Inside the Archive #74: Nitrate Screenings, a Preservation Seminar, and Asexual Screen Histories

This June saw the Nitrate Picture Show (NPS) safely blow out its tenth birthday candles at the George Eastman Museum, Rochester, New York. As a unique festival in which all the films are projected from highly flammable cellulose nitrate prints, it pays to have caution with the naked flame. Sourcing, inspecting, preparing, and screening 35 pre-1951 film prints, one of which was over a century old, over four days is no mean feat.

Helmed by the museum’s Senior Curator Peter Bagrov, it is made possible by a dedicated festival team and supported by students of the L. Jeffrey Selznick School of Film Preservation, based at the museum. The films come from the museum’s own collection, as well as from film archives in the USA and internationally, including the BFI. These are prints with stories to tell, materially different from anything manufactured after 1951 and only possible, or safe, to see thanks to the vital conservation work that underpins access to such collections.

The NPS is a small-scale festival, with all screenings held in the museum’s single 500-seat Dryden Theater. It is always a fast sell-out, beating its own record each year (this year’s passes were gone in six days). It has earned a reputation as an unmissable rendezvous for film-on-film enthusiasts, who gather even though no details of the programme are shared in advance, creating a unique sense of anticipation and excitement for the opening event. Even then, one final surprise awaits at the last screening of the festival through the tradition of a final curtain rise to reveal the title selected for a “Blind Date with Nitrate”. This year, we all found our match with an original copy of Jean Cocteau’s Orphée (1950) from La Cinémathèque française.

Senior Curator of Fiction James Bell and I were there to introduce Luis Buñuel’s Un Chien Andalou (1929) from an original print held in the BFI National Archive. We also sent two replacement reels for a screening of David Lean’s This Happy Breed (1944) as substitutes for heavily damaged ones in an otherwise fine print from the Library of Congress. It’s a brilliant example of collaboration between institutions and shows the potential for future exhibition projects.

The impeccably curated programme, which included trailers, home movies, Gasparcolor shorts and a print from Cecil B. DeMille’s own collection, gave us much to take away for the BFI’s own Film on Film ambitions. Among the highlights were a beautiful original release print of Helmut Kautner’s Under the Bridges (1946); Jean Renoir’s The Little Match Girl (1928) from a print donated to MoMA by Renoir himself; a print of Why Change Your Wife? (1920) that had the highest level of shrinkage the team had ever screened, and yet ran beautifully through the projector; Paolo Cherchi Usai’s thought-provoking talk about AI and the future of film archiving; and the only film screened digitally: Bill Morrison’s haunting elegy of nitrate decomposition, Darker (2024).

The connections between the Nitrate Picture Show and the BFI are foundational. Back in 2000, at what was then the National Film Theatre, the BFI National Archive put on a programme of nitrate prints under the provocative title The Last Nitrate Picture Show. The implication was clear: these unstable prints were unlikely to be screened for very much longer. And so it seemed to be. Following a further programme of nitrate material from the BFI National Archive at BFI Southbank in 2011, no public nitrate screenings were held in Britain until the first BFI Film on Film Festival in 2023.

It was partly the provocation in that 2000 BFI programme that inspired the George Eastman Museum to step into the breach in 2015 with the first Nitrate Picture Show. Since then, the BFI National Archive has partnered with the NPS several times: among the materials we have loaned to them have been a couple of reels from an original release print of Carol Reed’s The Third Man (1949) in 2023, provided – as with the reels of This Happy Breed noted by Sonia – to be combined with reels from a print from UCLA, and so enable the complete film to be shown. And we were back last year to present an original release print of Fritz Lang’s proto-noir You Only Live Once (1936) from the BFI’s collections, a standout for many in that year’s programme.

As well as the glorious aesthetic qualities of a nitrate print, with its oil-well blacks and shimmering silvers, or its inimitably unique palette if it’s a colour film, there’s a tangible magic to seeing an original nitrate print projected today. You’re passed back through time to when a film was first seen by audiences, the print object a relic encoded with the markers of its youthful moments and of its life story since. Watching, the distance between the now and the then collapses, and events onscreen seem to take on a different kind of urgency: the characters, the attitudes, even the fashions, somehow appear contemporary, not ‘heritage’.

That sense of transportation was wonderfully true when we presented Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí’s Un Chien Andalou at this year’s NPS. Like the debut performance of Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring, or Bob Dylan going electric at Newport in 1965, the first unveiling of the scandalous Un Chien Andalou was a fulcrum moment for twentieth-century art. We were invited to present it following the success of a screening at last year’s Film on Film Festival at BFI Southbank. As in London, at NPS we screened it with a gramophone accompaniment of Argentinian tango and Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, as Buñuel and Dalí had done at the film’s original premiere in Paris in June 1929, in front of André Breton’s initially sceptical Surrealist group, Pablo Picasso, Jean Cocteau and other luminaries of Paris’s art world.

What we could not have known before arriving in Rochester, however, with the festival programme not announced in advance, was that the screening would fall on 6 June, exactly 97 years to the day since that premiere at Paris’s Studio des Ursulines. We informed the audience of the uncanny alignment in our introduction to the screening, and it brought an immediate charge to the atmosphere in the Dryden Theater as we invited the audience to imagine themselves taking their seats in Paris on that epochal evening, perhaps after a glass or three of absinthe. At the Paris premiere, Buñuel stood by his gramophone with a pocket full of stones, ready to hurl them at any heckling Surrealists, only to find his and Dalí’s film rapturously embraced (the succès de scandale erupted at later screenings in front of, in Dalí and Buñuel’s assessment, small-minded bourgeois audiences). Thankfully, no stones were required in Rochester either, and the screening was again widely regarded as one of the highlights of the festival and a great advertisement to US audiences for our own Film on Film Festival.

The journey to this year’s FIAT-IFTA Preservation and Migration Seminar had a decidedly film noir vibe for the BFI delegation. Heavy grey clouds and squalling rain joined us as we waited for a bus to Luton Airport. While no cynical, down-and-out detective or morally ambiguous mobsters appeared under the harsh lights of the departure lounge, the way we were swept back and forth, from gate to gate, beneath large signs warning of Luton’s ‘unpredictable security operations’, created the type of nightmarish disorientation of which Kafka would have been proud.

However, some hours later than planned, we landed in Dublin for a thought-provoking two days. Entitled Digital Time: Show me how you do it!, the seminar covered all things digitisation and digital preservation, from retrieving data to metadata standards, and took place in the incredible surroundings of the Royal Irish Academy and its remarkable collection of books (some of which date back nearly 1,500 years).

The seminar started with a fascinating, albeit very high-level, keynote from Kate Murray of the Library of Congress on new policies and standards for metadata tagging of AI usage. The message was clear: AI is going to influence the material being created today, and we will need to be equipped to log that, both to maintain trust in our collections and to meet legislative requirements. There is a huge body of work being done in this area, and we all need to be ready to respond to the impact of this rapidly changing technology.

In a very metadata-heavy first day of talks, the highlight was undoubtedly Stephen McConnachie’s presentation on how the BFI has been able to utilise metadata and new AI technologies, as well as our new NVIDIA H100 GPU server, to efficiently extract 137,000 unique TV adverts from a decade of off-air recordings. The presentation was a great reminder of why preserving data and maintaining good data management are important: they enable us to access the kind of heritage that can both reflect and shape the thoughts, beliefs and cultures of society today.

Other highlights from the first day included a presentation on the My Balkan(s) project, an initiative designed to strengthen and preserve media heritage in the Western Balkans through skills and knowledge sharing (at a time of particular political urgency), and a presentation from the BBC on the mass digitisation of regional news and the logistical and curatorial challenges this entailed.

The day finished with a panel discussion on the archiving of born-digital cinema, and it was hard not to feel some pride at the room’s reaction when Stephen outlined quite how much data the BFI holds. It was a great reminder of the scale and significance of our work, and that the BFI National Archive really is a leading force in the sector.

The second day had more of a hands-on feel. My personal highlight was a presentation from Tristan Zondag and Marjolein Steeman of the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision, who explored ‘metadata archaeology’: how they had retrieved digital data from obsolete hardware using open-source tools and DIY solutions to extract and reconstruct raw magnetic data from a disk. It was a breathtaking piece of innovation and ingenuity that really delved into the nitty-gritty of what is required to overcome the technical challenges of media conservation.

Charles and I continued on this theme with a presentation that reflected on the waning number of technical practitioners able to maintain and repair equipment and deal with the issues of degralescence (a portmanteau used to describe the combined effect of material degradation and technological obsolescence). We spoke about the BFI’s lottery-funded initiative to bring in trainees and explore new pipelines for developing the skills and knowledge needed to tackle these challenges. We used the example of the hugely challenging MII TV-am collection, for which we are currently developing solutions, to demonstrate the need for specialist, contextual understanding of these issues and to look towards the future, considering what might be required in terms of both workflow and workforce. We ended with a reminder that, once the knowledge has left your workforce, it is too late to pass it on. Organisations cannot necessarily rely on commercial pipelines to keep these skills alive.

Other highlights from day two included excellent presentations from the French National Audiovisual Institute (INA) and the BBC. Sarah Vandegeerde spoke about how INA modified a remigration solution to great effect, creating a mass-migration solution. This enabled them to ingest 320,000 DVDs of off-air recordings into their digital preservation infrastructure, driven by new software solutions built in-house. In The Archive Metadata Conundrum, Brendan Mallon discussed the BBC’s new archival structure and how it handles the vast amount of metadata it holds, and continues to produce, in order to create an archive that is accessible to its service users.

The seminar ended with a very powerful panel discussion (moderated by Charles) about the future of video migration. We saw fascinating presentations about the work being done by the Paul Scherrer Institute (in association with the BFI), including contact-free ways of retrieving magnetic information from tapes, as well as the retrieval of complete films from film reels that are completely fused, using hugely advanced X-ray technologies. We saw examples from archives around the world without financing for environmental controls or proper storage, where materials were, in practical terms, as good as lost to traditional playback. The panel brought up a number of key questions: is this a realistic, viable solution going forward? Do we have time to see where this technology can go? What can the developments in this area mean for us on a practical, everyday level? There was also a vital reminder of the risk of heritage preservation being a pursuit restricted to the world’s wealthiest countries.

– Thom Walker, Trainee Archive Technology Technician

On Thursday 4 June, I was delighted to lead an interactive event at the BFI Reuben Library on the topic of archiving asexuality. I partnered with Artie Carden, an artist, writer, and researcher, who facilitated the crafting element of the event. The event coincided with the launch of a new collection for the BFI Mediatheque, Asexuality on Screen, that I have curated, and together these marked the culmination of my placement with the BFI, an opportunity funded by the Midlands4Cities Doctoral Training Partnership as part of my PhD research.

Asexuality is a sexual orientation referring to people who don’t experience sexual attraction or may only experience sexual attraction rarely or under certain circumstances. Whilst asexuality is categorised within the LGBTQIA+ umbrella and many LGBTQIA+ identities have seen increases in representation in recent decades, during the event I spoke about the difficulties in locating asexual representations.

However, by pulling together five years of my research into asexual representations and diving deep into the BFI archives, I have been able to surface 17 works which explore over twenty years of asexual histories from British screens and which are now available to view in the Mediatheque.

However, importantly, this collection does not – and cannot – offer a full history of asexuality on British screens.

Within the BFI, only certain television channels have been recorded and archived; additionally, even when programmes have been collected, not all of them are available digitally, or the current file types preserved cannot be viewed in the Mediatheque. Likewise, many representations of asexuality have not come from film or television, and the BFI has only recently started to explore possibilities for preserving online video.

But what do we do with these gaps in the archive?

This is a question I asked during the event, and we reflected on this through collaging and zine making, where attendees recognised the gaps in the archive, the lack of asexual representation generally, and how specific asexual representations and experiences are also missing from screens.

As I end the placement, I’m left with the knowledge that the TV team is busy surfacing more works about asexuality from the BFI National Archive so these can be made available in the Mediatheque in the future. This takes time, but this is an important and exciting step forward in making more asexual screen histories accessible to view and making these forgotten representations remembered in asexual and queer histories again.

But now we have an archive of asexual screen histories, how can we use this to change asexual screen futures?

– Rebecca Humphreys-Lamford, PhD researcher