Screen, burn, kill: the forgotten story of nitrate film stock

Artikkel - Matei Norbert Balan

Opphavsrett: Universal Studios / Foto: IMDb

At the end of his 2009 movie, Inglorious Basterds, Quentin Tarantino kills the entire Nazi high command in a mesmerizing example of revisionist cinema. The extreme gory vengeance which Tarantino exercises on screen, presumably in the name of the victims whose lives have been claimed by the Holocaust, is still the subject of many heated debates. 

However, one thing is often overlooked when this particular scene is being discussed: the fact that Tarantino tries (and to some extent succeeds) to envision an alternate time-line where cinema itself changes the course of WW II. And he achieves this by using cinema's own death-haunted segment of history, embodied in this case by the hundreds of nitrate film reels which the secretly Jewish Shosanna Dreyfuss (Mélanie Laurent) and her boyfriend, Marcel (Jacky Ido), set on fire after blocking all the exits of the cinema where the top brass of the National Socialist Party is attending the premiere of Joseph Goebbels' latest propaganda film, Nation's Pride.

In the movie, there is a previous ongoing plot to assassinate Hitler (who is also attending the premiere) which is brought to fruition by The Basterds, a guerilla group of nazi hunters and scalpers, despite a series of plot turns and twists. Yet Shosanna's plan, "filling the cinema with Nazis and burning it to the ground" to use her own words, is the most effective of the two.

For once, her plan is being carried out unnoticed by the Nazis, despite the Cinema, which Shosanna owns under the alias of Emmanuelle Mimieux, being carefully inspected by the SS since the presence of the Führer himself at the premiere is no small thing. Then there's the fact that even if The Basterds' plans are to fail, and for a few long and tensed moments in the movie it really looks like this is going to be the outcome, Shosanna's plan would still wipe the crème de la crème clean off this nazi strudel. Or, to be more precise, it would burn it to a crisp. 

The certainty of this plan is based, both in Shosanna's timeline and in ours, on the solid fact that not only does nitrate film burn, even when completely submerged under water, but when ignited in large quantities it can quite literally explode, the highly toxic and lethal fumes that result from this being just a bonus.

While introducing Marcel to her newly born plan, Shosanna points out that if they can keep the cinema from not burning down by themselves, then they can easily let the opposite happen. This hints to the thorough safety measures that cinemas had to take back in those days if they were to store nitrate film. In the movie, Shoasanna has at her disposal 350 of such nitrate films that belonged to Madame Mimieux, the previews owner of the cinema, and she knows what they can do. With those films on their side, they wouldn't need explosives. Or, as Marcel puts it, they wouldn't need extra explosives.

The association of nitrate film also known as celluloid, or nitrocellulose, with military hardware, is not accidental. As another film, Bill Morrison's 2016 documentary Dawson City: Frozen Time, states: "Film was born of an explosive." And this is no exaggeration. In a 2010 article on nitrate decomposition and combustibility, Heather Heckman explains that nitrate film stock is derived from what we commonly call "guncotton", a highly flammable powder that was originally meant for military use. "Six times more powerful than standard gunpowder and almost entirely smokeless, guncotton was also very unstable. Because of its tendency to spontaneously combust (…) guncotton's weapons applications were largely abandoned in the mid-nineteenth century," Heckman also writes. So it was too dangerous for the military, but not too dangerous for filmmakers, for whom nitrocellulose was the film stock of choice for more than half of a century. According to Heckman, this is on the account of a series of factors. "Though it may seem far-fetched to today's readers, nitrocellulose was highly prized not just for its lustrous images, but also for its durability. Until the 1950s it clearly outperformed safety stocks in terms of tensile strength and resistance to shrinkage and warp," writes Heckman. 

Now, we could say that we're pretty used to constantly being cautioned about the dangers which certain day to day commodities can pose to us. Fall asleep with your headphones connected to your phone, and your phone connected to an electric outlet, and you can end up with your eardrums zapped. Leave your laundry pods randomly lying around and, before you know it, you and your toddler will be bound for one hell of a hospital trip. Also, screen a movie to a few hundred people in Paris, during Bazar de la Charité, in 1897, and most of them will die as a result of it. Unlike Tarantino's story, this one is quite true. 

Copyright: Le Petit Journal, public domain / Foto: Wikipedia

Two years after the Lumière brothers gave their first paid public screening at Salon Indien du Grand Café in Paris, thus marking the birth of what we now call cinema, Bazar de la Charité (an annual charity event organized by the French Catholic aristocracy) burned down after projectionist's equipment caught fire. 126 people died in the fire, most of whom were aristocratic women, thus marking the start of a long trail of bodies nitrate film would leave behind over the next sixty years. Together with the human lives that it claimed times and times over, celluloid robbed the world of pieces of its history too - history in the form of films, silent or not, which will forever be lost to us.

According to Heckman some of the films lost to nitrocellulose fires include everything produced by both sides of the Spanish Civil War, "at least fifty unique actuality films documenting Czech life in the interwar period; nearly all of the pre-1951 holdings of one of Egypt's major film studios; more than 12.5 million feet of unique Universal outtakes; films from Canada's National Film Board Archives; all but three of early master Victor Sjöström's silent Swedish works; and an unknown number of unique titles held by the Cinematheque Francaise." This list doesn't of course include all the films produced before 1932 which were destroyed in the notorious 1937 Fox Vault Fire in Little Ferry, New Jersey, or the films lost in the fire that decimated the Solax Film Laboratories, founded by the filmmaker Alice Guy-Blaché and her husband, in Fort Lee, New Jersey in 1919.

Some of the footage of Solax Studios engulfed in the fire was found in Dawson City, in the Yukon territory of Canada. The film, together with a few hundred others, have been buried in permafrost for years until their discovery in 1957. In 2015, Canadian director Bill Morrison made the documentary Dawson City: Frozen Time out of the films unearthed in Dawson. The story it tells is, by all means, one centered around the promising beginnings of cinema and it is perhaps one of the few stories that come close to Tarantino's dream of cinema altering or even fashioning the course of history.

Dawson City, initially a small mining camp and then a thriving mining town, was the center of the renowned Gold Rush on the Klondike river at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th. The fate of the gold in the Klondike and the surrounding areas walked the same path as what we can now consider the first life cycle of cinema. Gold was discovered in the Klondike for the first time in 1896, just one year after the screening at Salon Indien du Grand Café in Paris. By the time TV came around and officially killed cinema, half of the century later, decades of hydraulic mining had rendered the land around the Klondike barren. This, of course, overlaps the life cycle of the celluloid itself, from 1895 until the mid-1950s.

Like anywhere else in the civilized and industrialized world, cinema was one of the main attractions in Dawson. It saw its course from the first banal footage shot from trains to its very own alumnae stories put to screen, like The Trail of '98 (1928). Movies traveled a long and hard road in order to get to Dawson, which was the end of the distribution line, which meant two things: first the images the people of Dawson saw on the cinema screen were the only representation they had of the world outside of Dawson, which was changing as fast as one could blink; then second, distribution companies did not want their movies back because this would have been too costly, and also because by the time the movies got to Dawson City they were already outdated. This would eventually lead to an unmanageable and hazardous deposit of nitrate film, which in order to be disposed of had to be buried. Everyone in Dawson knew how nitrate film acted around a fire, since the old business sector of the town, built entirely out of wood, burnt down every year like clockwork, during the early 1900s, as a result of cinema projectors catching fire.

The legacies of the Gold Rush and the cinema which kept the gold miners entertained and connected to the outside world are also embodied by those who have built their great fortunes in the Yukon. Sid Grauman, one of the first cinema tycoons, who build Hollywood's most beloved and recognizable landmarks, the Chinese Theatre and the Egyptian Theatre, worked in Dawson alongside his father as a paperboy. They would both make their fortunes not from gold, but from their Klondike entertainment activities. One other notable example of man made rich by the Gold Rush is Frederick Trump, the grandfather of Donald Trump, who made his fortune from running brothels in the Klondike area.

Cinema, with nitrocellulose as a vital component, is without a doubt one of our civilization's greatest discoveries. However, it is not a tame one. To this day very little is known about why some nitrate film stocks spontaneously combusted into flames more than others. According to Heckman, this is due to the lack of standardization across cellulose nitrate production. Heckman goes on to quote the film technology historian Deac Rossell who said that "the production of a clear and flawless sheet of celluloid by any method was something akin to black magic." 

This mystification of nitrate film would seem exaggerated if not for the medium of which it is part of. Cinema as a whole is as unstable and impalpable as it is material and material driven. Just like with celluloid we know very little of why some stories told through cinema end up influencing the viewers in terrible ways. Over the course of history, cinema has been both something to marvel at and something to be afraid of. 

At the end of Inglorious Basterds, Quentin Tarantino does more than to simply burn down a cinema filled with Nazis. By having his characters using nitrate film stock as a weapon (there are no historical records of anyone ever attempting to do that anywhere in the world) Tarantino attempts to do something that far braver men and women than him have tried before: to tame cinema and command it. In order to answer the question if he succeeded or not we only have to look at the ripple effects that his whole body of work has produced over the years, from the ongoing debates around how he represents his female characters to the question of how much he actually enjoys his little cinematic revenge trips, and beyond. It just goes to show that sometimes, most of the times, regardless of our best or worst intentions, movies can still catch fire.