In a recent appearance on the Extended Clip podcast, I jokingly said going to the Nitrate Picture Show, an annual nitrate-only festival put on by the George Eastman Museum in Rochester, New York, is like going back into the COVID-era movie-binging mindset for one weekend, surrounded by 200 other people. While that’s somewhat true, each Nitrate Picture Show showing is never just about you and the movie. To watch a movie at the Nitrate Picture Show is to hear about the life of the print being shown, have an opportunity to appreciate the work done to archive it, clean it and project it, as well as an opportunity to appreciate the material quality of the print — this all in addition to the artistic merit of the film.
By complicating the viewing experience like that, the Nitrate Picture Show opens up its programming to films in a unique way, making way for various curios and ephemera that offer value outside of the primary one I looked for during those three-movie COVID days. Maybe the best example at this year’s event was a print of G.W. Pabst’s strange musical Bertolt Brecht adaptation, The Threepenny Opera (1931), whose protagonist, Mack the Knife (Rudolf Forster), feels like a precursor to R.W. Fassbinder’s Franz Biberkopf (Alfred Doblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz came out just two years prior to Pabst’s film) mixed with the hijinks of the Pink Panther. The film is odd and offbeat in that way some early sound films are, but full of interesting, webby mise-en-scene.
After the film was shown, Festival Director Peter Bagrov said they took a chance on showing the Pabst print based on its physical quality, for the same reason they took a chance on showing Roberto Rosselinni’s Germany Year Zero (1948) from a nitrate print that has simultaneous Finnish and Swedish printed-in subtitles: because otherwise, these prints would continue sitting untouched on a shelf in perpetuity.
For what it’s worth, none of the flaws in either print were distracting. Not only were they not distracting, there’s something beautiful in the shared social contract that the festival has fostered with its audience over the years. You’re not going to the Nitrate Picture Show to see films in pristine exhibition; you’re going to experience artifacts. It’s a glorified antique show.
Alongside curios and ephemera, Nitrate Picture Show programming strikes a nice balance between known masterpieces, such as D.W. Griffith’s Intolerance (1916) and Vincente Minnelli’s Meet Me in St. Louis (1944), and auteur deep cuts, like William Wyler’s The Good Fairy (1935) and Max Ophuls’ From Mayerling to Sarajevo (1940).
From what I gathered, anecdotally, Raoul Walsh’s The Strawberry Blonde (1941) might fall more into that latter category than the former, at least amongst fellow festival goers, despite garnering a bit of notoriety amongst cinephiles over the last three or four years. It’s a film I had seen a couple times since 2020, on a shitty DVD rip prior to the Warner Bros. relatively recent Blu-ray release. But experiencing the film with a crowd (and on nitrate) was maybe my favorite moment of the festival. Bagrov, who admitted to coming to the film late, called it one of the most sophisticated American comedies ever made. I can’t disagree. I love its flashback structure, the recontextualization of James Cagney’s persona with Biff Grimes and Olivia de Havilland’s posture as a boldly progressive single woman.
The Strawberry Blonde was one of three films for Walsh in 1941, alongside the terrific Humphrey Bogart crime flick, High Sierra, and the Errol Flynn-led General Custer biopic, They Died With Their Boots On. The film is mired in nostalgia for turn-of-the-century New York. A simpler time even if life as we knew it was changing with imports of strange exotic foods like spaghetti. The title, The Strawberry Blonde, is a bit of a red herring. It refers to Rita Hayworth’s Virginia Brush, a minor character that acts as a symbol of that nostalgia, as well as the inverse of “the one that got away.” Biff’s reaffirmed realization of how happy he is to have wedded de Havilland’s Amy instead of Virginia is genuinely moving. Whether a canon classic or auteur deep cut, I’m not sure, but I love it dearly.
Wyler’s The Good Fairy, a screwball comedy penned by Preston Sturges, comes at the period right before Wyler’s most well-known period and a half-decade before Sturges would start directing. The film follows a former orphan (Margaret Sullavan) set on doing good deeds when she finds herself in a pickle between a rich and prurient older gentleman (Frank Morgan) and a young and naive lawyer (Herbert Marshall). I had no knowledge of the film prior to the Nitrate Picture Show and expected a minor delight, but The Good Fairy is top-shelf screwball fun. The film thrives on multiple scenes of sustained verbal gymnastics that extend one single joke out for minutes on end. This felt like the biggest crowd pleaser of the festival outside of Meet Me in St. Louis.
The only flaw in this year’s Nitrate Picture Show programming was following The Good Fairy with Kikyo (1950), an obscure Japanese film from Hideo Oba about postwar tensions. Despite being Shochiku’s highest grossing film of 1950, the film hadn’t played in the states since 1978, according to Bagrov. The film had a chance to benefit from this rare showing, but placing it at 9:30 p.m., at the end of a long day of movie-watching, didn’t do it any favors. Kikyo is a very slow burn and includes an excellent pendulumic ticking score set over long scenes of dialogue anchored by a typically impressive Shin Saburi performance. Just the type of thing that feels built to put you to sleep if you’re even remotely tired or prone to theater-dozing. Maybe one day I’ll get a chance to see it again.
A film from this year’s program that I might purposely never watch again is Intolerance. The seminal three-hour epic that cross-cuts between four parallel times throughout history opened the festival this year, and seeing it on nitrate in a packed house is a thrill I don’t think I’ll ever be able to replicate at home. I don’t really have anything of real value to add about this 108-year-old film that hasn’t already been uttered, but I will mention how dazzled I was by the ornate use of deep focus. There’s countless interior shots with doorways in the background leading to other ballrooms or halls where more people are dancing and drinking and it’s such a delight to take it all in. According to Jacques Aumont (in Early Cinema: Space, Frame, Narrative), Griffith’s use of background action was fundamental in “lend[ing] weight to the idea that this ‘background noise’ is not just that, that it has its own laws, that it too could form the object of a narration.”
At lunch the next day, an acquaintance mentioned how much early filmmakers had to draw on photographs and painting, which resulted in compositions like we find in Intolerance. It made me wish contemporary filmmakers would draw more on older mediums more than they draw on previous works of film.
Last year’s nitrate showing of King Vidor’s Duel in the Sun (1946) from a print owned by Martin Scorsese was an inspired bit of programming. A film that’s not completely satisfying, yet I haven’t really stopped thinking about it in the last year — presumably helped by seeing its stamp all over Scorsese’s latest, Killers of the Flower Moon (2023). In this year’s “Vidor spot,” joked a programmer, was Stella Dallas (1937), a film I was aware of without knowing any of its particulars.
Stella Dallas is Barbara Stanwyck-led melodrama that exposes the complexities of a mother-daughter relationship as class, divorce, age and loneliness are introduced. The film immediately reminded me of Douglas Sirk’s masterful collaborations with Stanwycy, All I Desire (1953) and There’s Always Tomorrow (1956). All three films tackle big domestic quandaries by honoring multiple points of view equally, rather than siding solely with the protagonist.
Multiple scenes in Stella Dallas are incredibly sad, but the one I’ll be thinking about for a long time takes place in a train car, when Stella and her daughter, Laurel (Anne Shirley), share a moment of unspoken and parallelled grace after a moment of deep shame only family members share. It’s a beautiful illustration of familial love remaining a constant even if everything around us changes over the years.
Meet Me in St. Louis is another film that feels impervious to novel thought, but I will say that, alongside the stunning colors on nitrate, I was struck on this viewing by the film’s relatively plotless narrative. Up until the potential New York move, Minnelli simply surveys quotidian life in St. Louis for a middle class family, but each moment manages to feel gigantic.
If Meet Me in St. Louis is plotless, Nitrate Picture Show’s closing (and secret) film, Carl Theodor Dreyer’s Day of Wrath (1943), is so singularly cloistered around one plotline. It had been more than 15 years since I had last seen Day of Wrath. I remember liking it well enough then, but this showing felt like a revelation. An entire theater hypnotized, whether they liked it or not, by Lisbeth Movin’s devious stare in chiaroscuro and Dreyer’s incredibly slow and tension-loaded pans.
It was fitting that the 2024 Nitrate Picture Show was bookended by Intolerance and Day of Wrath since Dreyer’s pans feel like an extension of Griffith’s visual innovation, particularly the expressive crane shots into the Babylon steps (not to mention the pans contained in his earlier short, The Country Doctor (1909)).
“In the same way that Dreyer’s camera is clever in J’eanne d’Arc, in Vampyr it frees itself and becomes a young man’s pen as it follows, darts ahead of, prophesies the vampire’s movements along the gray walls,” Francois Truffaut wrote following Dreyer’s passing. The camera movement in Day of Wrath acts as the opposite of prophecy; the slow 180-degree crawl uses empty space to manufacture dread.
In the days since the festival has ended, I’ve learned that Griffith was actually a rather large figure of inspiration for Dreyer, particularly his use of cross-cutting and camera continuity. If Griffith’s visual imagination was breaking ground, Dreyer’s pans were laying some serious bricks.
In the program notes for Pabst’s The Threepenny Opera, it’s noted that Pabst’s reputation, once significant amongst international filmmakers, has suffered as a result of his post-1933 films. I quite liked the programming of Day of Wrath as the “Blind Date” screening, a slot whose secrecy builds excitement over the four festival days. Aside from his monolithic Joan of Arc biopic, it feels like Dreyer’s reputation isn’t what it was 20 years ago, which is a shame, especially during the recent era of “elevated horror.” What marks Dreyer’s films, especially his later masterpieces, like Day of Wrath and Ordet, in opposition to those contemporary horror films, on one basic level, is that they’re not allegories; these issues of family, community, religion and sin feel like actual life or death issues for Dreyer.
If Dreyer’s stock feels low at the current moment, it’s nowhere near as bad as it apparently was in the 11 years between Day of Wrath and Vampyr, a film whose commercial failure can be attributed to such a long absence from directing. Upon release, Day of Wrath did little to rehabilitate Dreyer’s reputation, critically or commercially.
Though perhaps not currently popular, Dreyer has long been canonized, and there’s nothing new about great directors who went under appreciated during their time, but I’d be lying if I said it didn’t move me to sit there in a room full of people and engage with an 80-year-old film that was originally deemed a failure. That’s what the Nitrate Picture Show does at its best — offers a venue where the long dormant (be it prints, the medium of nitrate or film titles) are given new life for a brief moment.