Four films on 35mm nitrate screen November 20–21
The George Eastman Museum will present November Nitrate Weekend November 20–21 at the Dryden Theatre. Introduced in 2025, November Nitrate Weekend offers audiences another opportunity to experience the distinctive beauty of nitrate film outside of the museum’s Nitrate Picture Show festival, which sold out in 2026 in just six days.
This year’s November Nitrate Weekend program features four films, combining titles previously screened at the Nitrate Picture Show with films that have not yet appeared on the Dryden screen. The selections draw from the collections of the George Eastman Museum and the Library of Congress.
Returning to the Dryden screen are A Star Is Born (1937), screened at the Nitrate Picture Show in 2015, and Laurence Olivier’s Hamlet (1948), screened in 2018. They join Frank Lloyd’s Mutiny on the Bounty (1935) and Otto Preminger’s Daisy Kenyon (1947) for the two days of nitrate film projection.
“The Dryden Theatre is committed to re-creating the cinematic experience as closely as possible and screening nitrate film is the ultimate expression of this endeavor,” said Jared Case, curator of film exhibitions, Dryden Theatre. “By projecting these eighty to ninety-year-old prints on nitrate, we are providing access to the original elements audiences saw at the time of release, and the experience opens up a new world."
With nitrate prints, the silver content is much higher than those of modern stock, making the black-and-white image sharper and with greater contrast. The original dyes on the Technicolor prints are as the filmmakers intended, instead of mediated through digital technologies and modern expectations.
Full schedule:
- November 20 at 7:30 p.m.: Mutiny on the Bounty (Frank Lloyd, US 1935, 132 min., 35mm nitrate)
- November 21 at 1 p.m.: A Star is Born (William A. Wellman, US 1937, 111 min., 35mm nitrate)
- November 21 at 4:30 p.m: Daisy Kenyon (Otto Preminger, US 1947, 99 min., 35mm nitrate)
- November 21 at 8 p.m.: Hamlet (Laurence Olivier, UK 1948, 154 min., 35mm nitrate)
Tickets are available for purchase individually for each screening. Admit One and Take-10 Passes are not valid for November Nitrate Weekend, and complimentary admission is not available for these screenings.
For more information, visit https://www.eastman.org/november-nitrate-weekend-0.
About the Dryden Theatre
The 500-seat Dryden Theatre is the premier exhibition space for the art of cinema as championed and interpreted by the George Eastman Museum. Presenting film screenings six times a week, the Dryden is devoted to showing all films in their original formats, thus honoring and reproducing their historical—and aesthetically supreme—modes of exhibition. It is one of the very few theaters in the world equipped for the projection of original nitrate film that also makes nitrate film screenings part of its regular program.
About the George Eastman Museum
Founded in 1947, the George Eastman Museum is the world’s oldest photography museum and one of the largest film archives in the United States. Its holdings comprise more than 400,000 photographs, 31,000 motion picture films, the world’s preeminent collection of photographic and cinematographic technology, one of the leading libraries of books and archival materials related to photography and cinema, and extensive holdings of documents and other objects related to George Eastman. The museum is located on the historic Rochester estate of entrepreneur and philanthropist George Eastman, the pioneer of popular photography. As a research and teaching institution, the Eastman Museum has an active publishing program, and its L. Jeffrey Selznick School of Film Preservation’s graduate program (a collaboration with the University of Rochester) makes critical contributions to film preservation. The George Eastman Museum is supported with public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature. For more information, visit eastman.org.
