international archival film lovers community. Most of the well-established international film festivals gets the foreign public through English language publications and generally touristic orientated attitude, which can be considered as lacking in the case of the Nitrate Film Festival.
It was not difficult to fulfill the archivist's pure passion to show the cinema from his collection 50 years ago, but currently when the global market of archival cinema and related events is much larger and more competitive, cinematheques must put much more effort to survive and to successfully sell its service to potential customers. The Nitrate Picture Show has established itself as “the world’s first festival of film conservation”102 in 2015. The first of such kind, which is with its title stressing the longevity of each film print and importance of conservation. Unlike other archival film festivals, where much more attention lies on the new restorations and preservation projects of archival cinema by using a constantly expanding collection of well preserved film prints and digital copies from various archives. The Nitrate Picture Show with its mission to show only nitrate film prints does not contribute to the global archival cinema preservation practices. It simply uses the prints, which were passively preserved for further use of projection. Differently, the Nitrate Film Festival in Belgrade does not have such a specific aim to rely only on nitrate film prints and celebrate its conservation. In that sense, it
102 George Eastman House, program, 1
48 is much more of the traditional archival film festival, which offers its audiences a compilation of diverse archival films from around the world. In addition to being a regular archival film festival, it continues the long established tradition to project its locally preserved nitrate “gems”. However, with the lack of publicity the festival can hardly compete with highly acclaimed and successful festivals in Italy, Germany and the UK. As it is barely known amongst the citizens of Belgrade, it relies on maybe naïve, but courageous attitude to purely hope for greater attention and increasing popularity in the following years. Unfortunate circumstances are not helping the Nitrate Film Festival in Belgrade, in comparison with Rochester, hence I must mention the obvious difference of the aims of these two festivals. As the curators of the Nitrate Picture Show are not even mentioning the program of the festival until the audience has already paid and maybe even travelled to the event, it relies on the trust of its audiences. As well, it clearly states that the actual program (or the content) can be considered as less important than the context of it. If comparing the film programs of both the Nitrate Picture Show in Rochester and the Nitrate Film Festival in Belgrade solely in 2015, Rochester overall showed 11 films from nitrate prints, including such well known examples as “Casablanca” directed by Michael Curtiz, “The Man Who Knew Too Much” by Alfred Hitchcock and “Samson and Delilah” by Cecil B. DeMille. These films are often included in must-see lists and are crucial educational subjects for film students. On the other hand, Belgrade in 2015 showed two nitrate base films – Czechoslovak comedy “U snedeného krámu” from 1933 and French crime drama “L’homme de Londres” from 1943 directed by Henri Decoin. Both of these films are lesser known examples from relatively well known European directors’ filmographies. Furthermore, in Rochester the audience is presented with possibilities to visit the projection booth, to attend various seminars and even visit the vaults of the archive. It gives the event an important performative aspect, where film projection and the transfer of the projected nitrate prints from the archive to the silver screen is not hidden and openly discussed. In such a manner, the performance of the projectionists becomes apparent, creating another layer of unique elements into each of the nitrate film projections during the Nitrate Picture Show.
49 The projectionists are not less professional or less open-minded in the booth of Jugoslovenska Kinoteka in Belgrade. Although they do their skillful job during the festival in the same manner as any other day during the year. In the case of Nitrate Film Festival, nitrate film base as its subject of concentration is publicly represented only on the front page of the festival's paper program. The title Nitrate Film Festival here stands behind the era of cinema, when no other film base was used for the commercial cinema. Unlike technical and film preservation education in Rochester, the Nitrate Film Festival chooses to follow the educational path of the film historian, choosing sometimes obscure, recently restored or rediscovered titles of the era. Such different paths can be closely related with the clear difference between the backgrounds of the initiators of the festival. In this case, the Nitrate Picture Show gets the particular interest in film conservation and its initiator Cherchi Usai, who is educated as fine-art restorer, delivers his aim on raising awareness of nitrate film base uniqueness. On the other hand, Erdeljanovic is educated in political science and grew into film world through the path of a cinephile. In his case, the material aspect of film is just another aspect of cinema in a broader sense. The Nitrate Film Festival, even though in previous years it has got some attention as a nitrate projecting event, is still more or less “just another” archival film festival, celebrating cinema in a less professional way than its brother overseas. As the head of the collection Erdeljanovic mentioned, his idea to establish the festival came from the passion to show the forgotten gems in the nitrate vaults of Kinoteka. As some of these films which are owned by the archive are not locally kept in any other film base or at least in any higher definition form, a number of these films, if chosen for the program, are either screened from loaned copied prints from foreign archives or locally preserved nitrate prints. Such a pure passion to show classics from locally stored prints could be compared with the similar passion behind the screenings of Henri Langlois. With such a comparison I want to present the idea that the Nitrate Film Festival is based on the stable grounds of being a more content concentrated event, while with the festival in the USA I would like to categorize it as concentrated on context. Unlike the Nitrate Picture Show in Rochester, festival in Serbia barely ever incorporated information about film base in
50 their festival program. Only recently it has started notifying which films are being screened from the nitrate prints. When looking back at several previous editions of the festival103 none of the films contains remark about being from “nitrate print”. Knowing that they only screen flammable film owned by local archive, one could only guess how many nitrate screenings were there each year based on the number of the films from the national archive of Serbia. Such factor shows that the Nitrate Film Festival is less about it being the event, which screens nitrate prints, but more about it being an archival film festival, which is concentrated on the era of nitrate film. The nitrate film projection here stands as a secondary goal, which is not less important from the ideological point of view, but less vivid for the potential audiences. This simplified comparison puts our case studies on a slightly contrasting relationship with contemporary digital projections and general practices of film digitization and digital intervention in film based cinema. The Nitrate Picture Show in this instance could be defined as the film-related event, which does not use any of the digital technology and purely relying on vintage unique prints, all of them made before the commercial introduction of safety stock. If we wouldn’t mention the help of the internet and digital social media to reach for the audiences, the Nitrate Picture Show could be understood as an annual archival film festival which is not in any way related with all the contemporary preservation practices. Such an “anti-preservation” message here does not necessary show negligence of the importance of such practices, but it better stresses the value of film conservation (passive-preservation) in the field as the more truthful way to keep cinema alive in its original material form. Supporters of the concept of ‘cinema as art of reproduction’ would call both of these festivals somewhat anti-preservationist, since they give a higher chance to damage the "original” unique prints in comparison with their passive sitting in the vaults would. However, both Cherchi Usai and Erdjanovic most importantly care for cinema, and unlike the others, care for the audiences, who wants to see the original instead of a reproduction. Such care could be very well described by repeating the
103 Jugoslovenska Kinoteka, printed programs of the festival from years 2010, 2012
51 phrase “to show is to preserve”, which gives credit to the memory of the audience as another, even if it is only temporary, storage space to keep the cinematic heritage.
Nitrate projection events, whether they take place in such a celebratory fashion as in the Nitrate Picture Show in Rochester or as a single random screening incorporated in a much wider spectrum of archival cinema traditions, are in at least some way contributing towards the destruction of projected film prints. Its exposure to light and running through the projector makes the risk to lose these prints irreversibly much higher than when keeping them in the vault. However, as the archival world is already aware of the unavoidable nature of decomposition of any film base, nitrate prints cannot be saved from self-destruction. With that knowledge decisions to screen it or not mirrors the Henri Langlois and Ernest Lindgren debate, where ironically enough, the role of “hare” to not waste time and try to project the flammable prints as long as it is possible today becomes a reasonable idea. Surely, it is hard to establish the relationship of current nitrate projections with the screenings organized by the legendary Langlois. However, it is clear that today’s communications and collaborations between archives and archivists lowers the risks of unique sole surviving prints not getting proper preservation care. Even if the lack of needed preservation care occasionally occurs due to lack of documentation or budget, it is hardly believable that public nitrate events, as the ones we analyzed here, would irresponsibly show unpreserved film and take the risk of damaging the only/best surviving print. Comparing Nitrate Film Festival and Nitrate Picture Show and their standards of nitrate projection, I must mention that the flammable film print projection will very unlikely actually create the possibility to do any fire damage for audiences or the theater itself. As both interviewed archivists mentioned, the main problematic issue of projecting nitrate is not its flammability, but the shrink rate, which at some degree makes it impossible to run through the projector. If these festivals were reviewed and advertised honestly, the title of the article in, for example, the Rochester City Newspaper would be changed from “This Film is Dangerous”, to “This Film is Dangerously Shrunken”. Ever since licensed projection
52 requirements were established in the early 1900s, nitrate accidents during the projections were very rare. In consequence, currently the nitrate projections are very rare events, providing no more than 15 public nitrate film projections per year globally. They all are hosted by respected institutions, which do not lack of attention or care for any curated events, including nitrate projections. The regulations in those particular venues where such events take place are fully managed by the local staff members, though some particular safety requirements about the nitrate film projection are advised by both fire department and FIAF. Both George Eastman House in Rochester and Jugoslovenska Kinoteka in Belgrade have been active members of the largest film archive community FIAF (International Federation of Film Archives) for more than half a century. One being a member since 1949, the other since 1951, accordingly. FIAF itself has only advisory document compiling current national regulations on nitrate projections, which shortly describes the projection of nitrate stock:
“Only nitrate films which are not preservation or duplicating copies may be projected. The films should be subjected to a technical check prior to projection. The aim is to avoid the projection of badly damaged or decomposed films so that the risk of destruction or fire is reduced. Film projectors for nitrate film should be equipped with a fire loop switch which, in case of fire, automatically closes the shutters over the projection and viewing windows. Two persons must always be present in the projection room when nitrate film is being shown.”104
Even though it imposes its archives with its code of ethics, FIAF has never questioned the standards of nitrate projections, neither in Belgrade nor in Rochester. Furthermore, George Eastman House is as well a member of another federation of film archives – Association of Moving Image Archivists (AMIA), which only mirrors FIAF’s perspective towards these rare events. As AMIA and FIAF has no mandated and controlling regulations on how to show nitrate prints, it becomes only safety
104 FIAF, Handling, storage…
53 regulations which are kept under the management of the archive itself in Belgrade, and mandated by the local fire department, but managed by the staff of the archive in Rochester. In the end, whatever the regulations are in both of our analyzed venues, safety of the audiences and their film heritage mostly rely on high professionalism of projectionists and generally staff who work in the festivals. By criticizing the highly exaggerated flammability of the nitrate film I am not trying to state that nitrate film is less flammable than it actually is or was, but considering that majority of the audiences who come to these rare nitrate film projections are very well aware of why is it special, and it is not the flammability of the film, but its distinctive quality of the image and particular, unique depth, which is visible only when projected on the screen. Such knowledge is not very widely spread and even if the festival contributes on education needed for better appreciation, media myths about nitrate films persist throughout the viewers who never attended one of these specialized festivals. The publicity of the two festivals, as I have already mentioned above, differs radically. While the Nitrate Picture Show is not shy about its unique status of being one of only few venues in the world which shows films from the infamous flammable prints, the festival in Belgrade can be seen as older, more experienced, but as well passive and personal or local. In 2015, this festival was running for the 17th time. Having its regular audience and clear but not very out-spoken mission, it created the image that nitrate projections there is just “business as usual”. The longevity of such specialized festival can as well affect audiences’ perspective of such a rare event. Belgrade, as culturally and geographically distant location from any other place, which has at least occasionally screened nitrate films, accommodates cinephiles, who might have been watching nitrate film projections for decades. In that respect, Jugoslovenska Kinoteka is truthfully defending the idea, which perfectly uses and rephrases Mark-Paul Meyer’s comment about “digital, as being just another emulsion”. Only in this case, the nitrate base is “just another film base”. Such a perspective raises another very valuable question: should we celebrate and perceive nitrate film projections as somewhat superior over other ways of showing films? And does nitrate film print deserve more attention than a digitally
54 restored film projected from DCP (Digital Cinema Package), or contemporary blockbuster from 35mm polyester print? Those questions can only arise in the culture, where diversity and matter of choice for the audience has been practiced for a relatively long time. In this case, either by accident or intentionally, Serbia’s capital could be proud of being the city with the most stable balance of various film formats and forms, with this struggle of keeping archival cinema alive and giving the audience a chance for healthy and unpretentious comparisons.
Conclusion
Rephrasing David N. Rodowick’s question ‘what was cinema?’ we could ask our ancestors ‘what was nitrate film?’, diving deeper into understanding what did it feel like to go to the cinema with a slight fear and actual possibility to be killed when it bursts into flames. Today, after the long forgotten nitrate prints have entered the film projection booths again, we can barely connect with such fear and distrust of cinema as a whole. Furthermore, we will never be able to recreate the atmosphere, which nitrate films gave in the dawn of the cinema. However, the hype of nitrate film projections is undoubtedly an important development in our current times of New Film History, when archival cinema is getting more and more attention every year, and its materiality is becoming one of the subjects mentioned amongst archival film lovers and archivists. Furthermore, the growing rarity of film projection using celluloid creates exclusiveness and prestigiousness of projection for each single film. Nitrate projection in this retrospect holds the status of being on top of exclusive events. Interestingly enough, nitrate film screenings and its practitioners can be easily seen as the opposing force to the dominant film preservation practices in the archival world. Unavoidably, as long as accessibility of passively preserved prints will not be taken as seriously as active preservation (restorations, digitization’s, remasterings), screenings of such an artifact as nitrate print will stand on the
55 opposing, almost controversial side. Such a controversial side, as expected, clearly relates with the nitrate projection practices of Henri Langlois, who was heavily criticized and eventually abandoned by the international community of archivists. By analyzing the personal investment to the nitrate projections by two supporting archivists Paolo Cherchi Usai and Aleksandar Erdeljanovic, this thesis has attempted to interrogate and explore the successes and aims of two studied festivals. It is clear that George Eastman House and Jugoslovenska Kinoteka are not the only ones, which can legally screen nitrate films, but currently there are no other dedicated and strong advocates to initiate such a celebratory event of the kind. As the comparison between the festivals showed, two festivals have large and radical differences. Economic situation, legal issues, national and cultural background, age, etc. are heavily effecting the outcome of the festivals. With time the missions of the two are slowly turning to different directions, but nevertheless the original idea and theoretical background behind them are the same, namely the pure love for cinema, the desire to see cinema in its most original form, and to develop the generation of audiences who are aware of the materiality of cinema and its distinctive qualities. Slow growth of interest in the nitrate film and awareness of disappearing
35mm projectors has had a strong impact on the reoccurring Langlois and Lindgren debate. When the debate is placed within the context of this thesis, Henri Langlois won the battle when the number of archival-only nitrate prints received at least limited access and came back to the cinema. After all, the question if nitrate projections will become more and more popular will most likely be answered negatively. Cherchi Usai, with the Nitrate Picture Show demonstrates the importance of passive preservation, but at the same time, I believe, he secretly constructs the audiences' acceptance that the “Cinema is the art of moving image destruction”105, and we should be happy that our generation happened to be the one which can see nitrate prints because naturally it will not last for a long time. However, the expected short lifespan of nitrate films should not mean that showing nitrate should be stopped. I believe that similarly as silent films should be shown
105 Usai, The Death of Cinema, I
56 with live accompaniment, with the same passion and enthusiasm about historical and aesthetical understanding of cinema nitrate films should be screened as long as possible.
I hope that I have presented a thorough analysis, which addresses the topic that has not yet been explored in detail. I hope that by initiating the debate about the controversial use of archival nitrate film prints I contributed towards potential further analysis and continuous research on later developments in the nitrate film festivals. With this in mind, my ideas and arguments rest upon the justification of the overlooked importance of film print accessibility and its significance within the transforming world of film preservation.
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