While safety film base is not really toxic in itself, the chemicals used to clean or repair it, can contain a lot of petrochemicals and therefore cause skin irritation or temporary cough, if not used with gloves and a mask.įrom Acetic Acid to Aliphatic Petroleum Hydrocarbon 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. The decline of nitrate film usage happened long before the digital era. Archival collections have special fireproof rooms for their nitrate films. 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.
Some brands of film cleaner are actually based on petrochemicals. 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.Īdditionally, film cleaner, used to remove dirt or oil residue from film is also quite volatile and can cause nausea and cough. Inhaling the fumes of volatile chemicals, used in many developers and fixants, caused respiratory issues.
Developing the exposed negatives takes its toll on the filmmakers. Image: Wikimedia.īut the abundance of asbestos in old cinema buildings (most of them remediated by now) is not the only toxic substance related to film. The fire started due to nitrocellulose X-ray film being close to a light bulb. The X-ray file cabinet in the Cleveland Clinic, Ohio, after the 1929 fire which claimed 123 lives and left 92 inured. To prevent such disasters, many cinemas across the world installed asbestos in their projection booths. 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. The earliest film stock, nitrocellulose – or nitrate film, as it’s usually referred to – was extremely flammable. This is known as a film stock and it comes in a few different versions. Imagine a film reel – a long piece of transparent plastic base and the colorful emulsion that is printed on top of it. 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. 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). 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.
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