Film Stock

A global collection exploring the vital significance of film's materiality to the history of cinemaMade from animal bones, plant cellulose, and precious metals, photochemical film defined a century of cinema. Looking past Hollywood and beyond iconic companies like Eastman Kodak, Agfa, and Pathé, Film Stock travels to Argentina, India, Czechoslovakia, and other locales to offer a truly global history of the very material of film.Engaging with cultural, political, economic, and environmental questions of significant contemporary concern, Film Stock shows the immense consequences of how film was made, handled, processed, destroyed, and archived. Individual essays explore how climate shaped film distribution in early twentieth-century Southeast Asia, unique film formats manufactured in China, early efforts to standardize the size of film stock in Hollywood, and how Eastman Kodak's tropical research lab in Panama became a tool of cultural empire.With a deep commitment to archival research and substantive engagement with primary materials, Film Stock is a major work that tells the international story of film's physical life. Its innovative, groundbreaking essays make a compelling case for why, even in our digital age, motion picture film matters.Retail e-book files for this title are screen-reader friendly with images accompanied by short alt text and/or extended descriptions.