While researching Hati and Skoll yesterday, I learned of the passing of Allan Arbus (1918-2003) last April.  Most of us know Arbus as the caring and liberal psychiatrist Maj. Sidney Freedman on the hit television series “M*A*S*H.”  “Alan Alda, who played Hawkeye Pierce on the show, paid Arbus the ultimate compliment when he said;

“I was so convinced that he was a psychiatrist I used to sit and talk with him between scenes.  After a couple months of that I noticed he was giving me these strange looks, like ‘How would I know the answer to that?’”

Acting however, was only Mr. Arbus’ second career.  In his first career, he was a photographer.  During World War II, he was a United States Army photographer.  After the war he and his first wife, the well-known photographer Diane Arbus started a photographic advertising business in New York City.  He produced advertising photographs for magazines like: Glamour, Seventeen, Vogue, and Harper’s Bazaar.  Significantly, one of the photographs in Edward Steichen‘s landmark exhibition “The Family of Man” was credited to the couple.

Diane Arbus quit the business in 1956.  The couple separated in 1959 and were formally divorced in 1969. I suppose that this makes him the model for the fictionalized non-supportive husband in that very bizarre movie loosely about the life of Diane Arbus and starring Nicole Kidman, Robert Downey, Jr., and Ty Burrel, as Allan Arbus, “Fur.” Diane, famous for her images of marginalized people, committed suicide in 1971.

Mr. Arbus continued as a photographer for several more years.  But, of course, he is most famous to us as an actor.  And we shall always fondly remember him as Maj. Freedman, whose caring insight brought some level of sanity to the insane reality of M*A*S*H and the Korean War.

Figure 1 – Classic stereo image showing the Labor Day Parade on Union Square, in New York, City in 1887, from the Robert N Dennis collection of stereoscopic views in the New York Public Library. Scanned image from the Wikimedia Commons and in the public domain.

Today is Labor Day 2013; so I thought that I would start this post with a vintage stereo photograph of the 1887 Labor Day rally at Union Square in New York City.  It is important, I think, to remember that Labor Day was not meant to celebrate the end of summer, nor was it meant to be a day to flock the stores in search of bargains.  Labor Day was meant to celebrate Labor, the people who physically built and created what makes nations economically great.

The term “Labor Day” always reminds me of the slaves day off in Cecille B. DeMille’s epic film “The Ten Commandments.”  The origins of a Labor Day In the United States is just a bit obscure.  Some credit a machinist named Mathew Maguire, who first proposed in 1882 the holiday, while serving as secretary of the Central Labor Union, or CLU of New York. Others credit Peter J. McGuire of the American Federation of Labor as being the first to suggest it in May 1882 after he saw the annual labor festival held in Toronto, Canada. Oregon was the first state to make it a holiday on February 21, 1887.

By 1894, thirty states celebrated Labor Day, when congress unanimously voted to create a national holiday in response to the deaths of workers at the hands of the US military during the Pullman strike and it was hastily signed into law by President Grover Cleveland.

The Pullman strike was a complex and truly pivotal point in the history of labor.  It must be remembered that the railroads were quintessential in the building of America economically in the nineteenth century.  George Pullman in building the Pullman Company set out to create a model industry and community.  The Great Panic of 1893 caused a large drop in Pullman Company revenues and Pullman unilaterally imposed lower wages but made no adjustments in the rents that he charged workers. The Pullman workers went on strike and were supported by the American Rail Union, under Eugene V. Debs, which refused to pull trains with Pullman Cars.  The Railroad Brotherhoods and the American Federation of Labor supported the General (Railroad) Managers Association and opposed the strike. The federal government secured a federal court injunction against the union, Debs, and the top leaders, based on interference with the transport of the US mail. When the strikers refused to comply. President Cleveland ordered Federal Troops to enforce the injunction.

What  many forget today is how deeply embedded the rail interests were in the US government and the important role played by American unions in creating a viable and vibrant middle class.  There is a pendulum to public perception about labor, and in the twenty-first century the world has become truly global.  I do not mean to politicize Hati and Skoll.  But I would suggest that it is worth thinking about Labor Day and the iconic nineteenth century image shown in Figure 1 in the context of other haunting images that we have spoken about: Lisa Kristine’s photographs of slavery in the modern world, the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, and of this May’s Garment Factory Collapse in Bangladesh.  Abuse will always occur in the absence of counter balancing power.  At the risk of sounding cliché, I have to echo the words of George Santayana that: “Those who do not read history are doomed to repeat it.“

Figure 1 – Martin Luther King speaking at the March on Washington, August 28, 2013. Image from the Wikimedia Commons, property of the United States government and in the public domain.

Today marks the fiftieth anniversary of the March on Washington, August 28, 1963.  The event was defining for a generation of Americans, and all its associated imagery, like Figure 1, proves iconic.  In a very real sense the event ushered in the beginning of the sixties, a tumultuous and often disturbing decade that was a moment of profound change.  Let the image speak for itself.

Figure 1 – George Eastman with Kodak #2 Camera on the S.S. Gallia in 1890 by Frederick Church (1864-1925), image from the Wikimedia Commons and in the public domain.

We learned on August 20 that the Eastman Kodak Co, which pioneered the popularization of photography, has earned court approval to emerge from bankruptcy as a  much smaller digital-imaging company specializing in commercial and packaging print.    Big snore!  It’s not photography news.

I recently posted about the early nitrocellulose-based film that really marked the beginning of the movie film industry – and what a ride it has been.  Well, we are now really on the other end of it all.  2013, perhaps 2014, are widely expected to usher in the end of what is generically referred to as celluloid based film.

In 2011, Fox announced that it would suspend production of film-based movies by 2013, and worldwide 90,000 theaters have converted to digital projection.  Fujichrome delivered its last film stock this past March, and this leaves only Kodak, which is pulling out of the film business as it emerges from bankruptcy.

Should we be sad?  The story is a lot like that of digital photography in general, and it’s all really a matter of what is referred to as Moore’s law.  The law is named after Intel co-founder Gordon E. Moore, who in 1965 described the fact that the number of transistors we can put on a circuit board doubles every two years.  More often it is quoted in terms of a computer performance doubling every 18 months, this because performance depends both on the number of transistors and how fast they are.  As regards photography the point is that when digital photography was introduced images didn’t have the dynamic range or resolution of film.  But it was only a matter of time because of Moore’s law.

We now have the resolution of film, greater dynamic range than film, and unbelievable processing capability.  Compared to film cameras a few decades ago, which had simple light meters that controlled exposure and focusing, today’s DSLR’s are essentially computers onto themselves.  Distributing digital copies of movies is a tenth the cost of distributing film copies.  The special effects that we love so much are easier and cheaper to produce.  Indeed, as we’ve seen you don’t even necessarily need actors and actresses.  It can all be done by computer.  And as we’ve discussed previously all of this means that there is a growing democratization of film production, and film distribution via the internet.  The bottom line is that the technical, creative, and financial aspects of the art are all significantly enhanced.

So as regards the question of whether we should be sad, the answer is probably not.  My one caveat here is that as media succumb to financial pressures and necessity, whole genres of human creativity become lost.  I remain a great lover of silver gelatin photography, and platinum printing, and daguerreotypes.  A number of years ago I went to an exhibit of the work of Chuck Close, where side by side were shown portraits in hologram and daguerreotype and I was left with the realization of how wonderful it would be if daguerreotype printing were still more readily accessible to artists.

Most writers on the subject say that film will never die completely.  I am not so sure.  Roll films, celluloid movie films, are technically complex to produce.  As demand plummets, it seems very likely that financial pressures will drive them to extinction.

I can remember seeing movies as a child, when all of a sudden the image on the screen would melt before your eyes from the heat of the projector. There is a Mash episode that depicts this.  I definitely won’t miss that!

Figure 1 – a badly deteriorated piece of nitrocellulose photographic film, from the Library and Archives Canada / Bibliothèque et Archives Canada via the Wikipedia and in the public domain.

So, as promised, what about this nitrocellulose?  We really need to project ourselves back to the late nineteenth century and imagine that we want to create a light weight portable film that doesn’t require loading a single glass plate at a time.  Our goal, really George Eastman’s goal, was to create a flexible roll film. Nobody wanted to carry glass plates around.  So you need a tough, clear,sheet material, and its being the late nineteenth century there aren’t too many choices.

The story really begins in 1832 with Henri Braconnot, who used nitric acid combined with starch or wood fibers to produce a lightweight combustible explosive material to which he gave the name xyloïdine.  1832?, you exclaim, that’s just before photography was invented.  Then in 1838 Théophile-Jules Pelouze treated paper and cardboard in a similar manner to create nitramidine. Both of these were pretty unstable and not practical explosives. In 1846 Christian Friedrich Schönbein, finally found a practical solution.  He mixed nitric acid with cotton, dried the material, and then there was a flash.  Oh did I mention that he dried it on the oven door?   I am reminded of a childhood limerick:

“Johny was a chemist.

A chemist he is no more.

For what he thought was H20 was H2SO4.

And it rained little Johny for a week!”

Schönbein and several other chemists worked on controlling the process, which eventually led to the creation of a material called “gun cotton.”  Gun cotton was a usable explosive and was employed for all the good and bad uses you can imagine.

It was subsequently discovered that a suitable “plastic” (meaning flexible) sheet of Nitrocellulose could be made using camphor as a plasticizer.  Starting in 1889, Eastman Kodak, starting in August 1889 used as the first flexible film base.It was used until 1933 for X-ray films and for motion picture film until 1951.

Though driven by the technical requirements of a clear and flexible film base, using a material also used for magicians’ flash paper and explosives, was not ideal – especially when used in conjunction with very bright and very hot movie projectors.  Even worse, nitrocellulose, once burning, produces its own oxygen and as a result will continue to burn even when fully submerged in water. Projection rooms had to be lined with asbestos, and it was illegal to transport nitrocellulose movie films on the London underground.

Needless-to-say there were multiple fires caused by nitrocellulose movie film.  In 1926 a cinema fire at Dromcolliher in County Limerick claimed the lives of forty-eight people. Sixty-nine children where killed in a theatre in Paisley, Scotland in 1929.

And then you have the coup de grace.  The intrinsic instability of nitrocellulose, the very thing that makes it useful as an explosive, makes it a disaster from an archival point of view.  It deteriorates very badly (see Figure 1).  As a result old films, indeed the very films that represent the incunabula of cinema, are decaying.  They are dangerous to store, dangerous to work with, and crumbling to explosive nothingness!

Figure 1 – Scene from Les Infants du Paradis, from the French Wikipedia and in the public domain.

I was reading the BBC news “Pictures of the Day” yesterday and came upon an intriguing photograph of a technician restoring the 1945 French film “Les Enfants du Paradis,” (“Children of Paradise“) at the laboratory of Eclair outside Paris.  The film shot on nitrocellulose was seriously compromised and constantly in danger of exploding or bursting into flames – never a good thing!  The film was directed by Marcel Carné during the German occupation of France during World War II. The plot is prototypic.  Set in the Parisian theatre scene of the 1820s and 30s, it tells of a needless-to-say beautiful courtesan named Garance, and the four men who love her: a mime artist, an actor, a criminal, and an aristocrat.

The accolades for this film are astounding.  In the original American trailer it was described as the French answer to “Gone With the Wind” .  None other than the great French film director François Truffaut  said: “‘I would give up all my films to have directed Children of Paradise’^”  TAnd here’s the clincher, in 1995, it was voted “Best Film Ever” in a poll of 600 French critics and film professionals.

So, the restoration is an important landmark in the history of film conservation.  Now we get to see it as it was meant to be seen. It is also a tribute to the incredible painstaking work associated with such a frame by frame.  It is truly a work of love, and to someone, like myself, who was involved in some of the early image processing, our ability to accomplish such Herculean tasks is, frankly, awe inspiring!

But it all begs the questions: what is this thing called nitrocellulose and why would anyone use an explosive as a film base?  I’d like to explore these mysteries in tomorrow’s blog.