K.J. Relth-Miller, the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures’ Director of Film Programs, was kind enough to speak with us ahead of the museum’s upcoming screening of 1932 film Blonde Venus in 35mm nitrate.
You probably have some awareness of the film stock, even if you’re not on the cinematography side of filmmaking. Perhaps the most famous recent example is its use in Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds—as an incendiary device to take out a bunch of Nazis in the finale.
The stock is also featured as a key prop in Alfred Hitchcock’s Sabotage and Giuseppe Tornatore‘s Cinema Paradiso. Highly flammable to the point of being unstoppable, but notoriously beautiful in projections, nitrate film has slowly faded away in favor of safer stock and, nowadays, digital filmmaking.
Relth-Miller told us how the film is transported and handled safely for screenings at the Academy Museum and why the stock is an important piece of cinema history that should be witnessed—especially since many of these screenings might be once-in-a-lifetime, with the number of usable reels dwindling with each passing year.
Blonde Venus screens Nov. 2, 2024. You can buy tickets here.
Blonde VenusParamount Pictures
Editor’s note: The following conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
No Film School: Can you tell us a little bit about why this screening is so unique and what makes nitrate so unique?
K.J. Relth-Miller: Nitrate film stock was the predominant film stock that was used for printing feature films that were distributed theatrically from the 1920s, ’30s, ’40s and into early 1950s, maybe 1951. It was just the dominant film stock of the day. It produces, when it’s black and white, this sort of silver shimmer. The range of grays on a nitrate film print, a black and white nitrate film print, it has more of a dynamic visual range. You see sort of this shimmering silver that comes through when the light catches certain objects in a frame, and it has more of a depth of shadow and a richness in the black and white.
When it comes to color—and primarily when we’re talking about nitrate film prints that were produced in color, we’re talking about Technicolor, though that’s not exclusive. With Technicolor nitrate, you’re watching the color sort of breathe on screen. I think anyone who’s familiar with watching a Technicolor film will notice that, especially Technicolor when it was really advanced in the late ’40s and early ’50s. You see, maybe a red lip is not a solid red lip. From frame to frame, it breathes, in terms of how saturated that red is or how the light is picking it up. It really changes from frame to frame.
With a nitrate print, you see that even in an even more pronounced way. We just screened back in July an original nitrate print of [Michael] Powell and [Emeric] Pressburger’s Black Narcissus. Seeing the blues of some of the walls within the interiors of the film just breathing with the light, it feels very alive.
So with black-and-white or color film stock, when it’s projected on nitrate, it feels like a living, breathing thing that you’re watching.
It really creates more depth, as I mentioned before, and more of a dynamic range of visual experience. And so that’s sort of why seeing nitrate projected is so special. I know that annually at the George Eastman Museum, there’s a program called the Nitrate Picture Show, where for an entire weekend, you can gather with other film lovers to watch a previously unannounced [film]. So it’s almost like a blind experience walking into what the program is on that weekend. But you always know you’re in for a treat.
Black NarcissusGeneral Film Distributors
I know that this last year they did a test where they showed a bit of a safety print and a bit of a nitrate print of the same film and asked the audience to guess which is which. You can almost immediately discern which is nitrate and which is a polyester or safety film print.
That’s what makes the experience of watching it so special. What makes a nitrate film screening so rare is that, because I mentioned the experience of watching nitrate as almost watching a living, breathing image, but you can say the same thing about the film stock itself. It is organic material, and like all film prints, it’s prone to shrinking, especially if it’s not a polyester print—though, that is also prone to changes throughout time.
A nitrate film print, as you can imagine, if it shrinks over time—let’s say it’s a 70-year-old print and it just shrinks due to exposure to air or other factors—the distance between the perforations on the film print are not the same as if it was a newly printed 35-millimeter print. As the film print shrinks, the distances between those perforations change, and therefore don’t exactly line up with the sprockets and the projector.
So that means that a nitrate film print that is shrunk to a certain percentage is actually no longer projectable, at least not safely projectable, because once if it gets caught up, it can lead to it getting stuck in the projector, and the heat from the lamp of the projector could come into contact with the film and cause a hazard. Cause a fire.
When nitrate film starts burning, there’s actually no way to extinguish it. It produces its own oxygen. You can take a piece of nitrate film stock, light it on fire, and submerge it in water, and it will continue to burn underwater. That’s how much heat it creates and how much oxygen it’s producing.
So a nitrate film screening is also a super rare event because it’s kind of the closest thing that cinephiles have to an extreme sport, really. Of course, all safety measures are put into place. We have two projectionists for every nitrate film screening just to be sure that everything is safe and everything is handled properly, but there is still always that very, very small chance that with a volatile material that something could happen. So there’s that level of heightened excitement when it comes to stepping into a theater to watch a nitrate film projected.
NFS: Almost living on the edge a little bit. I’ve heard of booths having limited reels at any given time.
Relth-Miller: There are special vaults where nitrate film lives. The print that we have that we’ve borrowed for the screening of Blonde Venus is on loan from the UCLA Film and Television Archive. Anyone who’s storing nitrate film prints has state-of-the-art vaults in order to do so.
I know specifically at UCLA, they have a wing that’s underground in Santa Clarita where it is just nitrate film. And these vaults are much smaller than a safety film vault, just so that if there is an incident, if a fire does break out, it can be contained to the fewest amount of reels possible. And those reels are stored flat, so they’re stored on their side on shelves that also are contained to I believe no more than three reels per little cubby hole in their shelves.
And each vault is, again, a much smaller vault than you would find for storing safety film. For safety film, you can store floor-to-ceiling on movable racks. Nitrate film is stationary in small vaults. In the case of UCLA, they have two different sprinkler systems. So there’s one that sprays the entirety of the vault if a fire breaks out, and another that creates a wall of water over the shelves to contain that fire to just that single little cubby, and therefore prevent it from breaking out among the other cubbies and the other shelves in that specific vault.
Storage is one thing, and then there’s the process of taking that film from where it’s safely being stored to bringing it to the theater. And that is a multi-step process where we take the film print out of the film vault that has a certain temperature. It’s very cold in there. You don’t want to stay in a nitrate foam vault for too long without a heavy coat and gloves because it’s quite cold.
It’s started at cold conditions with very specific humidity levels, and then it’s taken to another temperature-controlled room that’s a little bit warmer with a little bit different humidity where it stabilizes there for 24 hours, and then it can move to the shipping area where it’s taken in a nitrate-safe container in a vehicle from that vault to, in the case of this screening, the Academy Film Archive where it stays for one day at least, and then it’s taken from the Academy Film Archive to our theaters where it’s kept in a fire locker until it’s inspected and ultimately put on the projectors, which are the same projectors we run our 35-millimeter prints and our 70-millimeter prints on. The projectors are not specific to nitrate, but until it’s actually hitting the screen, it’s kept in that fire locker.
And then once we’re done screening it, it goes right back in the fire locker. And then, either that night or the following day, it goes back to its place of origin. So just getting it to and from the booth requires several teams and several hands to make sure that it’s being handled as safely as possible. And then, when we project nitrate, we have a minimum of two projectionists in the booth to make sure that, again, once the reel comes off the projector, it’s handled properly and put back in that fire locker until it goes back to its vault of origin.
Inglourious Basterds Universal Pictures
NFS: How could seeing a nitrate film screening benefit an aspiring filmmaker?
Relth-Miller: I think any opportunity to see a film, whether a “newer” old film or an “older” old film, in a cinema is a learning opportunity or a potential educational experience for any guest, any visitor to a cinema, because you’re seeing that film projected on the format that it was either originally shot on or originally printed on, and you’re having the same experience and meaning.
In the case of a nitrate film print, this print is from 1932, and the print of Black Narcissus is from 1947. To know that you’re seeing the exact same material that was projected for audiences, in the case of Blonde Venus, 92 years ago—in the case of Black Narcissus over 70 years ago—I think it’s a pretty grounding experience. It immediately connects you to history. I think also understanding just the evolution of film stocks and film processes and being able to witness that with your own eyes.
I do honestly think that nitrate is the best showcase for cinematography. When Blonde Venus opens, the credits roll out over a static shot of black-and-white water, the rippling water in a small lagoon, where we later meet our main character, played by Marlene Dietrich. To see the shimmer on that water in this very dynamic range of grays and blacks and whites, it really highlights the cinematography.
I think that anyone who’s interested in the more visual aspects of filmmaking, not just the storytelling aspects, but the visuals that can be achieved by certain decisions made on behalf of the director of photography or the lighting, I think that that can always be a learning experience.
Also, anytime we see a movie with an audience, we’re also learning about the ways that certain story notes and beats can connect with a group of people, assuming that the filmmaker is interested in showing their work.
Ultimately, I think knowing the way that an audience responds to a unique cinematic experience, it’s always informative in terms of understanding the way that people come together to experience something.
And if you’re thinking about an angle of audience studies, the specific group of people that a nitrate film print attracts might actually be different from film to film. So I don’t know that necessarily the experience of seeing Blonde Venus in nitrate will produce anything that can teach an up-and-coming filmmaker about, I don’t know, lighting or audience expectations for a contemporary story. But I think that understanding what the communal act of viewing something can teach us about the film-going experience is always a learning opportunity.
NFS: Those moments are so moving, too. I remember I saw 2001: A Space Odyssey on 70-millimeter at the MoMI in New York a couple of years ago, and that was just life-changing.
Relth-Miller: I think we’re so fortunate, and we can really thank some of the folks who donated to the museum in the early days before we were open, when we were determining how to construct our booth and what equipment to put in it and how we wanted it to be equipped and how capable we wanted it to be of showing different formats.
Christopher Nolan and his wife, Emma Thomas … donated funds specifically to be sure that we could project nitrate in our cinema. So the David Geffen Theater has 35-millimeter, 70-millimeter capabilities, 35-millimeter nitrate projection capabilities, and of course, Dolby 4K and 3D. We are really committed at the museum to showcasing nitrate film as often as we can. Right now, this year alone, we’ve done two nitrate screenings. I hope, in the coming months and years to start to have a quarterly cadence with nitrate screenings.
But as I mentioned previously, nitrate film is volatile, which means that it shrinks, and at some point, all nitrate film prints will become unsafe to project theatrically. So we want to make use of the time that we still have left with some of the film prints that we know are viable and that we know can safely run through a projector.
But that list diminishes every year. The list of available films diminishes every year. New discoveries are made every year as well. But we would really love to do as much of this as we can with our partners at UCLA, with MoMA and with other folks like the Library of Congress who have nitrate holdings. We hope to maintain at least a semi-frequent cadence of nitrate projection just so that because it is so special for audiences and being one of only five theaters in the country that can project nitrate, we really want to make sure that that’s something we continue to offer for audiences.
Author: Jo Light
This article comes from No Film School and can be read on the original site.
