Beauty at the Edge of Ruin: A Dispatch From the Nitrate Picture Show

The 10th Nitrate Picture Show, programmed by the George Eastman Museum in Rochester, New York, is predicated on a technology both out-of-date and incendiary: the eponymous film stock, which was the most commonly used in film production until the early 1950s, is notoriously flammable. The Eastman Museum is well-equipped to handle this rare and potentially dangerous material, with trained projectionists, a climate-controlled vault, and decades of institutional knowledge, but as a first-time attendee, I was struck by the extent to...