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Annotated Bibliography

Past, Present, and Future of Celluloid Film

 

Abreu, R. (2020). What is celluloid film: A brief history of motion picture film. Studio Binder. Retrieved April 11, 2021 from https://www.studiobinder.com/blog/what-is-celluloid-film-stock/

  • This website has a very helpful video explaining the composition of of celluloid film.

  • Since the invention of celluloid film, advances in technology made better film stock products that would be less flammable and easier to handle and store. 

  • While celluloid film is not used as much these days, many of today’s filmmakers like to keep the nostalgic aesthetic of celluloid film in digitally-filmed movies. 

  • Popular examples of digital films made to look like they were recorded on celluloid film are Little Women & Marriage Story.

  • Cellulose acetate started to be used in 1940’s because it’s safer (less flammable) than Nitrocellulose. In the 1990’s, filmmakers started to prefer a polyester-based film.

 

Dixon, W. W. (2016). The celluloid backlash: Film versus digital once more. Quarterly Review of Film and Video, 33(2), 122-130). DOI: 10.1080/10509208.2015.1097495

  • An in-the-weeds article comparing film and digitally recorded movies and the future of moviemaking.

 

Harding, C. (2012). Celluloid and photography, part 3: The beginnings of cinema. Science and Media Museum. Retrieved on April 11, 2021. https://blog.scienceandmediamuseum.org.uk/celluloid-and-photography-part-3-the-beginnings-of-cinema/

  • In the 1870’s, Eadweard Muybridge in America and Etienne-Jules Marey in France were studying movement. They were looking at sequential photography, trying to analyze the different photos they took; instead, they synthesized all of their photos, creating an illusion of movement, which led them to invent cinematography. 

  • The first supply of celluloid film was sold in the US in 1889.

  • Thomas Edison invented something called a kinetoscope. “When the Kinetoscope was commercially introduced in 1894, it was to embody a direct link with Eastman. It was designed to take film exactly half the width of that made for the original Kodak camera of 1888, probably produced by slicing such film down the middle and splicing it together to give a length of about fifty feet. This film was 35mm wide—the origin of the film we use to this day.

 

Hurlbut, S. (2020). Film: The history of celluloid in filmmaking. Hurlbut Academy. Retrieved April 11, 2021 from https://www.hurlbutacademy.com/film/

  • “Photographic Film is a strip or sheet of transparent plastic film base coated on one side with a gelatin emulsion containing microscopically small light-sensitive silver halide crystals. The sizes and other characteristics of the crystals determine the sensitivity, contrast and resolution of the film.”

  • “The first transparent plastic roll entered the market on 1889 and was made from highly flammable nitrocellulose ‘celluloid’ or now known as ‘nitrate film.’”

  • Thomas Edison’s “Kinetoscope” was a novel way of looking at film, before the invention of the projector. This was an individual way of looking at moving pictures, before the projector made it possible to show mass audiences motion pictures.

  • The invention of the compact camera allowed for more versatile footage all over the world.

 

Kehr, D. (2010). When Hollywood learned to talk, sing and dance. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/17/movies/homevideo/17kehr.html

  • Switch from movies to talkies happened between 1926-1930

  • Transition happened mostly on the backs of 2 genres: gangster films and musicals (machine guns and music)

 

Kushins, J. (2016). A brief history of sound in cinema. Popular Mechanics. Retrieved May 1, 2021 from https://www.popularmechanics.com/culture/movies/a19566/a-brief-history-of-sound-in-cinema/.

  • A fun, article and recommended read for anyone interested in the development of sound in movies, not just celluloid film.

 

Rawat, K. (2018). Why Christopher Nolan prefers celluloid film over digital? The Indian Express. Retrieved on April 21, 2021 from https://indianexpress.com/article/entertainment/hollywood/christopher-nolan-5118217/.

  • Digital films are easier and more cost effective to produce.

  • Nolan also has a distaste for CGI

  • Nolan had previously been quoted, “why should I care that your camera is lighter, unless you’re doing something with it you couldn’t do before?”


 

Technology Breakdown

 

Fielding, R. E. (2021, January 20). Lee de Forest. Encyclopedia Britannica. Retrieved April 20, 2021 from https://www.britannica.com/biography/Lee-de-Forest

  • Lee de Forest developed a sound-on-film optical recording system called Phonofilm, which wasn’t adapted but was used as the model for analog soundtracks on film in the 1920’s.

 

Hammock, B. Engineerguy. (2015). How a film projector works [Video]. YouTube. https://youtu.be/En__V0oEJsU

  • The movement of the film & avoiding the burring: The shuttle moves back to disengage and forward to engage with the film, so the film could be stationary most of the time and quickly advance to the next frame.

  • Eliminate the burring: The film passes by the lamp twenty-four frames per second, at which rate the human mind blends the still frames into fluid motion-flicker fusion threshold.

  • Sound: The sound drum reads the optical soundtrack

 

Oseman, N. (2020). How film works. Retrieved April 11, 2021 from https://neiloseman.com/how-film-works/.

  • Film is “a strip of plastic backing coated with a film of chemicals”

  • Celluloid was too flammable so it was phased out in the mid-twentieth century

  • Good image of “The Basic Structure of Film”

  • “As for ‘emulsion’, it is in fact a suspension of silver halide crystals in gelatine. The bigger the crystals, the grainier the film, but the more light-sensitive too.”

  • Film is processed by being bathed in a combination of chemicals in liquid form called developer.

  • Different layers of the emulsion are sensitive to different parts of the light spectrum, so bleach and color couplers are added to create different colors in the film strip.

 

Vener, E. (2017). Silver gelatin photography: the medium that changed the world. La Noir Image. Retrieved April 21, 2021 from https://lanoirimage.com/silver-gelatin-photography-the-medium-that-changed-the-world/.

  • “No longer did photographers have to manufacture their negatives immediately before exposure and likewise when they went to print those negatives.”

  • How it works: “light and chemistry are used to reduce light sensitive silver salts suspended in a gelatin emulsion into pure silver. During the manufacturing process ions of silver bonded to atoms of the halogen family (usually bromine, chlorine, iodine) form crystals of water insoluble silver salts, known as silver halides. These are suspended uniformly in a flexible gelatin emulsion which is coated on a transparent base to make film or on a paper or plastic base to make photographic paper.”


 

Propaganda and the Influence of Film

 

Kaes, A. (1990). History and Film: Public Memory in the Age of Electronic Dissemination. History and Memory, 2(1), 111-129. Retrieved April 11, 2021, from http://www.jstor.org/stable/25618592

  • The use of film allows viewers to relive and “experience” a historical event, like war (Kaes, 1990, p.112).

  • “Various narrative patterns, often taken from literature or myth, structure the events and translate them into a story with a beginning, middle, and end. Historical films interpret national history for the broad public and thus produce, organize, and, to a large extent, homogenize public memory” (Kaes, 1990, p. 112).

  • “Film and television have become the most effective institutional vehicles for shaping historical consciousness” (Kaes, 1990, p. 112).

  • “Memory in the age of electronic reproducibility and dissemination has become public; memory has become socialized by technology” (Kaes, 1990, pp. 112-3).

  • Elie Wiesel on the Holocaust portrayed on NBC: "I am appalled by the thought that one day the Holocaust will be measured and judged in part by the NBC TV production bearing its name. The Holocaust must be remembered. But not as a show" (Kaes, 1990, p. 115).

  • “Just as Perseus was instructed to look at Medusa's mirror reflection in Athena's polished shield–to face Medusa's horrible sight directly would have petrified him–the German audience was given a chance to see representations of the Holocaust horrors on the polished shield of the television screen” (Kaes, 1990, p. 117).

  • “Nazi-produced images, precisely because they are recorded on celluloid, will remain with us forever; tens of thousands of meters of documentary footage testify to the collective madness: images of cheering crowds, of Hider triumphandy towering over the masses, images of bookburning and of harassment against Jews, as well as images by Allied cameras of concentration camps and emaciated Holocaust survivors. All these images, which have been replayed again and again, do not age nor can they be erased or forgotten; they are part of public history, they have assumed a function which is historical” (Kaes, 1990, p. 118).

  • “History preserved or recreated in filmed images does not fade or yellow, but the sheer mass of historical images transmitted by today's media weakens the link between public memory and personal experience. The past is in danger of becoming a rapidly expanding collection of images, easily retrievable but isolated from time and space, available in an eternal present by pushing a button on the remote control. History thus returns forever–as film” (Kaes, 1990, p. 121).

 

Rosenbaum, J. (1978). Sound thinking. Film Comment, 14(5), 38–40.  Retrieved April 30, 2021 from https://wrlc-gu.primo.exlibrisgroup.com/permalink/01WRLC_GUNIV/1met7gs/cdi_proquest_journals_210271022

  • “In a persuasive ideological study of the dominant practices of sound editing and mixing… Mary Ann Doane suggests that these practices should be examined in relation to ‘a certain structure of oppositions which split 'Knowledge' within bourgeois ideology-oppositions between intellect and emotion, the intelligible and the sensible, reason and intuition.’” She also said, “"not only the techniques of sound track construction but the language of technicians and the discourses on technique are symptomatic of particular ideological aims."

  • The author argues that there are plenty of ways to describe images but much fewer ways to describe sound, and therefore, we don’t understand its functioning.

  • Sound adds more evidence to plots (i.e. a punch in the gut, a sigh, the music that accompanies a sunrise, etc.) that images do not provide. These sounds create empathy, persuading the audience to feel a certain way.

  • Dubbing videos

 

Welch, D. (Ed.). (2013). Propaganda, power and persuasion: From World War I to wikileaks. Bloomsbury Publishing.

  • “Propaganda is the most effective when it is least noticeable” (Welch, 2013, p. 17).

  • New stars had to be able to handle “dialogue in a way that many silent stars without stage training could not” (Welch, 2013, p. 66).

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