“I adore the past,” winked the Master of Ceremonies (Anton Walbrook) in Max Ophüls’ La Ronde (1950), projected on day two of this year’s Nitrate Picture Show. “It’s so much more peaceful than the present, and so much more certain than the future.”
Such sentiments might be thought to prevail at the George Eastman Museum which, each June for the past nine years, has played host to the “festival of film conservation.” Premised as it is upon the exhibition of films on nitrate stock—the highly flammable and, depending who you ask, incomparably luminous celluloid base on which all 35mm films were printed until the early 1950s—the weekend breeds a potent form of nostalgia. While present in Rochester, New York, pass holders tend to maintain a tight radius with the museum, the former mansion of its gilded age namesake. Lanyards roam the blocks of East Avenue lined with thick maples shading the Italianate manors built for the C-suite of Rochester’s distant prosperous past, when the city reaped the profits of first the flour industry and, later, film manufacturing. Beyond this meager halo—to which some guests arrived in period dress—lies one of America’s poorest metropolitan areas, with almost a third of the population living below the poverty line, and half of that number below the extreme poverty line.
One could be forgiven for assuming the Nitrate Picture Show proffers sanctuary from the uncertainty reigning outside, in Rochester as in America writ large. But this year’s edition inverted this presumed mandate. With a program of films curated by a committee led by Dr. Peter Bagrov, festival director, this year’s picks presented the past not as a refuge from our present tumult, but as a reflection of it. Films from all genres sourced from archives around the globe depicted fallen worlds and failing authorities to rival our own. Again and again, characters sought redemption, staking their lives on faith and chance. But from the godless world of this year’s Nitrate Picture Show, it was the surprise final screening that truly put viewers to the test, forcing them to question what it means to save something from such a world, if anything is worth saving at all.
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Rather like our own, the society of Canyon Passage (1946), selected by Bagrov and Co. to open the festival’s sunny second day, is one founded on theft, organized by exploitation, and undone by pitiless chance. Scaffolded by the drama between Logan Stuart (Dana Andrews), a man driven to success, and his best friend, George Camrose (Brian Donlevy), a man driven to failure, the film offers the kind of sober and ruthless depiction of American origins only a European can provide.
Not unlike John Ford’s My Darling Clementine from the same year, Jacques Tourneur’s Canyon Passage aims to tell the story of America through a single town. In Canyon Passage’s rainsoaked Jacksonville, Oregon—as in Clementine’s sundrenched Tombstone—the raising of a building is a moment for the nascent community to articulate its first principles. Whereas Ford builds a church, Tourneur raises a cabin with, notably, a horseshoe tacked above the door for good luck—the frontier mezuzah. The cabin-raising scene opens on a close-up of a bucksaw cutting through a redwood, allowing the great tree to fall before a music cue announces that this is in fact a moment of positive community building rather than wanton expansion, while perforating the event with enough ambiguity to hint that the distinction is perhaps not so important. Jacksonville is a town built on salted—or, rather, stolen—earth. “It’s their land, and we’re on it, and they don’t forget it,” one character laments to Logan. It’s this original sin, in Canyon Passage, that causes the rain to fall, the luck to fail, the good men to turn bad.
Their sin is, of course, our own. In a world fallen before it was raised, to live is to gamble and to gamble is, more than likely, to lose—morally and financially. Vice’s chief witness and beneficiary, the town croupier, looking off into the middle distance, bluntly summarizes: “the human race was a mistake.” Provoked by the town brute (Ward Bond), by film’s end, the natives have burnt down Logan’s store along with the cabin, horseshoe, et al. And yet Logan vows to rebuild. “It’s a thin line, Johnny, between what could be and what is,” he remarks before the credits roll. George, by this point, has run the inevitable course from bank teller to gambler to thief to murderer, but Logan defends his honor all the same, insisting he “could have been a good man.” Logan’s heroism derives not only from his resolve to bet big, lose big, and keep playing, but also from his admission that the difference between him and George is pure chance. In a world allowing ample space for cynicism, Logan holds fast to possibility. George, like Jacksonville—and like America then and now—could have been good. The cards fell where they fell, where they’ll likely continue to fall, but we reshuffle the deck anyway.
Following Jacksonville’s lead, the rain started to pour over the George Eastman Museum as the weekend progressed. Queuing under umbrellas in the parking lot, the settings awaiting guests inside were hardly more inviting. Joining muddy Jacksonville was The City’s (1939) industrializing Pittsburgh, captured in this documentary as a barbed wire tangle of traffic on smog-choked avenues, and Hue and Cry’s (1947) post-Blitz London, where indefatigable boys seek adventure between bombed-out buildings. Even My Man Godfrey (1936) began with a portrait of the “forgotten men” who raise their meager domiciles at the dump. All told, the silver-dense and three-strip Technicolor landscapes of this year’s program reflected a world better designed for dying than for living.
Such a quicksand world churns honest men into gamblers into criminals, in both the case of George Camrose and the two noirs at this year’s festival: Hugo Fregonese’s Hardly a Criminal (1949) and Fritz Lang’s You Only Live Once (1937). In the former, José Morán (Jorge Salcedo) is, again, a bank teller who just so happens to be a gambling addict, for whom massive embezzlement is only a hop, skip, and a jump down the road. In the latter, Henry Fonda, that avatar of human decency, plays Eddie Taylor, recently released from prison and determined to go straight for the woman who has waited faithfully for him, Jo Graham (Sylvia Sidney). After Eddie’s convict status compromises his civilian life, he and Jo are forced back into a life of crime. With a world war and most of two continents between them, these films are united by their air of poverty-fueled desperation, and the moral compromises demanded by their twin worlds where the difference between honest work and criminality is but a roll of the dice.
Whereas José Morán’s guilt is hardly ever in question, Lang opts to leave the door ajar on the question of Eddie Taylor’s innocence. When he’s fired from his first job out of the can, he slaps his boss across the face, announcing: “And I wanted to go straight.” The film cuts without ceremony to the scene of a bank robbery, where we see a pair of eyes looking into a rearview mirror—probably, though not certainly, Fonda’s—and a hat with Taylor’s initials sewn in. In the next scene, Taylor arrives chez Jo, paranoid and brandishing a pistol, pleading his innocence. But it’s a question Lang won’t resolve until deep into You Only Live Once. This withholding becomes central to the film’s more existential questions: How far is the audience, or Jo, for that matter, willing to extend its presumption of innocence? Have we knowingly or unknowingly sympathized with a criminal? Can anyone escape morally unsullied from such a world?
A darkened world, like that of this year’s program—like our own—thrusts such questions into sharp relief. And yet, to assume that these questions can be answered rationally is, of course, hubris. La Ronde’s anthological waltz through ten “amorous encounters” that countermand prudence, self interest, and class fealty makes this much clear. The heart goes where it will, penetrating boundaries that might more satisfyingly be kept intact. If the head must follow, so must remorse and self-critique, occasionally in company with a new sense of the thinness of any such divides.
Two films made four years apart sallied forth into these newly opened breaches. The first, Mikio Naruse’s Wife! Be Like A Rose! (1935), takes for its subject a daughter, Kimiko (Sachiko Chiba), who sets off to retrieve the father who abandoned her and her mother to live with a geisha, with whom he now has a second family. The second requires a hair more explanation.
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Every year, when the lineup is announced on the festival’s first morning, a space is left open for the closing event: Sunday’s “Blind Date with Nitrate.” A lone still printed from the undisclosed film tantalizes guests. Typically the curators choose a crowd pleaser, aimed to leave the audience on a bright note they’ll remember when it comes time to pony up for next year’s passes. My cohort had hypothesized Rebecca (1940); instead, in the midst of one of the most fascist years on record since film was last printed on nitrate, audiences were treated to a blind date with Veit Harlan, Joseph Goebbels’ top director of propaganda films in Nazi Germany.
The Trip to Tilsit (1939), adapted from the same source novella as F.W. Murnau’s Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (1927), was the film Harlan made before Jüd Suß, the antisemitic propaganda film for which he would be twice tried and twice exonerated for war crimes, pleading that it was made under duress. As does Murnau’s film, The Trip to Tilsit tells the story of a man tempted away from his faithful wife by a woman of the city; his aborted attempt to murder said wife; his shame when, after they reconcile, she nearly dies in a storm; and her miraculous reappearance just before the credits roll. As the historical context was withheld from all but the most thoroughly-versed cinephiles in the crowd until after the film, much of the audience had no choice but to relate to the film as just that. And, in keeping with the other films of this year’s festival, The Trip to Tilsit pointedly negotiated the question of redemption for those past the moral point of no return—a loaded question, indeed, given the context.
Rather akin to the project of this year’s festival, Harlan’s approach to the material was to liberate it from its seclusion from reality, grounding it in a real place and time. “The Man” of Sunrise is here named Endrik Settegast (Phillip Dorn), “The Woman” is Elske Settegast (Kristina Söderbaum), and “The Woman From the City” is Madlyn Sapierska (Anna Dammann), hailing not from some undefined Sodom, but Krakow. Murnau’s emotional whiplashes are drawn in bold, primary colors; Harlan’s are shaded with inner conflicts, tensions, and competing demands. Endrik wavers back and forth between women, Elske yearns against her better instincts to believe her husband, and Madlyn tries to relate to Elske while ruining her life. Constantly, against their wishes and expectations, the trio is made to sympathize beyond the caricaturized version of the “other” they wish to project onto one another.
Unbidden, reality and nuance flow into these images. In Wife! Be Like A Rose!, when Kimiko finally prevails on her father (now established to be an inveterate loser) to visit her mother in Tokyo, she admits on the voiceover: “On the train ride back to Tokyo […] he bought me tangerines and chocolate. Until then I hadn’t felt much affection for him, but such a small thing suddenly made me feel I wanted to keep him close.” There’s no guarding against such intrusions of sentiment. One moment in The Trip to Tilsit roused the Eastman Museum audience, surely by this point burdened with some suspicions about this German language film from the early midcentury. In contrast to the family German Shepherd in Murnau’s film—barking, leaping, even jumping into the water and swimming on command—the Settegasts’ dog, a massive, Newfoundland-type thing, clumsily noses into the midst of a climactic argument between Elske and Endrik. “Where did she send the letter?” Elske implores her husband, the dog pawing at her arm. Dogs in repertory houses never fail to elicit laughter, but this intrusion of an inadmissible reality into a fictive world doubly served as a preview for the revelations shortly awaiting the audience when the lights came on.
Kristina Söderbaum, who plays Endrik’s faithful hausfrau, was Harlan’s third wife and a prominent star in Nazi Germany. His first wife, Dora Gerson—an actress, a singer, and a Jew—had fled Nazi persecution to the Netherlands in 1936. Söderbaum’s subsequent role would be Dorothea Sturm, the German maiden raped by the titular nefarious Jew in Jud Suß. In both Tilsit and Suß, the emotional nadir is reached when her character nearly drowns, while others call her name in the dark. In the former film, she’s saved, and her German husband is redeemed. In the latter, she drowns, her Jewish rapist is sentenced to death for miscegenation, and the city of Württemberg is redeemed by evicting its Jewish population. A month before The Trip to Tilsit premiered in Berlin, subtly preaching understanding to its Polish ‘villain,’ the Nazis invaded Poland. Four months before Jud Suß took home awards at the Venice Film Festival, the Nazis invaded Holland. Gerson and her family were taken to the Westerbork Transit Camp in 1942 before being brought to Auschwitz, where they were murdered in 1943.
Bagrov and Co.’s decision to present The Trip to Tilsit without any such context will stand as the festival’s enduring controversy, but I would posit that rather than simply reifying the isolation of the cinema experience, this decision thrust into relief the precise stakes of this isolation. The Nitrate Picture Show’s mandate to show the films of the 1930s and 1940s in the 2010s and 2020s is an opportunity easily shirked, but no longer. The same history is unfolding outside the Dryden Theater as inside it, and there are not likely to be signposts identifying clearcut heroes and villains. Sifting through truth and lies, recognizing the tipping point between sentimentality, manipulation, and propaganda—these are skills as vital to the American subject in 2025 as they were to the audiences of 1939.
The program notes, handed to us on our way out the door, reprinted an alleged quote from Henri Langlois: “All films are born free and equal.” I read this as less evaluative than descriptive. Langlois was among the first to program the films of Nazi Germany following the war. Indeed, the nascent Cinémathèque Française had been saved, in part, by the collaboration of Frank Hensel, friend of Langlois, head of the Reichsfilmarchiv, and occupation official in Vichy France. All films are born wildly free and yet equally laden with moral compromise and contradiction. The festival’s enduring image, for me, was the search for Elske in The Trip to Tilsit. Sailors held lanterns aloft on a darkened, roiling sea, lighting flares that burned silver-hot against an utterly black sky, temporarily illuminating the crowd in the Dryden Theater.
As the program demonstrated, such searches yield mixed results. We live in the dark, and the failing lamp light is as likely to turn up a drowned Dorothea Sturm as a saved Elske Settegast, a guilty José Morán as an innocent Eddie Taylor. The Nitrate Picture Show audience is trained to expect the expected, to reify the existing canon while appending little quirks around the edges. This feeling of comfort and safety, so easy for the curators of an antiquarian film festival to deliver, is precisely what was denied this year’s audience. I left not with a fortified belief in the enduring power of Hitchcock, but a deeply troubling set of questions: Must a moral cinephilia deny the existence of fascism? If not, must its presence be highlighted and bolded, so as not to tempt a guileless audience? Would an edenic Nitrate Picture Show without The Trip to Tilsit be a more or less fascist affair? How much fascism is in Sunrise, the source text of so much American melodrama? How much in Fritz Lang, who seemingly obfuscated the truth about his past in the Third Reich? How much in cinema? In cinephilia? In me? I take cold comfort in Logan Stuart’s maxim: It’s a thin line between what could be and what is. The good doesn’t eliminate the bad, nor the bad the good—both are in the self as the other, outside the Nitrate Picture Show halo as inside it.