Water, air, earth: Celluloid film as a threshold between natural environment and the Japanese photochemical industry

Based on research into the corporate histories of Fujifilm, Dainippon Celluloid and Konishiroku, this contribution will contemplate the relationship between celluloid cinema and the environment, and present some interim results of an on-going 3-year research project on celluloid manufacturing and global agricultural supply chains.

The eco-materialist turn in recent years has led to a rethinking of the environmental costs of media technology, including cinema, and their entanglements with the non-human world. But existing research on the materiality and elementality of celluloid film has been concentrated around prominent Western manufacturers Kodak and Agfa. I wish to shift the attention towards Japan’s elemental role in the celluloid film industry: Both as the dominant supplier of camphor, an essential plasticizer, and as the once largest celluloid-producing country, as well as the only non-Western country to develop a globally competitive celluloid film business.

Adopting an approach that pursues geographic specificity, I focus especially on the scattered sites of celluloid manufacturing and raw material extraction, such as Fuji’s gelatin factory in Nagano, Daicel’s nitrate and cotton factories in Aboshi and in occupied Manchuria and Korea. These manufacturing activities and supply chains are entirely unknown in English-language film scholarship and can help us situate cinema in a history of climate, environment, imperialism and colonial extractivism.