Journal of Film Preservation N° 60/61 - FIAF

A Brief History of Plasticized Cellulose
Nitrate or Celuloid
Alfonso del Amo
This article would have been impossible to write without the knowledge of the research
accomplished by Dr. Fernando Catalina.
In Prometheus Bound, Aeschylus depicts the benevolent hero who, on
giving humans the gift of fire, laid the foundation for all of mankind’s
artistic endeavors.
It is perhaps this grand idea involving Mankind being wrought on
creating, developing and modifying the material aspects on which
human existence is based that may aid us in understanding how the
changes which filmmaking has wrought in twentieth-century culture
are related, in part, to the existence of a material unstable to the
point of being self-inflammable yet flexible and transparent, the
golden era of which lasted little over fifty years but which would
afford the possibility of the mechanical projection of moving pictures to
make its way onto the scene as a possible, fundamental human art
form.
The discovery, the processing and the development of new materials
with which to more cost-effectively cover society’s needs has been
one of mankind’s constant endeavors to which it has devoted a major
portion of its industriousness, but, in all truth, a vast majority of the
new materials discovered are not totally new but can be termed as
being processes or new ways of processing or of employing
previously-existing materials already in use.
Truly new materials being discovered is quite a rare event, and the
processes which lead to these new materials coming into being were
often not initially set into motion with the aim of meeting any
specific, known needs, or the needs it was being attempted to cover
had nothing to do with the uses achieved in the end for the material
in question. Often only after many different modifications and
changes were new materials used in a way that would exploit their
full potential.
To illustrate the above statement, we can begin by discussing another
material which is in no way new and which became an essential part
of our lives during the last half of the nineteenth century. Afterward,
we can discuss the discovery of celluloid by drawing a comparison.
Steel is a product which has been known to Man since the dawning
of history and which is made by heating iron ore to release the
oxygen from the iron oxide and lowering the carbon content in the
masses of molten iron to quite specific proportions. But the nature of
41 Journal of Film Preservation / 60/61 / 2000