The Nitrate Picture Show

Thank you for joining us for the 9th Nitrate Picture Show! Mark your calendar for the 10th festival June 4–7, 2026. Look for an announcement about the sale date for passes early Fall.
 

About the Nitrate Picture Show

The Nitrate Picture Show, the festival of film conservation, returns for its ninth year. The festival features screenings of vintage nitrate prints from international archives and the Eastman Museum’s own collection and lectures from leading archivists, inviting you to experience the art and science of film preservation, from print conservation to archival projection. Film fans who have attended our festival before will tell you that it's the rare experience of watching original nitrate prints projected in the cinema while surrounded by other enthusiasts that really makes the Nitrate Picture Show unique. 

Since the very first edition, which took place in 2015, the titles of the films have only been announced on the first day of the festival, and the last screening has traditionally been a Blind Date with Nitrate, where the title is revealed when the curtain rises and the light from the projector hits the screen. Hence, we cannot say anything about the program selected for 2025. Instead, we can name but a few titles we screened in the past. Such as tinted silent prints of Intolerance (1916, D.W. Griffith) and Die freudlose Gasse [The Joyless Street] (1925, Georg Wilhelm Pabst); original release prints of Der blaue Engel [The Blue Angel] (1930, Josef von Sternberg), L’age d’or [The Golden Age] (1930, Luis Bunuel), Liebelei (1933, Max Ophüls), Stella Dallas (1937, King Vidor), Le jour se lève [Daybreak] (1939, Marcel Carné), Walt Disney’s Pinocchio (1940), Casablanca (1942, Michael Curtiz), Meet Me in St. Louis (1944, Vincent Minnelli), Leave Her to Heaven (1945, John M. Stahl), Nightmare Alley (1947, Edmund Goulding), Ladri di biciclette [Bicycle Thieves] (1948, Vittorio de Sica), The Third Man (1949, Carol Reed), and Bakushu [Early Spring] (1951, Yasujiro Ozu); William Wyler’s personal prints of Counsellor at Law (1933) and The Good Fairy (1935) and David O. Selznick’s prints of A Star is Born (1937) and Rebecca (1940); a stunning 1945 British release print of The Wizard of Oz (1939, Victor Fleming); one of the few surviving nitrate prints of Alexander Nevsky (1938, Sergei Eisenstein) and Vredens dag [Day of Wrath] (1943, Carl Theodor Dreyer). Among other filmmakers whose works were screened at the first seven festivals are René Clair, George Cukor, Robert J. Flaherty, John Ford, Fritz Lang, David Lean, Ernst Lubitsch, Mikio Naruse, Roberto Rossellini, Douglas Sirk, Preston Sturges, Teuvo Tulio, King Vidor, and Raoul Walsh, to name just a few. We were lucky to find multiple projectable titles by Alfred Hitchcock and the legendary duo of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger. In the Nitrate Shorts section, we presented Walt Disney’s first color films, screen tests for Gone with the Wind (1939), as well as experimental works by Mary Ellen Bute, Oscar Fischinger, Len Lye, Norman McLaren, and Vsevolod Pudovkin. We set a high standard, as you can see, and now we just have to live up to it.