Papers presented by Emmet von Stackelberg since 2019

2024 Providence, Rhode Island

"From the World to Rochester: The Raw Materials of Kodak’s Motion Picture Film"

Emmet von Stackelberg, Harvard University

Abstract:

To make nitrate motion picture film, the substance necessary to making moving images into a mass medium in the early 20th century, the Eastman Kodak Company required certain key chemical ingredients: nitrated (“soluble”) cotton, silver nitrate crystals, photographic gelatin, and camphor. Initially, when film manufacture was still in its infancy, the company acquired these chemical products from other firms. But in the late 1890s, Kodak embarked on a project to make more of its ingredients itself, out of their constituent materials. This paper traces how Kodak’s push toward greater vertical integration only further knitted the company into vast global commodities networks. Though sourced from across the globe, by the time these raw materials reached Rochester, they were cleansed of much of the evidence of their origins. Cotton linters bleached bright white, camphor distilled into sugar-like crystals, and silver in highly purified bars bore few material traces of the labor, much of it from Black, Indigenous, and Hispanic workers, that brought it to Kodak’s doors. Kodak was less successful, however, at controlling the exigencies introduced by the fact that these materials were extracted from nonhuman living worlds. Through recounting failed attempts to replace or synthesize camphor and gelatin, this paper shows that these raw materials could never be perfectly purified, nor their nonhuman origins fully effaced. In telling this story of the work of (and failure at) purification of raw materials, this paper tells a commodity biography of film that situates motion pictures within histories of racialized extractive labor and of the longstanding reliance of the chemicals industry on the mysteries and contingencies of nonhuman forms of life.