A lot of the readings we’re doing for this class touch on aesthetics – not in the classical sense where “aesthetics” equals the philosophical study of beauty and its qualities, but rather in the sense of contemporary philosophy and art history where it comes to signify the experiential perception of the world via one’s senses. In this vein, we have read and spoken of visibility and spectacle (Nixon 2011), and the hierarchy of senses (sight over hearing, in Shapiro 2015). While my arguments will remain grounded in thinking about material engagements with toxicity and the broader world, I want to take the discussion to actual art and more specifically, film, which (to me, at least) is the most beautiful, yet most toxic of art.
Film, Flames, Asbestos
Imagine a film reel – a long piece of transparent plastic base and the colorful emulsion that is printed on top of it. This is known as a film stock and it comes in a few different versions. The earliest film stock, nitrocellulose – or nitrate film, as it’s usually referred to – was extremely flammable. Auto-ignitions were also common and have led to numerous incidents, including a hospital fire in Cleveland, Ohio and the fire in Glen Cinema in Paisley, Scotland, which took the lives of 71. To prevent such disasters, many cinemas across the world installed asbestos in their projection booths.
But the abundance of asbestos in old cinema buildings (most of them remediated by now) is not the only toxic substance related to film. Developing the exposed negatives takes its toll on the filmmakers. Inhaling the fumes of volatile chemicals, used in many developers and fixants, caused respiratory issues. Indie film makers working with film today, use masks – and still sometimes cough for a month after developing film in their bathroom for a few consecutive days.
Additionally, film cleaner, used to remove dirt or oil residue from film is also quite volatile and can cause nausea and cough. Some brands of film cleaner are actually based on petrochemicals.
Nitrate film is rare today. Only two cinemas in the US are legally allowed to show it and they are banned from ever having more than two reels of film in the projection booth. Archival collections have special fireproof rooms for their nitrate films.
The decline of nitrate film usage happened long before the digital era. In the late 1940s Eastman Kodak patented a new film stock – cellulose acetate film, which came to be not as safety film and became the industry standard in the 1950 and after.
From Acetic Acid to Aliphatic Petroleum Hydrocarbon
Smell, as we’ve seen again and again (Lerner 2010, Shapiro 2015), is a powerful indicator of something wrong. This is also observable in most film archives. If you open a can of safety film, chances are it’s going to smell like vinegar.
This is because safety film is chemically unstable. While this was not recognized at the time of its invention, safety film turned out to be prone to warping, shrinking and general decay. Throughout this process of degradation, safety film emits acetic acid – which along water is one of the two ingredient of vinegar, which is why the decay of safety film is often called “vinegar syndrome”. The worst thing about vinegar syndrome is that it is contagious and unstoppable – once you have a film with vinegar syndrome, you have to isolate that film from the rest of your collection and, ideally, you’ll freeze it in order to slow down the chemical processes.
The panic around vinegar syndrome has led to some peculiar inventions. Among them is Vitafilm: a type of film cleaner whose unique selling point is that it can stop vinegar syndrome. To that purpose you have to either clean your film with it, as you would do with a regular film cleaner, or soak your film in it for three months.
The first time I held a can of Vitafilm in my hands I was quite impressed. The back label advised caution and suggested the usage of gloves and suggested a variety of safety measures: work with mask and in a well ventilated area, avoid prolonged exposure to vapors, avoid eye contact, use protective gloves.
One of the main ingredients of Vitafilm, as pointed on the same label, is aliphatic petroleum hydrocarbon. This could mean different things – methane, acetylene, propane among others, – but in any case it means that it is a highly corrosive petrochemical. We soaked some film in it, as per the instructions on the manufacturer’s website. We used metal containers since the same instructions warned that Vitafilm can make otherwise sturdy plastics soft and squishy.
To cut the short story short, three months later we opened the can and ran some vinegar syndrome tests only to see that Vitafilm and/or the aliphatic petroleum hydrocarbon in it is snake oil: the levels of acetic acid which the film was emitting were the same as the ones it was emitting in May.
Wrapping it up
Film as an art form has been synchronized with the development of several industries, including the chemical one. Among the earliest film-related patents were not only cameras and lenses, but also film stock and various chemicals. Some of these were quite toxic and needed precaution. Others were pretty much ok. Acetate film itself, as far as my chemical knowledge goes, technically can be considered a bioplastic although the term was not around when this film stock was invented. Many of the chemicals used to maintain it, however, were toxic and could cause chemical burns and temporary respiratory issues. Old-school film-cement, for instance, used to edit film and bring shots together, made use of butanone, which is a petrochemical that we have in abundance only thanks to the oil industry.
And while it is true that we have moved to digital modes of producing and enjoying cinema, the classics of film, as well as the basic film grammar and the infrastructural set up of the studio system, were developed due to their more or less explicit ties to industrial chemistry.
With this I do not want to imply that we are guilty of something and should abandon film; neither I want to go in simplistic renderings of Marxist base/superstructure explorations of petropolitics and film aesthetics. By sharing my experience with film, I simply attempted to give another tactile and concrete expression to Zoë’s often-used metaphor: “We cannot unscramble the egg.”
We’re all in it in all kinds of unexpected ways and we should try and be conscious about it. But we are also all in it together, so no need to panic and don’t stop going to the movies!
End of part one of a two part series on toxic film. Tune in next time for an excursion in smell, cough, #MeToo, extractivism and recuperation.