For the first half-century of cinema, most movies were made and printed on nitrate film. Problem: it easily decomposes, it's easily combustible, and once it's on fire, you can't put it out. Only a few theaters on Earth can safely screen nitrate prints...and only one has an annual festival dedicated to the format: The George Eastman Museum's Dryden Theatre in Rochester, New York with its Nitrate Picture Show.
To understand why it's important to screen these original treasures in an age of digital — and the incredible effort it takes to pull it off — Rico Gagliano travels both sides of the Atlantic, from the Dryden's fortified projection booth to the British Film Institute's nitrate holding vaults.
The second season of the MUBI Podcast titled “Only in Theaters” tells surprising stories of individual cinemas that had huge impacts on film history, and in some cases, history in general.
After listening, check out our coverage of the sixth annual Nitrate Picture Show, which took place earlier this month. Read Joshua Bogatin’s article on this year’s edition here.
To stream some of the films we've covered on the podcast, check out the collection Featured on the MUBI Podcast. Availability of films varies depending on your country.
MUBI is a global streaming service, production company and film distributor. A place to discover and watch beautiful, interesting, incredible films. A new hand-picked film arrives on MUBI, every single day. Cinema from across the world. From iconic directors, to emerging auteurs. All carefully chosen by MUBI’s curators.
And with MUBI GO, members in select countries can get a hand-picked cinema ticket every single week, to see the best new films in real cinemas. To learn more, visit mubi.com/go
For the first half-century of cinema, most movies were made and printed on nitrate film. Problem: it easily decomposes, it's easily combustible, and once it's on fire, you can't put it out. Only a few theaters on Earth can safely screen nitrate prints...and only one has an annual festival dedicated to the format: The George Eastman Museum's Dryden Theatre in Rochester, New York with its Nitrate Picture Show.
To understand why it's important to screen these original treasures in an age of digital — and the incredible effort it takes to pull it off — Rico Gagliano travels both sides of the Atlantic, from the Dryden's fortified projection booth to the British Film Institute's nitrate holding vaults.
The second season of the MUBI Podcast titled “Only in Theaters” tells surprising stories of individual cinemas that had huge impacts on film history, and in some cases, history in general.
After listening, check out our coverage of the sixth annual Nitrate Picture Show, which took place earlier this month. Read Joshua Bogatin’s article on this year’s edition here.
To stream some of the films we've covered on the podcast, check out the collection Featured on the MUBI Podcast. Availability of films varies depending on your country.
MUBI is a global streaming service, production company and film distributor. A place to discover and watch beautiful, interesting, incredible films. A new hand-picked film arrives on MUBI, every single day. Cinema from across the world. From iconic directors, to emerging auteurs. All carefully chosen by MUBI’s curators.
And with MUBI GO, members in select countries can get a hand-picked cinema ticket every single week, to see the best new films in real cinemas. To learn more, visit mubi.com/go
Heads Up. This episode contains a few spoilers. Back in 2016, a guy named Peter Bagrov was senior curator at the Russian Film Archive called Gosfilmofond. And one day that summer, he was sitting at a desktop machine winding through reels of a movie that was printed on a notoriously tricky material. I was watching a nitrate print on a flatbed. And... the fire alarm sounded. I knew that it was just, they were just testing the system. But of course, everyone was supposed to leave the building. And I know that I don't want to leave this nitrate print unattended. God knows what happens. You know, somebody dropped something on it accidentally, I just, you should never leave it unattended. So while everyone else raced for the exits, Peter meticulously wound and stored the film. And I came out, you know, 20 minutes later, and gentlemen was in charge of the drill, told me,"Well, you know, that you might have been burned alive by now." I said, "Well, look, if I'd left the nitrate, we all might have been burned alive." Not fire drill pretend "Burned alive." For real burned alive. That's because nitrate film, the material most movies were shot and printed on for the first half century movies even existed can ignite from a tiny spark, or from too much friction. Or sometimes if you don't take care of it, it can just ignite all by itself. And then... If nitrate catches fire, it can't be put out. Kieron Webb works with the stuff all the time as film conservation manager at the British Film Institute's National Archive. As it breaks down, as it's burning, it generates oxygen, so it's fueling its own destruction in that sense. It will burn under water so you can submerge the reel and it will still be burning, right. So the danger with most fires, of course, is that they're started as all fires are. But if nitrate's caught up in it, you can extinguish it. There's nothing you can put on it to make it stop. Not that I'm aware of. Now as a film fan, I've seen nitrate fires all my, life depicted in movies. Like the classic Cinema Paradiso, in which a flaming reel of nitrate burns down a little Sicilian movie house. Or the film you're listening to now, Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds, where a nitrate fire engulfs a Parisian cinema, along with a good chunk of the Third Reich. And up till 1951 or so after which filmmakers switched to safer film stock. Nitrate fires really did destroy some movie theaters, and even later than that, some movie archives. Back in 78, sparks from a power tool set fire to 12 million feet of film at the National Archive in Maryland. That same year at the George Eastman Museum in Rochester, New York. Hundreds of nitrate negatives just spontaneously went up in flames. So when I heard that once a year, the George Eastman's Museum's Dryden Theater shows days of nothing but old nitrate prints... some of them irreplaceable, flown in from archives around the world. I thought that sounds crazy. I am Rico Gagliano and welcome back to the MUBI podcast. MUBI is the best way outside of theater to see beautiful, hand-picked cinema. On this show, we tell you the stories behind beautiful cinema. This is season two. We're calling it Only in Theaters. Every week we tell you the story of a single cinema and experiences you could only have in it. And the Dryden's annual Nitrate Picture Show is definitely one of those. The Dryden's the only U.S. theater outside California equipped to even project nitrate movies. And the only one on earth that makes an all nitrate film festival happen. Whatever it takes. Shipping nitrate prints is a nightmare. It is a logistical nightmare. And that I'm putting this mildly. That's Paolo Cherchi Usai. He founded the Nitrate Picture Show and I spoke to archivists like him and took a trip across the Atlantic to understand what it takes to mount a fest like this and why it's not actually crazy. It might even be essential. So ticket, please... Enjoy the show. Today Peter Bagrov, the fire drill guy, is senior curator at the George Eastman Museum. He says his predecessors hit upon the idea of the Nitrate Picture Show back around 2014. And right out of the gate smacked into a roadblock. Maybe two years before the first festival started, the most difficult thing was to convince all of the other archives to, well, I wouldn't use the word risk, but at least well to at least provide their prints. And I would say that many were suspicious. Why were they suspicious? What was the suspicion? Well, because people were afraid of fires, first of all, that nobody knows how to handle nitrate properly. There was so little nitrate projection that many archives thought that it is hardly possible anymore, that this is a thing of the past. And actually, there are good reasons why nitrate was rarely shown beyond its flammability. Well, first of all, the majority of nitrate prints are not projectable. They have broken perforations. Some of them, they have decomposition. Some of them look very good, but are very shrunken. That's what happens with nitrate. And if you put a very shrunken piece of film in a projector it just tears the film. And can tear a film completely, and it could start a nitrate fire. Which happened in the past. Multiple, multiple times. And the projectable prints? Well, there's a school of thought that says those shouldn't be shown either. There are several types of archivists. My first reaction was,"Oh, it's an excellent idea" because I saw nitrate projected, I think it's great. Others thought that the idea is insane and these people are crazy and nitrate should be cherished and kept in a special case and nobody should ever see them. Because after all, nitrate movies can be cleaned up and copied over to digital media or sturdier, quote unquote safety film stock. And you can watch them that way. Why risk the original, sometimes sole surviving nitrate print by running it through a projector, which by its nature damages any film at least a tiny bit? If you have a very gentle projector, this extra damage is minimal. But yes, the film has a limited amount of screenings in it. So to say, a print that is, I can give you... a colleague and friend of mine who is a wonderful film scholar and a film archivist who doesn't like the idea of the Nitrate Picture Show, he told me once that we're like spoiled millionaires who eat extinct animals. It's pretty clear they're not. We'll get to that later. But the question remains, in a world of digital and safety copies, why risk projecting the original nitrates? And I posed that question to this guy. My name is Paolo Cherchi Usai, I am the founder of the Nitrate Picture Show. Paolo says his inspiration came when he stumbled upon an old magazine interview with one of his predecessors at the Eastman Museum, curator James Card. In which he said, I'm trying to paraphrase here, the nitrate originals should be looked at as long as they can be put through projectors. Otherwise, you're not talking about films, you're talking about facsimiles. And that word facsimiles resonated with me. Modern technologies, including digital technologies, are helping us a lot in bringing back the great films of the past to a contemporary audience. But they are reproductions, they are facsimiles. They're not quite the same thing. On some level, movie fans know this, right? We'll make a date to see a screening of an original 35 millimeter print because we know that movie will look different than it does on, say, video. Well, Paolo says, especially when it comes to movies from the nitrate era, that difference can change the way we think about film history. Like take the murky copies of early silent films he studied as a film school student. It all started with the question, Why do they look so awful? Why do they look so grainy and with an unbalanced contrast? Well, the answer was no, they were not ugly. The nitrate originals were great. Their cinematography was really, really beautiful. I want to see these films as they were seen by an audience at the beginning of the 20th century to dispel the notion that early cinema was, quote unquote, primitive in relation to contemporary cinema. And Paolo says it's also worth checking out nitrates of old movies we think we've seen at their very best.<i>Play it once Sam, for old time's sake.</i><i>I don't know what you mean Miss Ilsa.</i><i>Play it Sam.</i><i>Play As Time Goes By.</i> When we screened Casablanca on the opening night of the first Nitrate Picture Show, I had to deal with the skepticism of so many friends and colleagues who would say,"Why would you want to come to Rochester, New York, to see yet again Casablanca, which we have seen in so many versions on film, on VHS, on LaserDisc, on DVD." Well, but then they came and they saw it was as if I had seen the film for the first time in my life. Yeah, devotees will tell you a good nitrate print has a quality all its own. Subtler grays, deeper blacks. To describe that Casablanca print, which was a famously pristine one on loan from MoMA, Pablo practically resorts to poetry. I often use the metaphor of it's like touching silk with my eyes. A film historian, Kevin Brownlow used to say that he was visiting some mountain resort and it was a beautiful, crisp day. And he told his wife"What a nitrate landscape!" What he meant by nitrate landscape I think he meant the edges of the mountains were so crisp that distant as they where he felt that he could touch them with his eyes. And that's what I feel sometimes when I look at the good nitrate print. At one point before the Casablanca screening, Paolo asked if anyone in the audience had never seen the movie before. And to my surprise, there were about 50 or 60 hands being raised. And at that point, all I could say was,"Boy, I envy you!" You're going... It's like, you're going to have the first kiss of your life in front of the Taj Mahal. Now, most nitrates aren't in good enough condition to yield that level of transcendence. But for Paolo, that's also kind of the point of projecting the best ones. What is the subtext? It's very simple. By looking at the gorgeous nitrate print on the screen that makes people gasp in admiration, we are telling the audience, if we had preserved all our films the same way, we had preserved these survivors, we would have a very different, a broader, a better vision of the history of cinema. That is a message film archives around the world ultimately decided they were happy to send. After all, preservation's what they do. So many ultimately have provided nitrates for the Picture Show. Which isn't easy because as I learned, nothing about nitrate is easy. The British Film Institute has one of the world's largest film archives. And when they're restoring a movie or studying it or getting it ready to ship somewhere like the Dryden Theater, they do it in their Conservation Centre, about a half hour train ride outside London. Last fall, Conservation Manager Kieron Webb led me through a maze of stairs and hallways to the imposingly secure looking door of what they call their nitrate holding vaults. I was about to get an idea of what it takes just to let nitrate sit safely on a shelf for a while. Right. Right, so I've explained this is obviously just for the temporary keeping of nitrate. It will be here a matter of days. And each, at the end of each working day, people would return the nitrate that they're examining or working with to these vaults, to these cells. So let's go in and have a look. He has to switch on the vault lights from the outside before we enter because there aren't any light switches inside. They could cause sparks. I am instantly paranoid. Okay. I need to remember my pass. Now, when Kieron mentioned the vault had "cells", I thought it was some kind of technical term. But actually... This looks like a jail in here. I think it looks less comfortable. I think you're being quite compli... Yeah. I'm looking down a hallway with thick white concrete walls and rows of ominous red steel doors down either side. Behind each is a closet sized, yeah, a kind of jail cell with shelves for nitrate reels. Every door is hinged in the middle and folds inward. The better to hold tight if there's an outward explosion. And Kieron points out the ceiling inside each cell is basically one big security precaution. Above us, you're seeing a kind of a grid there in the ceiling and a like a glass pane. Yes, like a glass pane. And then on the other side is like a very wide metal cage, like mesh. Yeah. So above us on the roof, there's gallons and gallons of water. If there was a fire in this individual cell, there's a system that would break the glass and allow water into the cell. Not as we've already said, because you're going to extinguish the fire, but just as a means of controlling and preventing spread. Elsewhere in the vault, there's more spark proofing. Kieron points at the hall ceiling. If you look at the strip lights there, the fluorescent tube lights, they're encased in a kind of perspex. It's Plexiglas. Yeah, that's again, to minimize any source of ignition. There's also a light over the door and that's covered in glass as well. And where it's wired in, you can see it's heavily encased in pretty thick looking metal casing. Basically, everything reminds you you're surrounded by potentially hazardous material. Right down to the echo when Kieron shuts the cell door. It really does sound like you're shutting in a dangerous criminal. And we haven't even mentioned the precise climate control you need to keep nitrate from decomposing. Or, as Kieron later explains, the literal days it takes just to move nitrate reels to this facility from their super cold long term storage. Because that is minus five throughout. So obviously, if you bring them out too quickly into normal working conditions, room conditions, there's a risk of condensation causing damage to the film. So the films are acclimatized. You have to kind of slowly ease them into, you know, whatever the ambient temperature is of the work room that they're going to be worked on. Yeah, we're talking 48 hours. So this is not you can't get on the phone and say, I need that copy of this film tomorrow. Right. As somebody who's an archivist, do you love the fact that this stuff is so hard to work with on some level, that it requires this certain amount of expertise? What can I say? I can only answer yes to that. Yeah, there are challenges. Yeah, it's absolutely challenging. I mean, it just to me as a film fan, it's just there's a part of me that's kind of like "If only they'd thought about this back in the day, if they just thought, like, maybe we could work a little harder before we start putting little literal national art treasures onto it." To find something that won't explode.- You know what I mean?- Yeah. Well, you've got me thinking about a kind of parallel universe where they... But... Well, would I be in a job? And it's clear that it'd be sad for him. Every archivist I spoke to loved their job, except when it comes to one part of it. The part where a nitrate film leaves an archive and has to actually get to the Dryden Theater. Shipping nitrate prints is a nightmare. It is a logistical nightmare. I'm putting this mildly. And that's actually the most unwelcome aspect of organizing the Nitrate Picture Show, because from the point of view of international authorities, nitrate film is an explosive. They're dangerous goods that have to be properly packed and the shipper has to be certified. It is much more expensive to ship them than it is to ship a safety print. So it's a very expensive thing, this festival. To make things worse, there is no universal rule. In one country they will ask you to put every single reel into a box individually wrapped with a certain label. In other countries, they will ask you to put an entire film in a metal barrel. There is a country that they wanted the barrel to be sealed, which is a contradiction in terms, because in the unlikely event that the film is going to explode, if the barrel is sealed, the explosion is going to be only more destructive. So you don't want the container to be sealed. What the hell are you talking about? It's basically making it into a giant hand grenade. It's just going to be shrapnel everywhere. But that, that's the rule. Sometimes it's almost enough to make Paolo long for the old days. There was a time in my life and I can say this publicly, because it was such a long time ago where I was hand carrying nitrate reels in my hand luggage in my transcontinental flights, you know. And I was doing that as a matter of course. In fact, the only reason why the the security was stopping me at customs control was not because it was nitrate. They were looking at the reel and they were staring at me and say,"Is this pornographic material?" Anyway, here's the fun part. Sometimes all that nitrate hassle is for nothing. We had cases in the past when an archive, another archive would send us prints, a print, and we would inspect the print and say, "You know, we're very sorry, but in spite of what you're telling us, we think it is not projectable. It is too brittle or too shrunken." We wouldn't take the risk and we would have to send it back. And being that discerning about the prints your show also makes just programing the festival yet another struggle. Well, I can give you an example. We really would like to show a nitrate print of Gone with the Wind.<i>Has the war started?</i><i>Sir, you should have made your presence known.</i><i>In the middle of that beautiful love scene?</i> But so far, we have not been able to find a single, perfectly projectable print.<i>- Sir, you are no gentleman.- And you, miss, are no...</i> we're even considering making, you know, a Frankenstein monster and compiling the film from two different sources. But still, because it's a very long film that many reels, we were not able to put together a complete film, perfectly projectable. And that's a very popular title. And many archives have prints. In other words, remember the jab Peter Bagrov's pal leveled at the Nitrate Picture Show, about devouring extinct animals? I find this a charming metaphor. I love it very much, though I strongly disagree. Because you know, we are a museum and we value the physical objects. We don't want them to be damaged, even though we really badly want to screen some of them. Still, every year, despite the hurdles, the Nitrate Picture Show pulls together a weekend's worth of nitrate screenings. And now the question I have is, is this really all worth it? I get a taste of nitrate on the screen. I take a long look inside one of the few projection booths in America that can put it up there. All that in just a minute. Stay with us. MUBI is a curated streaming service showing exceptional films from around the globe, all of them handpicked by real people who really know movies. And with a new film debuting on the platform every single day, there is always something new to discover. So this season of the podcast, obviously we are talking about history making experiences that you can only have in movie theaters. Hopefully it inspires you to love and support your local cinema that much more. And we've got a new thing going that can help you do exactly that. It is called MUBI Go. And when you sign up, you get a free movie ticket every week to see a hand-selected film in theaters. Previous picks include award winning films like Drive My Car, The Lost Daughter, Cha-Cha Real Smooth and the Power of the Dog. MUBI Go is now available in the UK, New York and Los Angeles, and it is coming to more U.S. cities soon. To learn more, check out MUBI.com/go Also, if you're intrigued by what you're hearing about the Nitrate Picture Show, you can read more about this year's installment of that very festival in MUBI's online magazine Notebook. Writer Joshua Bogatin attended and reported on the experience. You will find that piece at MUBI.com/notebook And finally, after you finish listening to me, you can stream some of the films we have featured on this podcast. All you got to do is subscribe to MUBI at MUBI.com and look for the collection called Featured on the MUBI Podcast that is on the Now Showing page. As always, you can find all the links you need in the show notes of this episode. Speaking of which, let's get back to it. All right. So before we head upstate to Rochester, New York, for a nitrate screening at the Dryden Theater. I want to make a quick pit stop, downstate. And another movie, Mecca in Manhattan. So this is the upstairs lobby. This is just the sort of, you know, small lobby space right outside of the Courthouse Theater. Jed Rapfogel is programmer of Anthology Film Archives. It's a legendary institution that's been preserving and exhibiting indie and avant garde movies for half a century. But today, I'm fascinated by something they've got standing in the high ceilinged lobby outside their main screening room. And you've got a giant project... You've got a huge projector here, almost like an art piece, but it's the real deal. Well, these, and these are, these have never been in use here. These are really just decorative. But, yeah, two large 35 projectors. And these are carbon arc projectors. Very beautiful projectors. I don't know what vintage exactly, but I would guess thirties or forties and yeah, they just have this little housing where you would take these rods and you can see some of them right here. These, I don't know what are those, like six inch long carbon rods which you would set into place, and not exact... because there was a spark, but they essentially just lit on fire. I mean, they burned. Yes, back in the day, this was often how nitrate prints were screened. Run through a projector that illuminated the film, not with a light bulb, but with a spark of electricity between two burning carbon rods. And gave off this unbelievably intense light which you can't even really look at directly. So the real purists, I mean, talk about being purist about film projection. I mean, the real purists will say that even if we watch a beautiful print of Casablanca, you're not really seeing it the way it looked because it used to be projected on these projectors that burned incredibly hot and had this very particular kind of light, also very dangerous, of course. I mean, the combination of nitrate film and burning carbon rods was was <i>no bueno</i>. Now, I'll take a second here to say in the early 20th century, a lot of theaters showed a lot of nitrate this way. And some folks insist there weren't that many fires, relatively speaking. Still, it was more fires than you'd probably like. So today, nitrate exhibitors are willing to give up the historically accurate light from burning rods in favor of xenon projector bulbs and a lot of other precautions. All right. So tell me where we are and what we're doing. So we are in the Dryden booth right now getting ready to project twelve Technicolor nitrate trailers from the mid to late 1940s. Sam Lane is a film conservation specialist at the George Eastman Museum. He's also on the projection team. And when I first join him in the Dryden Theater booth, it seems pretty typical. Some big, hulking projectors. Workbenches. Then I noticed the locker up against the wall. Yeah. Yeah. So I've got the films that we're going to be projecting today in a fireproof cabinet over here. Those cabinets definitely scream caution there like bright yellow with the red word flammable. And also <i>inflammable</i>. Right. Right. In French, just in case you've got a French Canadian down here. I think it's got, might have some Italian or Spanish or something in there as well. So, yeah. So describe this projection booth compared to other projection booths. What is special about it that makes it nitrate ready? So if you come over here and look at the projector, so each projector has got these enclosed magazines, the reel stay in. So that isolates the reels from the rest of the booth and from the projectionists. Yeah. This isn't your grade school teachers projector with the exposed reel spinning on top. This thing's built like a tank. The reels shut tied inside those metal magazines in case the print catches fire. Sam also shows me special little rollers guarding the slots in the magazines where the film comes out. I see an extra set of rollers up in here. Those are called fire rollers. I see. So those rollers actually, like basically forms, almost an airtight seal. The film can pass through it, but no fire hopefully could pass. Hypothetically, we've never tested it luckily. So, yeah. I don't. Yeah. Hopefully you'll never know whether this is actually necessary. Right, exactly.- Yeah.- What else? We've got water coolant as well, that pumps liquid from this barrel over here through the projectors. And what that does is cools the gates of the projector down. Sam also points out a wrench hanging from a wire over in the corner. Pulling it activates a Rube Goldberg system of pulleys attached to big metal slabs called fire shutters. They hang over those little windows between the projectors and the auditorium. So in the event of some sort of emergency, we can go over here and pull this wrench, and that'll drop the fire shutters down to contain anything within the booth. And if a projectionist has to flee before they can pull the wrench, Sam points out the failsafe system. These pieces here are a type of metal that would burn out after a certain amount of heat has hit them. So if we're not able to shut the fire shutters after a little while of a fire, these would burn away and they would drop automatically. The hooks that are basically holding the blast shields would just melt. Right. Yeah. Again, that's untested, but that's the theory. It's incredible to imagine that a fire could be that hot, that this piece of metal I'm looking at, you are planning for that to melt. Right. Right. Exactly. Yeah. I couldn't tell you exactly like how hot it would have to be for that to melt. But yeah, that's the idea of it. And then a big safety feature is just the projectionist himself. Or rather projectionists. You need at least two to switch back and forth between reels of a nitrate feature. One person assigned to each projector focused on it like a hawk. So as one projector is running, the projectionist on that projector would sit and kind of watch the film going through the whole time and make sure nothing is going wrong in the film path as it travels through the projector. Ready to stop the motor if need be. Seriously, through the whole film, you're basically at the ready to shut it all down. Yeah, each reel is usually about 20 minutes, so we sit here the whole time watching it. You're just kind of frozen in position, just waiting for. Some guys will look up and make sure everything looks okay on screen and adjust the focus and masking if need be. But for the most part, we've got our eyes glued on the projector. Just because a film goes through safely once doesn't necessarily mean it's going to behave the same way in a subsequent screening. To me, this feels tense. Is it actually tense or you're such a pro that you... It can be tense after doing it a few times you kind of get a little bit used to it. But there's always that thought in the back of your head that what if something goes wrong? So you have to be mindful of it. You've seen Cinema Paradiso I imagine. Yes, yeah. And and Inglourious Basterds, so... better to keep those in the realm of fiction.- Exactly. Yeah.- Thank you very much for talking. You're welcome, yeah have a good one. As I leave the booth and head into the expansive 500 seat Dryden Theater auditorium.- Have fun, break a leg.- Yeah, thank you! I think about the first article I ever read about the Nitrate Picture Show. The headline was A Weekend at the World's Most Dangerous Film Festival. It definitely caught my attention, but now it feels ironic. Because it's pretty clear everything they do is designed to eliminate danger. So an audience can focus on what's on screen. Speaking of which, I should say this wasn't a festival screening I attended. It was a pre screening for a small audience to take a look at some nitrate trailers from the Eastman Museum's own archives.<i>Mel Star, headstrong spirited daughter of the Old South.</i> And to see if the trailers were beautiful enough to make the cut for the next picture show. And the experience? I can't say I had a first kiss at the Taj Mahal moment, but well, couple of things. These were all Technicolor trailers from the forties.<i>Filmed in Technicolor, in actual locales of breathtaking beauty.</i> And they didn't look like Technicolor. Or what I think of as Technicolor. None of those big, bright reds and blues. Instead, there were these subtle shades of tan and brown. Not because the prints had faded, but because that's what a lot of Technicolor looked like in the late thirties and forties. It's a subtlety in movies like Gone With the Wind had before years later, color processes and tastes changed. So that later prints of the same movies were made way more bright. The Technicolor camera recreates with all its glamor and pageantry, the most thrilling race of America's finest thoroughbred horses. Sure enough, seeing these trailers is like getting a whole new view of movie history. And when it was all over... Something else occurred to me How rarely we get that view. For half a century, most films were made on nitrate. We're talking thousands and thousands of movies. And now look at the effort, the care and time and expense and special equipment just to screen a handful of them. One weekend a year. Paolo Cherchi Usai says it's an extreme example of what could be coming for modern movies. There is a thing called a Nitrate Picture Show. I think that eventually there is, if there isn't one already a Motion Picture Show dealing with 35 millimeter prints because projecting 35 millimeter prints is is becoming a rare occurrence. It will become increasingly hard to look at a film made on 35 millimeter on its own carrier. There will be a time when the same principles will also apply to digital technology. I do not know whether or not 200 years from now we will be able to screen Avatar in a form that reflects what the director wanted to achieve when he presented the film. I am not at all sure, and I do think that we should start thinking about it now. I left the Dresden Theater thinking this. Anytime you're in a cinema watching any movie the way it was originally intended to be seen, you're a witness to history. And it can't be duplicated. And that's the MUBI podcast for this week. Follow us to make sure you get a front row seat for more deep dives into great cinemas. Our final episode of this season airs in two weeks. Next week, though, a special episode from the folks at our sister show MUBI Podcast Encuentros. It's a conversation between director Apichatpong Weerasethakul and Tilda Swinton about their Cannes winning fantasy film Memoria. Do not miss that. Meanwhile, this episode was hosted written and edited by me, Rico Gagliano. Beth Schiff is our booking producer. Steven Colón mastered and engineered. Martin Austwick composed our original music. Thanks this week to Sarah Behman, to Jonathan Zanetti, Rachel Yang, and everyone at the George Eastman Museum, Anthology Film Archives and the British Film Institute. Which, by the way, next summer is launching a festival called Film on Film. True to its name, it'll be all movies on celluloid, including some nitrates, the first of its kind in the UK. Mark your calendars. This show is executive produced by me along with Jon Barrenechea, Efe Cakarel, Daniel Kasman and Michael Tacca for MUBI. If you love the podcast, tell the world by leaving a five star review wherever you listen, it helps others find and love us too. Also, if you've got questions, comments or a projectable nitrate print of Gone with the Wind in your basement, email us, for God's sake, we are podcast@mubi.com And of course, to stream the best in cinema, including some of the films we talk about on this very podcast, just head over to MUBI.com to start watching. Till next week. A box of Jujubes for me please. That sounds appropriately old school.