When Oscar-winning director Christopher Nolan (Oppenheimer, Inception) introduced a 2019 nitrate screening of Alfred Hitchcock’s Rebecca at Hollywood’s Egyptian Theatre, Nolan told the gathered spectators about the time he got to see Casablanca in nitrate after years of watching it in modern formats.
“It was just a transformative experience—a film I love and got to experience in a very different way,” Nolan said. “These screenings are all about seeing a work the way the filmmaker originally got to show it to the audience, the way the audience got to experience this great piece of work at the time.”
What is nitrate film and why is it rare?
From the 1890s to the 1950s, pretty much every movie was printed on cellulose nitrate film.
When we watch an old movie today, we’re really watching a copy of a copy, sometimes many generations deep and often created without the benefit of the original negative as the source. That’s why audiences often find the faces and details in many old films to be off-puttingly fuzzy and indistinct, and why the images in silent movies can be so mushy they feel like they’re from another planet.
But what filmgoers saw back in the day was much more detailed and crisp, thanks to resolution made possible by nitrate. The precision and contrast of movie images felt both intimate and spectacular, playing a big role in establishing cinema as a dominant entertainment form.
“[Nitrate films are] known for deep, richer blacker and gray tones,” director Martin Scorsese has said. “They glow.”
(Joan Fontaine and Judith Anderson in Hitchcock’s Rebecca [1940] | Public domain)
But nitrate had a few fatal flaws. One, it disintegrates quickly and must be stored in special conditions that even top-rate institutions like New York’s Museum of Modern Art proved incapable of providing.
Two, the silver crystals in the emulsion that give nitrate images such a splendid shimmer were worth cash, and studios had a habit of destroying films once their theatrical runs were over so that the metal could be reclaimed.
Nitrate’s third fatal flaw could be truly fatal.
“The bigger problem was that it blew up. It was flammable,” Scorsese said at the TCM Classic Film Festival in 2017.
Nitrate film can combust even if a room gets too hot, and once a fire starts, it’s near impossible to put out. Even if you try immersing burning nitrate film in water, it will go right on burning because the material generates its own oxygen.
Nitrate’s instability is a key plot point in Quentin Tarantino’s Inglorious Basterds and Giuseppe Tornatore’s Cinema Paradiso. It’s also one reason the Library of Congress estimates that 75% of all silent films have been lost. Some films were dumped by the final cinema to screen them during their runs. Many more were consumed in sudden film archive fires, including at the Fox Vault, MGM, Warner Bros., Cinémathèque Française, the National Archives, and in countless personal collections.
Eastman Kodak phased out the sale of nitrate film stock in 1952, and movies switched to so-called “safety film” that rendered duller, flatter, and less distinct images.
“We are lucky to still have a few nitrate prints that have not decomposed,” Scorsese has said. “Some are nearly 100 years old.”
Where can audiences view nitrate film screenings?
Many countries, including Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, have old nitrate artifacts in careful storage—in some cases, these were the last places to receive copies of movies during their initial runs, and the copies were never returned to the U.S. Despite maintaining these collections, many places don’t have projection rooms capable of showing the movies to the public.
Only a few cinemas around the world are adequately equipped to project nitrate prints nowadays. Safety upgrades are expensive, projectionists require meticulous training, and even transporting the delicate film from archive to projection booth can come with a bevy of legal and logistical challenges.
Witnessing a screening of a nitrate film is something that movie buffs are willing to travel for. In fact, they have to, since options have become so scarce.
(Inspecting nitrate film at the Eastman Museum’s annual Nitrate Picture Show)
Rochester, New York
Dryden Theatre, George Eastman Museum
The preeminent house in the world to witness a nitrate screening is at the George Eastman Museum. Dedicated to the history of photography and cinema, the museum is situated in and around the mansion of film manufacturer George Eastman. Since 2015, the Eastman (which hasn’t been immune to vault fires of its own) has hosted the springtime Nitrate Picture Show, a multiday festival of rare screenings and expert talks. Encompassing feature films, trailers, screen tests, and more, the event regularly attracts hundreds of attendees from as many as 20 countries.
“In addition to the Nitrate Picture Show, we have a couple of individual screenings throughout the year,” says Peter Bagrov, the museum’s senior curator. “In 2024, we screened the 1934 version of The Man Who Knew Too Much and Rebecca as part of our Hitchcock retrospective. In 2023, we screened The Wizard of Oz right before New Year—we often have a nitrate screening around December 30.”
Los Angeles, California
David Geffen Theater, Academy Museum of Motion Pictures
When the professional group behind the Oscars opened its lavish museum in a former department store in 2021, organizers included nitrate capabilities in the complex’s largest screening room. Events are only scheduled intermittently, but when they happen, they attract A-listers and icons. A July 2024 screening of Michael Powell’s Black Narcissus included an appearance by legendary film editor Thelma Schoonmaker (Raging Bull,Goodfellas).
Egyptian Theatre
Opened in 1922 on Hollywood Boulevard, the Egyptian is where the concept of the movie premiere was invented. In 2023, Netflix wrapped up a reported $70 million restoration of the century-old facility. American Cinematheque uses the Egyptian to mount regular screenings of nitrate films (including the one hosted by Christopher Nolan, mentioned above), as well as other lesser-seen formats such as 70mm. The organization sometimes holds its own nitrate screening series, plus occasional one-off screenings throughout the year, always clearly designated in the online schedule as “on nitrate.”
- Billy Wilder Theater, Hammer Museum
- As you’d expect of a university in Hollywood’s hometown, the UCLA Film & Television Archive has one of the world’s best collections of nitrate items, but that doesn’t always translate to a steady schedule of showings. When the archive does screen titles, it uses the Billy Wilder Theater, located in the Hammer Museum on Wilshire Boulevard (steps away from where the actual Billy Wilder is now permanently located). The UCLA screening schedule is posted online, but most of it isn’t nitrate-based, so keep an eye out for future events. Nitrate screenings are usually marked as such, as in this program from 2017.
Palo Alto, California
The Stanford Theatre
In the Bay Area, the 1925 Stanford Theatre, recently restored by the Packard Foundation, sometimes screens films from the Packard Humanities Institute, a nonprofit devoted to preservation. But it’s not a dedicated film society, so events are sparsely scheduled.
Culpepper, Virginia
The Packard Campus Theater, Library of Congress
The Library of Congress, the USA’s oldest cultural institution, uses the 45-acre Packard Campus of the National Audio-Visual Conservation Center to preserve the world’s biggest collection of archival films, TV shows, radio broadcasts, and sound recordings. While the campus is not open for tours, it does open its nitrate-capable 205-seat cinema for public screenings. As materials age, though, nitrate events are increasingly rare on the public screening schedule.
London, England
BFI Southbank, The British Film Institute
Since 1933, the BFI has been the United Kingdom’s most important entity for film restoration, archiving, and interpretation. The organization holds the largest collection of nitrate films in the world—sometimes, other countries without adequate facilities of their own will send over items for safekeeping.
The Institute’s BFI Southbank is the only place in the United Kingdom that is legally allowed to screen nitrate publicly, and it has mounted screenings for years, both through individual events and as part of festivals such as Dangerous Beauty and Film on Film. In 2023, the cinema’s attempt to show a nearly 80-year-old print of Mildred Pierce was stymied by projector issues, but the BFI, as a world leader in film preservation, managed to fix the issue in-house and screen the film successfully later the same year.
Belgrade, Serbia
Jugoslovenska kinoteka (Yugoslav Film Archive)
Founded in 1949, this film archive claims to contain more than “10,000 titles produced between 1896 and 1953,” and although public screenings of that material happen, they are unusual.
“[The archive] used to show nitrate regularly. Now that happens rarely,” says the Eastman Museum’s Bagrov. “Most of the screenings are digital, some are on 35mm safety film. During their 2024 festival they screened one nitrate print, but that was a very rare print of a U.S. silent film with Charles Ray.”
Stabilizing and preserving these increasingly rare historic artifacts is gradually becoming more important than risking damage to them further through exhibition. If you seek out nitrate screenings, be alert to films that are merely struck from nitrate prints—those are faithful copies, and they may be spectacular, but they are not original nitrate.
“There should still be projectable nitrate in 10 years, maybe in 20 years, but it’s hard to tell if our grandchildren would still have this opportunity,” says Bagrov of the Eastman Museum.
