Final screening of @nitratepictureshow.bsky.social, and it's the Blind Date! The audience won't know what we're watching until it hits the screen. Anticipation and exhaustion permeates the Dryden.
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Movie poster for the 1961 Polish film "Mother Joan of the Angels."
Program 11 of @nitratepictureshow.bsky.social : "Mother Joan of the Angels" ("Matka Joanna od Aniołów", Dir. Jerzy Kawalerowicz, 1961, Poland) from Filmoteka Narodowa - Instytut Audiowizualny. The nitrate era is usually cited as ending circa 1950, but the Soviets didn't get the memo.
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Production still from the 1936 film My Man Godfrey: William Powell wearing a suit, carrying a glass of dark liquid, bends over Alice Brady, draped in fur, lying in an elaborate bed.
Will wake up early on day 4 of @nitratepictureshow.bsky.social for William Powell. Program 10 is "My Man Godfrey" (Dir. Gregory La Cava, 1936, USA) via a print with German subtitles from Filmarchiv Austria.
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Movie poster for the UK film "Hue and Cry."
Program 9 of @nitratepictureshow.bsky.social 2025 : Hue and Cry (Dir. Charles Crichton, 1947, UK) from Nasjonalbiblioteket. Cautiously optimistic about the content based on past Ealing films that I have seen. Very intrigued by the print's origin.
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Japanese language poster for Mikio Naruse's "Wife! Be Like a Rose!"
Program 8 for @nitratepictureshow.bsky.social : "Wife! Be Like a Rose!" ("Tsuma yo bara no yô ni", Dir. Mikio Naruse, 1935, Japan) via a print from the Eastman Museum collection.
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Poster for the 1937 film "You Only Live Once."
Program 7 of @nitratepictureshow.bsky.social 2025: a nearly immaculate print of "You Only Live Once" (Dir. Fritz Lang, 1937, USA) from the British Film Institute. Easily one of the most beautiful prints screened thus far at this year's festival.
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The final short of Program 6, "Once Upon a Time - A Modern Fairy Tale" ("Er was eens - een moderne sprookje," Dir. Jószef Misik, 1949, Netherlands) screened in front of Program 7, and it received an expressive crowd response to the whimsical, stop-motion, hair tonic advertisement
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"Florida, Land of Flowers" (1940, USA) hit the screen properly and we all enjoyed the Technicolor view of the Sunshine State.
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You never know as an audience member of @nitratepictureshow.bsky.social, but I truly never would have expected to see a print of "The Three Little Pigs" (Dir. Burt Gillett, 1933, USA) dubbed in French, and with a long ago censored antisemitic scene!
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"Franz Liszt? Never heard of him!" Oh, Bugs! "Rhapsody Rabbit" (Dir. Fritz Freleng, 1946, USA) is always what comes to mind for me whenever I hear "Hungarian Rhapsody." Sorry, "The Cat Concerto" (1947), I'm a Bugs Bunny fan.
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"Spook Sport: A Graveyard Gambol" (Dir. Mary Ellen Blute, 1939, USA) in Cinecolor is another good reminder that abstract animation set to classical music was cool and avant garde well before Disney experimented with "Fantasia" (1940).
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The "Animation in Czechoslovakia in the 1930s" sub program was bizarre, beautiful, kept with the theme of shockingly great animation used in sponsor films. The B&W shorts by Irena Dodalová and Karel Dodal give America's Fleischer Studios and Disney Studios a run for its money.
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"Colour Flight" (Dir. Len Lye, 1938, UK) is another one of those amazing abstract color shorts that are actually a sponsor film/advertisement. This genre is such a crowd pleaser at @nitratepictureshow.bsky.social.
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"Unusual Occupations" (1944-1946, USA) is mostly a series of niche artists and hobbiests, except the guy who opens and closes the train tunnel doors.
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This remnant of the two-color Multicolor format is also the remnant of a feature film: "Married in Hollywood" (Dir. Marcel Silver, 1929, USA). The film is existent in an incomplete form, and this reel represented 12 minutes of an originally 110 minute film.
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I never knew how much I needed to watch a Pathé film about caterpillars before today!
["The Destroyer of the Garden, Caterpillars" ("Les Destructeurs de nos Jardins", Pathé Frères, 1916, France)]
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Program 6 of @nitratepictureshow.bsky.social is a series of shorts. The staff found a way to cram 7 different color processes into the line-up:
Pathécolor,
2-color Kodachrome,
Multicolor,
Magnacolor,
Gasparcolor,
Cinecolor,
and
Technicolor (Process IV/3-color/glorious)
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Movie poster for the French film "La Ronde" (1950).
Program 4 of @nitratepictureshow.bsky.social 2025: "La Ronde" (Dir. Max Ophüls, 1950, France). I haven't seen this movie since 2005 when I saw it in a college class on laserdisc. Excited to see this print from La Cinémathèque française.
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Screenshot of a masked man holding up a sack with a human form in it from "L'Affaire est fans le sac."
Program 3 of @nitratepictureshow.bsky.social continued: "It's All in the Bag" ("L'Affaire est fans le sac", Dir. Pierre Prévert, 1932, France) an anti-fascist cult classic courtesy of the Museum of Modern Art.
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Screenshot of a street scene from "The City" 1939.
Program 3 of @nitratepictureshow.bsky.social kicks off with "The City" (Dir. Ralph Steiner, Willard Van Dyke, 1939, USA) via a print from the festival's hometown archives, the Motion Picture department of George Eastman Museum.
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Program 2 of #NPS2025 : "Canyon Passage" (Dir. Jacques Tourneur, 1946, USA) from the Library of Congress. More glorious Technicolor! Now on location in scenic Oregon!
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First screening of #NPS2025 : "Becky Sharp" (Dir. Rouben Mamoulian, 1935, USA) from Eye Filmmuseum in Amsterdam. The first feature film made in "glorious" Technicolor (AKA Process IV) #NitrateIsHot
What do skeletons, syphilis, and bacon have in common? They're just some of the subjects featured during this morning's #nitrateshorts screening at #nps2024
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