Photochemical Film: Materials, Industries, Histories

THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 3: INDUSTRIES

9:45 am: Welcome and opening remarks

Michal Bregant, Národní filmový archiv, Prague

Alice Lovejoy, University of Minnesota 

Alice Lovejoy is a film and media scholar, critic, and programmer. She is the author of Tales of Militant Chemistry: The Film Factory in a Century of War (California, 2025), which was named one of Science News’ ten favorite books of 2025, and the award-winning Army Film and the Avant Garde: Cinema and Experiment in the Czechoslovak Military (Indiana, 2015), as well as co-editor of Remapping Cold War Media: Institutions, Infrastructures, Translations (Indiana, 2022) and Film Stock: An International History of a Sensitive Medium (Minnesota, 2027). Her writing has appeared in venues such as The Nation, Reverse Shot, Cinepur, and Film Comment, where she is a former editor. Lovejoy is Professor of Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature and Moving Image, Media, and Sound at the University of Minnesota, and Director of the Center for Austrian Studies.

10:30 am: Seeing Capitalism Through Kodak: Mass Production, Stabilization, and Motion Picture Film

Emmet von Stackelberg, Harvard University

This paper asks what the material history of film might contribute to the history of capitalism. Historians of the 20th century economy tend to pay little attention to the history of motion pictures. Commercial cinema was big business before television came along, but not that big. Why care about celluloid, in an age of steel and oil? I argue that cinema’s material affordances help us see the links between consumer and industrial capitalisms in a new light. I do so by tracing how, after adopting a new mass production method, motion picture film’s largest producer, Eastman Kodak, came to be a leader in employee welfare programs, corporate stabilization, and, curiously, calendar reform. By following the intertwined histories of continuous film production and of welfare capitalism, I seek to recast a familiar story of a corporate search for order as conjoined to volatile processes of speculative investment, both within the firm and outside of it. Inside Kodak, a search for employment stabilization matching their material processes led to the creation of benefits directly tied to the future-oriented logics of investment, encouraging or requiring workers to become investors themselves, to think across longer and longer time horizons. Profits accrued to Kodak, meanwhile, thanks in large part to the spasmodic growth of the nascent motion picture industry.

Emmet von Stackelberg is a Lecturer and Assistant Director of Studies of History & Literature at Harvard University, where he has taught since 2023. He is also a consulting curator at the George Eastman Museum in Rochester, New York. He is at work on his first book, Seeing Through Silver: How Chemists and Capital Made Images Move.

11:30 am: Thick Materiality: Why Film Base Matters

Andrea Mariani, University of Udine & Simona Schneider, independent scholar

This talk makes a modest proposal for how understanding economic, industrial, corporate and governmental pressures on photochemical materials can open up more traditional disciplinary activities such as film analysis. Inspired by the ethnographic method of recording culture called “thick description” (Geertz 1973), detailed and nuanced accounts that capture the complexities of social practices and cultural contexts, this talk looks at film material and film base or stock as recording just such social and cultural meanings. Working from research into the corporate documents of Agfa, part of the IG Farben group, as well as League of Nations materials that document debates about standardizing 16mm film, we look at the way that economic, international, corporate, and diplomatic alliances formed the educational standard and impacted global film culture. These processes were in turn influenced by the race for new media technologies and aesthetic capacities that could keep pace with the changing ideologies of a steadily industrializing world. We will discuss the ways these two projects have pointed to new directions for future research on small-gauge, educational, and amateur film, particularly in the recently concluded PRIN-financed FilmBaseMatters project. A short case study of an amateur film from 1942 will elucidate how the issues we have been researching manifest not only on the body of the film but also direct its content, purpose, and fate.

Simona Schneider is an independent researcher. From 2021 to 2025, she was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Udine, most recently on the PRIN 2022 project FilmBaseMatters: A Material Approach to the History of Small-Gauge Film in Italy and on the University of Calgary-led SSHRC project “Amateur Cinema Between the Wars.” Together with Andrea Mariani, she edited Fate of a Format: Small-Gauge Cinema in Postwar Italy (2023) and And Yet It Moves! On Cinema, Media, and Mobility. Conference Proceedings from FilmForum XXVIII (2023). She is a founding editor of the book series ExSeries (Mimesis).

Andrea Mariani is an Associate Professor at the University of Udine (Italy), where he teaches Media Theory (BA), Film Philology (MA), and Exhibition Design (MA). He was the Principal Investigator of the PRIN2022 project FilmBaseMatters: A Material Approach to the History of Small-Gauge Film in Italy and a scientific collaborator of the Amateur Movie Database (https://www.amateurcinema.org). He is also editor of the publishing series Plexus (Meltemi), ExSeries (Mimesis/DSL Press+), Saggi Ephemera (Marsilio), SPIE (Quarup), and Il prisma mobile (Kaplan).

12:30 pm: Lunch break (on your own)

2:00 pm: The Gate is Closing: The Transition of Soviet Cinema to Domestic Film Stock

Oleksandr Teliuk, Queen Mary University, London

This paper examines the historical, technological, and cinematic context of the origins of Ukrainian Soviet film stock. The manufacture of domestic raw photographic material in the USSR was declared as one of the numerous aims of the rapid industrialization and transition to a planned economy within the first Five-Year Plan (1928–32). This period marked a unique moment in the USSR, when technology was regarded as an emancipatory tool for constructing the ontological fabric of a new Bolshevik reality, as exemplified, among others, by Dziga Vertov’s depiction of Agfa film stock in Man with a Movie Camera (1929, VUFKU). However, rather than realizing Vertov’s vision of a “new man” liberated from “unwieldiness and clumsiness,” the transition to domestic technology sought to liberate this “man” from dependence on imported film stock, equipment, and foreign manufacturers.

Founded in 1931, Film Stock Factory No. 6 in Shostka (then Chernihiv Governorate, Ukrainian SSR; now Sumy Oblast, Ukraine) exemplified not only the substitution of domestic film stock for imports from Agfa, Gevaert, and Kodak on the Soviet market, but also the broader tendencies of early Soviet modernization, including forced urbanization, technification, proletarianization, and militarization. The construction and operation of the film stock factory in the small town of Shostka also had a profound impact on the local community, placing it at the heart of a major socio-technical milieu of Soviet modernization.

Oleksandr Teliuk is a film scholar, archivist, and curator. He is currently a PhD student at Queen Mary University of London, where he is exploring the technological and cultural history of Ukrainian Soviet film stock in the context of the contemporary revision of Soviet modernization. As a film archivist, he worked at the Dovzhenko Centre, the Ukrainian state film archive. As curator, he programmed several retrospectives and exhibitions of experimental, archival and Ukrainian cinema, in particular, VUFKU: Lost & Found (2019, Kyiv), The River Wailed Like a Wounded Beast (2023–24, Kyiv, Berlin, Tbilisi), and Ukrainian Cinema: Poetry and Resistance (2025, Berkeley).

3:00 pm: Soviet Color Cinema: A Difficult Learning Process, 1945-1949

Valérie Pozner, CNRS, Paris

In the Soviet Union over the course of the 1930s, the search for a way to make color films led to the development of two processes, one bichromatic and one trichromatic. Without American technological assistance, the second process was unsatisfying, a problem exacerbated by World War II and the combat death of one of the process’ inventors. After the war, however, the Wolfen factory where the Germans had developed the Agfacolor process fell within the Soviet zone of occupation. Against this background, this presentation considers Soviet efforts to develop color cinema during a period beginning in June 1945 and ending in 1949. There were two main phases to this period. In the first, the Soviets were in Wolfen; in the second, they returned to the Soviet Union, where color film was manufactured from 1948. The presentation will address the technological challenges of this moment in the history of Soviet color film, as well as its industrial, political, and cultural dimensions. 

Valérie Pozner is research director at CNRS (Thalim), Paris, France. She is author of several books and articles on Soviet cinema in the first half of the 20th century, and codirected an ANR research project on Soviet cinema during World War II. Her publications on this topic include “Les techniques entre Prêt-Bail et saisies de guerre : des importations aux réinventions (1939-1949),” in V. Pozner and A. Sumpf, eds., le Cinéma soviétique en guerre (1939-1949), Paris, AFRHC, 2025.

3:50 pm: Coffee break (Ponrepo café)

4:30 pm: Between Politics and Materiality: Film Stock as a Formative Element in the Introduction of Color to Czechoslovak Cinema 

Tereza Frodlová, National Film Archive, Prague

The introduction of color film in post-war Czechoslovakia is inextricably linked to the East German film stock Agfacolor. While this innovation offered the clear advantage of capturing the entire color spectrum on a single strip of film, it also presented challenges for creative and technical crews. These professionals had to navigate the stock’s specific color reproduction characteristics and, above all, its inherent technical limitations. Drawing on filmmakers’ firsthand accounts, archival research, and an analysis of materials preserved at the National Film Archive, Prague, this presentation aims to reconstruct how creative strategies and technical workflows were adapted to meet the unique demands of Agfacolor. 

Tereza Frodlová has worked as a restorer and curator at the National Film Archive, Prague, since 2015. In addition to the restoration and preservation of film materials, her research focuses on the history of color in film and the relationship between cinema and film technology. She regularly lectures on the history of film technology, restoration, and color film processes, and is committed to developing new approaches to teaching these subjects to future generations of scholars and filmmakers.

5:30 pm: Evening break

7:30 pm: Screening: East of Kodak: Foma, ORWO, Svema

This program focuses on film stocks made in postwar Eastern Europe—Agfa/ORWO, Foma, and Svema—establishing a dialogue between advertising films by film manufacturers, amateur work rooted in 1980s alternative culture, and contemporary experimental films. The program begins in the East German factory town of Wolfen, where Agfa and ORWO black-and-white and color stocks were manufactured. It moves to Czechoslovakia, home to Foma, where Agfa and ORWO were widely (if at times reluctantly) used by amateur and underground filmmakers. It concludes by considering the vibrant present-day lives of these East European stocks, as they are used by artist-run film labs to reimagine our relationship to photochemical film.

 

Film und Faser (Film and Fibers)

Dir. Fritz Gebhardt, GDR, 1960, 26 min.

 

Proč?! (Why?!)

Dir. Červenka, Dašek, Kusý, Mihle, Novotný,

Czechoslovakia, 1964, 2 min.

 

Skinflicker

Dir. Helena Gouveia Monteiro, Ireland, 2024,

5 min.

 

Bus, Turning

Dir. Richard Tuohy and Dianna Barrie,

Australia, 2021, 7 min.

 

Lichtspiele. Erkennen – Gestalten – Erhalten ORWO (Lichtspiele: Understand – Create –

Preserve ORWO)

Dir. Manfred Gußmann, GDR, 1979, 28 min.

 

Hynku, Egone (Hynek, Egon!)

Dir. Lubomír Drožď (aka Čaroděj OZ),

Czechoslovakia, 1985, 5 min.

 

Z jedné strany na druhou: Sieh des Todes Blasses Bild (From One Side to Another:

Behold the Pale Image of Death)

Dir. Lubomír Drožď (aka Čaroděj OZ),

Czechoslovakia, 1985, 5 min.

 

Fetish Frames #1

Dir. Masha Godovannaya, U.S., 2013, 3 min.

 

9:30 am: Placing Photochemical Film in a World of Silver (1890s-1910s, United States)

Emmanuel Falguières, Université Sorbonne Nouvelle/Navire Argo, Paris

This presentation aims to understand the economic and material history of silver in the late long nineteenth century (1890s-1910s), a moment when the industrialization of the manufacturing of photochemical materials was dramatically increasing. It explores the hypothesis that this change of scale was embedded in the political economy of the 19th century by looking at, on one hand, the supply chains of silver in the US and, on the other hand, other products that used silver (money, silverware, jewelry, and mirrors). From the mining industry of the American West to the silverware manufacturers of New York State, does this landscape of silver change the way we frame the photochemical image at the beginning of the 20th century in the United States? Through this framing, the presentation will test two concepts that might be the two sides of the same coin: film/silver as money and film/silver as waste, building on and contributing to recent explorations of these ideas. 

Emmanuel Falguières is a post-doctoral fellow at the Université Sorbonne Nouvelle in Paris for a research project titled “Thinking Photochemical Film from the 21st Century: Creative practices, Environment and Economy.” His research focuses on the economic and environmental history of the manufacturing of film in the United States between the 1870s and the 1920s. He has published on this topic in “De la monnaie, de l’argent métallique et des images (États-Unis, 1870-1910),” Transbordeur (2026). He also works with and for the artist-run photochemical filmlab L’Abominable at the former Éclair laboratories in Epinay-sur-Seine (www.navireargo.org). For this non-profit, he coordinates the inclusion of photochemical practices and know-hows within the Intangible Cultural Heritage list in France. 

10:30 am: Photographic Gelatin before 1930: Some Technical, Industrial, and Geopolitical Issues

Priska Morrissey, Université de Rennes 2

So-called “photographic” gelatin is an essential ingredient in photographic and cinematographic emulsions, yet its importance extends well beyond its role in determining emulsion sensitivity. The manufacture of photographic-grade gelatin was not within the reach of every gelatin producer, as the material had to meet a wide range of demanding criteria. These included purity—it had to be free, for instance, from even the smallest globules of fat, which could produce spots on the emulsion—as well as specific melting and setting properties, transparency, and other physical and chemical characteristics. While gelatin could contain substances that increased photographic sensitivity, it could equally carry compounds that slowed down the ripening process. As a result, gelatin was the subject of extensive research and testing by manufacturers of photosensitive materials.

This presentation explores the history of photographic gelatin before 1930 through a comparative study of several national and industrial contexts, including Britain, Germany, and France. It examines both the similarities in testing methods and technical objectives and the differences in the relationships between film manufacturers and gelatin producers. Finally, where sources allow, the presentation traces the geographical origins of the bones and hides used in gelatin production, with the aim of mapping the global networks of supply underpinning the manufacture of photographic emulsions.

Priska Morrissey is Professor of Film Studies at Rennes 2 University. Her research focuses on the history of film technologies, crafts and professions, and on the material history of cinema, with particular attention to early and silent cinema. She is the author of Les “As de la manivelle”: le métier d’opérateur de prise de vues cinématographiques en France (1895–1930) (2021; 2nd ed. 2024) and she has co-edited several volumes on film technologies and practices. She is currently working on a material history of negative film emulsions before 1930. With Guillaume Soulez, Marguerite Vappereau, Sébastien Denis and Christa Blumlinger, she also codirects PATRIX (Hermes Project, 2026–2029), a research program devoted to the preservation and heritagization of audiovisual experimentation.

11:30 am: Resourcing: Film’s Raw Materials and the Knowledge of the Humanities

Jonathan Haid, Humboldt-Universität/Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin

This presentation approaches the material history of photochemical film from an unusual direction: the history of the humanities. In my research I follow nitrocellulose, the substance underlying celluloid film as well as collodion photography, and ask what its raw materials, among them camphor and nitric acid, meant for humanities disciplines such as ethnography, cultural history, and film archiving. My claim is twofold: Like media technologies themselves, the raw materials behind them shaped how these disciplines produced and preserved knowledge. At the same time, humanities scholarship was entangled in the colonial and military economies of extraction that made film available in the first place. I understand both as part of one process of resourcing: the transformation of matter, environments, and photographic images into resources of knowledge. I develop this argument via the German case, drawing on archival research that ranges from the celluloid and film factories of the German Empire to the destruction of nitrate originals at the Bundesarchiv. Following the material rather than a single medium also brings still and moving images into one history. In the discussion I want to explore what a history-of-humanities perspective can offer this field of research, and where it benefits from the expertise gathered in this workshop.

Jonathan Haid is a doctoral researcher working at the intersection of the history of science and media studies. His research focuses on the history of the humanities and cultural studies, drawing on media theory, historical epistemology, and science and technology studies. Particular interests include media-based techniques and practices of knowledge production, as well as questions of extractivism, material provenance, and the global infrastructures of resource regimes. Haid is a PhD candidate in the DFG project “Raw Materials of the Humanities” at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin and doctoral student of the International Max Planck Research School “Knowledge and Its Resources” at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science.

12:30 pm: Lunch break (on your own)

2:00 pm: An Atlas of Photochemistry: Disentangling the Histories of Film and Photo Manufacturing and their Raw Materials with Digital Tools

Marek Jancovic, University of Amsterdam

Notoriously opaque and multilingual, and with a patchy archival record: Such is the afterlife of the photochemical industry. Even as recent research increasingly digs through the film and photo industry’s global presence and cross-sector environmental and nuclear entanglements, and gradually fans out from dominant multinationals to economically smaller players, blind spots remain. Japanese photochemical manufacturing is one of them (despite renewed domestic interest), as are the industry’s labor and material supply webs in general. Could emerging digital methods help us develop fresh approaches to the subject, discover new relations or neglected historical circumstances? This contribution will present the project CINEAGRI, an on-going inquiry into celluloid manufacturing’s global supply chains. At the heart of the project is a unique multilingual collection of more than 60,000 pages from the corporate archives of photochemical manufacturers. The presentation will reflect on the challenges of digitizing the collection and on the value that emerging digital methods—such as semantic search, retrieval-augmented generation, and automated knowledge graph construction—might add to traditional historical research. Is there any benefit in mapping, geocoding and visualizing the industry in graphs, maps and timelines? Could they help us better understand its interlinkages with government agencies, trade companies, or weather events?

Marek Jancovic is Assistant Professor of Media Studies at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. His research is centered around the materialities of the moving image, film preservation practices, media and the environment, and format studies. He is the principal investigator of CINEAGRI: Agriculture and the Global History of Celluloid Film Manufacturing, a 3-year project funded by the Dutch Research Council, the author of A Media Epigraphy of Video Compression: Reading Traces of Decay (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023); together with Jimi Jones, the author of The Future of Memory: A History of Lossless Format Standards in the Moving Image Archive (University of Illinois Press, 2025) and, with Axel Volmar and Alexandra Schneider, the editor of Format Matters: Standards, Practices, and Politics in Media Cultures (Meson Press, 2020).

2:50 pm: Coffee break (Ponrepo café)

3:30 pm: Investigating the Photochemical Materiality of Lumière Film Stock

Jeanne Pommeau, National Film Archive, Prague

The Lumière brothers’ films are mostly seen by the general public, and by historians and theorists, as very stabilized, without any flickering; with most defects cleaned away; and in black-and-white—that is, cleared of their technical historicity and their photochemical aesthetic. In contrast, when digitized so as to reveal, as much as possible, the materiality of the film sources, the films shot by Czech filmmaker Jan Kříženecký on Lumière film stock appear to the restorer to be yellow-orange. As part of a PhD study of Lumière film stock, hundreds of period prints and original negatives from the catalogue of views of Lumière brothers preserved in Centre National du Cinéma et de l’image animée in Paris were carefully inspected, and their colors systematically compared with color filters. The goal of this study, completed with chemical analyses and microscopic observations, was to gain a representative view—as precise and complex as possible—of the presence of yellow-orange color in Lumière film stock: which hues were present, how often; whether they were located in emulsion or film base, in negatives or in positives. Along the way, other specific physical characteristics were discovered, giving clues about the film stock’s manufacturing processes or, on the contrary, calling into question the production methods. This presentation opens a dialogue about the results of this mapping and the questions it invites about film manufacturing in early cinema, as an example of how film inspection and the use of chemical analyses may change perspectives on film history.

Jeanne Pommeau is a film curator and restorer. Since 2004, she has been in charge of photochemical and digital restoration at the National Film Archive in Prague. She is also responsible for the tinting and the toning processes on modern prints of silent films using original methods. A doctoral candidate at the University of Paris 8 Vincennes-Saint-Denis, her research focuses on the materiality of films produced by Lumière brothers and on the impact of conservation on the perception of works of cinema. Since 2020, she has been teaching film restoration methodology at Paris 8.

4:30 pm: Closing remarks 

Alice Lovejoy, University of Minnesota

5:00 pm: Evening break 

7:30 pm: Screening: labodoble (Bagdasarov-Moralesova), Submemorias de un rollo

Performance with two 16mm projectors and one variable-speed 16mm projector synchronized with live soundtrack.

We dwell in the layered memories of places where silver was extracted for centuries. It was this silver that lent Europe its splendor and shaped its insolent image. There is no silver left in these places. There isn’t much silver left in this film, either. It was here, but we bleached it out so that you can see the colors. Whether in film or ravaged soil, what remains once all the riches have been extracted?

This alchemical archaeology of our own Super 8 films, shot years ago in Buenos Aires, Montevideo, La Paz, and elsewhere, offers a complex vision of the relationship between representation and the resources it depends on, between figures and background, between memory and vision, between Western paternalism and other possible modes of existence.