Global Elements of Cinema - Tracing Agricultural Materials in the History of Celluloid Film Manufacturing

The story of the invention of celluloid as the first plastic is well-known. But where did the materials needed to make it come from?

This project looks at the material and technological history of cinema through the lens of agricultural manufacturing. It will chart the global trade routes and supply chains that made early cinema possible. This initiative links media ecology with histories of film technology and celluloid film stock. All of these are bourgeoning areas of research, but they face one major limitation: They are heavily Euro- and Americentric, because they rely mostly on sources in European languages. Media-historically, little is known about the global sites of extraction and processing from which early celluloid components – Taiwanese camphor, Chilean nitrate and others – originated. Not only does this result in a heavily skewed narrative of Western film-technological primacy, it also prevents us from correctly assessing the film industry’s relationship with the environment as well as its historical role in the formation of economies dependent on non-human life.

Focusing particularly on the region around the East China Sea, I will conduct archival research on three continents, documenting the materials, places and techniques involved in film stock production. I will set up a research network and, based on the data, establish an open, multifunctional online cartography of the “elements of cinema.” This database will not only visualize the logistical networks, but also serve multiple communities – historians, media scholars, archivists and the public – as a resource that facilitates new forms of research into global media history.

By doing so, this material cartography of cinema will provide one way of decentering the Euro- and Americentrism of current film-historical research and create new possibilities for understanding the colonial and extractive legacies of media.

Before films became digital, celluloid film was the basis of cinema. Celluloid is a plastic made from agricultural products like camphor, gelatin and cotton. Many of these materials were extracted in colonized regions of the world before being processed in Europe and North America.
By mapping the trade routes and supply chains, this research project will clarify how the film industry has historically relied on and driven the demand for agricultural materials. By doings so, it will examine how cinema has contributed to a global economic system dependent on plants, animals, plastics, nitrogen and other materials.