Above: Jurij Meden, Austrian Film MuseumWhen in late March 2020 I started a new job at a VOD platform, a personal transformation had been underway for quite some time, shifting and even undermining year’s worth of habits in thinking about movies. Without noticing, I started to imagine them not as the stuff of cinephile obsession, but as raw material that needed to be ferried to and fro, evaluated, sent back with notes, re-sourced, sent to the subtitler, and so on. Working for festivals, movies would come to me directly from the source. They arrived in provisional copies from producers, submitted via festival databases. Garishly watermarked. They regularly were sent unfinished; missing titles, special effects, whole sequences even. In parallel I found myself assembling an 11-film retrospective for which an archivist might send me indistinct iPhone snaps of a few frames of an Algerian classic, the decaying, pink-ish celluloid of the...
- 10/11/2021
- MUBI
Inside the projection booth at George Eastman Museum’s Dryden Theatre.
It’s been nearly 70 years since Kodak manufactured their last nitrate film, but the appreciation for the highly flammable, stunningly vivid film stock lives on in more ways than one in Rochester, New York. The George Eastman Museum, home of photography and moving image collections, opened in 1949 and two years later in 1951, the 500-seat Dryden Theatre was unveiled. However, it wasn’t until 1996 that the museum’s nitrate collection found a more secure home. Located in North Chili, NY–about a 15-minute drive from the museum–the unassumingly adorned Louis B. Mayer Conservation Center is a safe haven for nitrate film stock.
With room for 40,000 reels of film (about 26 million-plus feet) amongst its 12 vaults–completely separated to prevent a total catastrophe if a fire breaks out in a single vault–the center houses some of the most precious gems in film history.
It’s been nearly 70 years since Kodak manufactured their last nitrate film, but the appreciation for the highly flammable, stunningly vivid film stock lives on in more ways than one in Rochester, New York. The George Eastman Museum, home of photography and moving image collections, opened in 1949 and two years later in 1951, the 500-seat Dryden Theatre was unveiled. However, it wasn’t until 1996 that the museum’s nitrate collection found a more secure home. Located in North Chili, NY–about a 15-minute drive from the museum–the unassumingly adorned Louis B. Mayer Conservation Center is a safe haven for nitrate film stock.
With room for 40,000 reels of film (about 26 million-plus feet) amongst its 12 vaults–completely separated to prevent a total catastrophe if a fire breaks out in a single vault–the center houses some of the most precious gems in film history.
- 5/7/2019
- by Jordan Raup
- The Film Stage
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