10 Years of Nitrate Picture Show: A Religious Experience of What Cinema Can Be

Now in its 10th edition, the Nitrate Picture Show—held at the George Eastman Museum in Rochester, New York—is becoming the closest thing American cinephiles have to a pilgrimage. Every year it feels as if half of New York’s film community, out of sheer love for the medium, flocks upstate to catch the dozen-odd rare prints the festival offers. With a lineup that isn’t disclosed until the morning of the first screening, the films themselves often feel of secondary importance to the festival’s true star: nitrate celluloid. A highly flammable, long-discontinued material, Nitrate was the standard film base for the first five-ish decades of film history, and the George Eastman Museum is one of only five places in the country that still screen it.

Most audiences might recognize it as the substance that killed the Third Reich in Inglourious Basterds (2009) or blew up a bus in Alfred Hitchcock’s Sabotage (1936). For archivists, nitrate casts a long shadow over cinema history, the sad culprit behind vault fires that have led to the loss of innumerable films. For aesthetes, it is primarily and simply known for its rich visual textures. With a higher concentration of silver than acetate or polyester celluloid, nitrate has a sheen that is irreplicable in any other form. To watch a film on nitrate is to see classical cinema in all of its true splendor; to take in every last glimmer reflected in the eyes of a great star like Greta Garbo or bead of sweat in a diva like Anna Magnania; to observe the voluminous decadence of Gloria Swanson’s dresses against Cecil B. DeMille’s sets; to partake of James Wong Howe’s immaculate lighting while working with Technicolor for the first time; or the innate beauty of moonlight (real and artificial) reflected on water. 

Midnight

This year’s highlight was Mitchell Leisen’s Midnight (1939) for its sheer opulence and elegance. It’s a movie that effortlessly breathes all the easy romance and playful class-ribbing of classical Hollywood, gracefully serving up performances and dialogue filled with that ritzy zaniness, that combination of sophistication and madcap vulgarity which only the best screwballs provide. With a title referencing the story of Cinderella, the film finds Claudette Colbert’s Eve Peabody fibbing her way into Paris high society through the good graces of a pawn ticket and a cuckolded aristocrat, Flammarion (John Barrymore), intent on getting back at his snobbish wife (Mary Astor). Written by Billy Wilder and Charles Brackett, the film is an inexhaustibly clever bag of comic tricks engineered to send Peabody and the rascally cab-driving suitor pursuing her, Tibor Czerny (Don Ameche), through one ritzy soiree after another, each more decadent and ridiculous than the last. Stunning sequences, like a massive conga number at the Flammarion mansion featuring a dance train dozens of people long, are delivered so casually and elegantly, with such little pause in the main action, that they almost feel like throwaway bits, just one more bubble in a glass of fine champagne.

Another classical Hollywood title that floored me was John Stahl’s understated melodrama When Tomorrow Comes (1939). Loosely based on James M. Cain’s novel Serenade, the movie starts with a romantic meet-cute when busy waitress Helen (Irene Dunne) thinks Phillippe (Charles Boyer) is spying on the unionizing efforts at her restaurant. He follows her to the union meeting; she follows him around the city and, eventually, to his Long Island estate where they run into love and a hurricane. Primarily delivered in wide shots with plenty of empty pauses surrounding quite ordinary-sounding dialogue, the film feels almost atonal and modernist. It moves from one unexpected set piece to another less with romantic verve than a spiritual sense of the physical and common. It takes grand, melodramatic scenes of love and loss very quietly, with almost no score, but a moving sense for the difficulties of desire.

The most profound moment of this year’s festival came with one of its shortest films. Nestled in the middle of the Nitrate shorts block was a simple, three-minute work titled Footage of the Bombing of Nagasaki and credited to the U.S. Government. Taken on a 16mm camera from the back window of The Great Artiste, one of the six planes that flew on the nuclear bombing of Nagasaki, it was an overwhelming document to see on the big screen, projected from a print originally held by scientists of the Manhattan project. Silent and showing nothing but the mushroom cloud, it bears a hushed sublimity, an overwhelming and impersonal aesthetic derived from an abstract chemical beauty inseparably fused with a deep, unfathomable sense of morbidity. The scale is almost unknowable in its size and scope, and no matter how one prepares for it, it feels impossible not to be stunned into dumb speechlessness.

When Tomorrow Comes

The festival’s mission to comb archives to present curios from film history’s first five or six decades will lend a certain license to ponder such objects in the semi-detached manner of a historian. It’s a festival designed to continually take stock of the past so that we both don’t lose sight of it and have a greater sense of the medium’s essence. Where the object might land on a moral scale of good and evil feels less important than cultivating a historical consciousness that asks us to consider how we might create an active relationship to such documents. In many ways the essence of cinema might lie in such a tragic, miserable, magnificent act of technological destruction, but that’s not something one is often reminded of in regular filmgoing or daily life. The certain extraordinariness of a festival like this can knock the artform into place, reminding us of the peculiarities and specificities of the medium in all its darkest varieties.

The footage of Nagasaki made me think of Walter Benjamin’s observation that “there is no document of civilization that is not at the same time a document of barbarism,” an aphorism which also offered an apt reflection on one of the major discoveries of this year’s festival: Helmut Käutner’s Under the Bridges (1946). Made during the Third Reich by Goebbels’ least-favorite filmmaker (and the one who allegedly resisted the mandates of fascist art most compellingly), Under the Bridges is a beautiful and fantastical love story set on a barge. With all the cinematic ingenuity of René Clair, Jean Vigo, or Boris Barnet, there’s a buoyancy to the love triangle of two skippers, Hendrik and Willy, and the woman, Anna, they rescue from seemingly throwing herself off a bridge. There’s a lightness of spirit commensurate with many ’30s and ’40s movies that set themselves in very trying modern times. Käutner lingers on such whimsical details as the way Anna flips potato pancakes or Willy’s dog chases his own tail. The camera moves with a virtuosic mind of its own, woozily tracking around feet or unexpectedly pushing in for quietly devastating reaction shots. If one accepts this as a resistance to fascism, as the program notes implied, it’s from the film’s deep belief in the human soul, in the sublimity of ordinary and messy emotions. It takes no political stance and offers no overt critique of fascism, but—perhaps more profoundly—stages a spiritual defiance that can simply remind one to live a better, fuller life.

One doesn’t immediately think of a festival that, by design, can almost only show movies made before 1951 as being on the vanguard of film culture, yet in the Nitrate Picture Show’s ability to comb the canon and present work in new, startling contexts, it offers not only an essential reminder of the joys and beauties of cinema, but how much there is to learn and rethink. Best of all, this comes with a reverence for the medium in all its specificity, eccentricity, obscurity, morbidity, and beauty that is inspiring and hard to find elsewhere. If you take cinema seriously, it can feel like a religious experience, each year a clear reminder of what cinema was, is, can be.