The George Eastman Museum last weekend hosted the third
Nitrate Picture Show, its annual “festival of film preservation” paying tribute
to the medium’s notoriously combustible early format. The weekend’s events
included tours of the Eastman Museum’s vaults and projection booths, lectures
from film scholars Hisashi Okajima
and Alexander Horwath, workshops, and demonstrations, all centered on the
festival’s main event: 10 feature film screenings projected from beautiful
nitrate film.
The event has grown in popularity with every installment, and
attendees of this year’s festival represented more than 20 different countries.
That fact is all the more impressive when you consider that, since the specific
films being screened are kept under wraps until the morning the festival
begins, all those people made the trip to Rochester without knowing precisely
what they were going to see.
In addition, this was the first year of the Nitrate Picture
Show not to feature any films from the Eastman Museum’s own archives — the
screened nitrate prints were loaned from film institutions both in the US and
abroad. That variety gave things a more international flavor than previous
years, but it is also indicative of the way in which the event has been quickly
embraced by a film community eager to take part in it.
Film highlights were the shorts program, which included the
delightful “Movies are Adventure,” produced by the Academy of Motion Picture
Arts and Sciences in 1948 to advertise the magic and wonder of the movies. That
program also featured “In a Roman Garden,” a bible-inspired short from 1913,
which is the oldest known nitrate print still capable of being projected for public
viewing.
I also enjoyed “Early Summer” from Yasujirô Ozu and the fizzy fun of “The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer” with Cary Grant and Shirley Temple as well as the
thrills of Alfred Hitchcock’s classic “Spellbound.” But my favorite
selection had to be 1950’s “Night and the City,” a wonderfully atmospheric film
noir set in and around London’s seedy underbelly.
It’s become a tradition for the festival to conclude with “A
Blind Date With Nitrate,” a final screening of a film
whose title is kept secret all the way up until the moment it starts rolling.
This year’s selection was “Restless Blood,” a bonkers 1946 Finnish feature from
director Teuvo Tulio (whose
work Senior Curator Paolo Cherchi Usai
described as making “Douglas Sirk look like Robert Bresson”). The film starts off as melodrama before veering
sharply and unexpectedly into twisted noir territory.
Almost every screening at The Nitrate Picture Show played to
a nearly packed house, and one of the festival’s chief pleasures is being in a
theater surrounded by fellow cinephiles –many of whom
traveled great distances to come to Rochester just for the event — all excited
to see these films the way they were originally intended.
The 2017 James Card Memorial Lecture came from Austrian film
scholar Alexander Horwath, who spoke about the relationship between film and
memory; about how film can simultaneously capture our history while having a
history all its own. Each film print has a story, and with every bit of wear
and tear, that story continues to evolve.
My nitrate weekend began with a tour of the Eastman Museum
vaults, and being in that (temperature-controlled) environment, it’s hard not
to feel a bit awed by that history. Seeing — and even holding — the originate
nitrate negatives of films like “Gone With the Wind”
and “The Wizard of Oz,” it’s mind-boggling to remember that these cinematic
treasures are housed right here in Rochester.
And perhaps that’s one of the most important functions of The
Nitrate Picture Show. As Rochesterians, we have the
ability to enjoy a film at the Dryden almost every day of the week, all year
round. As a result, it’s sometimes easy to take the George Eastman Museum and
the Dryden Theatre for granted. It can take seeing the familiar through someone
else’s eyes to really appreciate what you’ve got, and the effect of seeing
crowds of people come to our city for a taste of what we can experience just
about any time we want certainly has that effect.
Events like The Nitrate Picture Show are wonderful not only
for learning a bit more about film history, but as a reminder of Rochester’s
own essential place within it. It’s a reminder to appreciate the treasures
contained in our own backyard.
The fourth Nitrate Picture Show will be held May 4 to May 6,
2018.
This article appears in May 10-16, 2017.
