Film from the Ashes: A beautiful but deadly art is reborn at the Nitrate Picture Show2 min read

Reading Time: 2 minutes

The lights were low, and the house was slowly filling. Ben Tucker set down an armful of film reels in the projection booth and checked the Dryden Theatre’s vintage machinery for dust and positioning one last time. As assistant collection manager and archival projectionist at the George Eastman House in Rochester, New York, Tucker helps maintain one of the largest, oldest, and most historically valuable film collections on earth. On this evening in early May, he was screening the classic of classics: Casablanca. It was a typical evening at the Eastman House’s 500-seat, single-screen movie palace – except this version of Casablanca had the potential to kill us all.

The print dated from 1947, meaning it was made from a base of nitrocellulose, a cousin to gunpowder. Nitrate, as it’s commonly known, was the earliest mass-produced celluloid format, and the dominant motion picture medium from 1895 to 1948. Renowned for the beauty and clarity of its images, nitrate is so flammable and physically unstable that it’s rarely, if ever, still screened. The heat from a cigarette is enough to make nitrate catch, and once it does, the flame is so powerful that it’ll burn underwater. The explosive theater fires in Cinema Paradiso and Inglourious Basterds were both the product of nitrate combustion, and the first half-century of mass moviegoing was dotted with dozens of similarly deadly real-world conflagrations – the first of which occurred at the 1897 World’s Fair in Paris and killed 140 people. The UN still classifies nitrate as “dangerous goods.”

Tucker was joined by two specially trained colleagues – a lot of manpower for one screening, but nitrate necessitates it: two projectionists trade off from one reel and the next on their respective machines, while a third gathers and winds each 10-minute length of brittle film and returns it to its nickel-plated aluminum canister. The Dryden’s projection booth is tiny, low-lit, and gizmo-packed, like a submarine control room. In addition to the floor-to-ceiling film gadgets, it’s equipped with sprinklers, reinforced steel doors, and a network of ceiling cables that control two guillotine-like steel gates perched above the windows, ready to slam shut in the event of a fire. The projectors themselves, which date from 1951, house each reel in a steel box of its own, and the projectionists have to keep one hand on the “dowser,” which cuts off the connection between the light source and the film in case of overheating.

Read the full article here >> Via The Verge

Image Credit The Verge