From Forests to Film: Chemistry, Industry, and the Rise of Nonflammable Film Stock

The first motion picture system to use 16mm film was the CinéKodak, Eastman Kodak’s cameraprojector pair, which, in the words of a 1924 advertisement, “enable[s] you to show in motion on your screen the sort of pictures you turn to first in your album. Train the camera, press the button and the motor cranks the camera.”1 Echoing the catchphrase that sold Kodak’s Brownie camera— “you press the button; we do the rest”— the ensemble was marketed as a motion picture equivalent to this affordable, pushbutton device, which put photography into the hands of nonprofessionals. A cornerstone of the CinéKodak was its customdesigned film stock, which was unique in several ways. Instead of using the established negativepositive process, the stock was “reversal.” Requiring only one strip of film, it was exposed in camera as a negative and then processed to a projectable positive. But for the CinéKodak’s promise of moving film out of studios, cinemas, and everything they entailed, the stock’s most important feature was that its base was made of nonflammable cellulose acetate instead of cellulose nitrate, the highly combustible plastic that caused countless fires in cinema’s first decades.2 Nonflammability was further guaranteed by the