Author Archive: Retro

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The Making and Unmaking of the Femme Fatale

The Maltese Falcon (1941)

Often considered the first American film noir, John Huston’s The Maltese Falcon features the femme fatale figure front and center, but not yet fully formed. The film opens on Jack Spade, P.I., played by a confident and competent Humphrey Bogart. His secretary enters his office and announces a possible client. She assures Spade, “You’ll want to meet her anyways. She’s a knockout.”

In comes Mary Astor, breathless and desperate, sporting one of several fake names her character will try on throughout the course of the film. Astor’s character embroils Spade in a tapestry of lies and deception, the primary structural role of any femme fatale. But Bogart’s no dope. The male hero is not quite ready to give up his privileged agency over the narrative. Their romance is always tempered by Spade’s distrust, knowing this woman’s act is deadly, and he’s not afraid

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How Nitrate Film Set the World Ablaze

Decades before the compact disc, DVDs and streaming services like Hulu and Netflix – even Betamax, there was the film reel – specifically, the nitrate film reel that manufacturers stopped producing in the 1950s.

The reason for the sudden stoppage in the manufacture of nitrate film reels? Combustibility. This posed a huge danger not just to production outfits of the 1930s onward, but also to cinemas that necessarily stored nitrate film reels. By the 1950s, Kodak had replaced both colored and black and white nitrate reels with more stable film stock that didn’t blaze like their predecessors.

Film critics and curators like Genevieve McGillcuddy of the TCM Classic Film Festival state that there’s nothing quite like watching films straight from nitrate film stock, and many similar believers of nitrate film say that the experience of enjoying this type of cinema is close to a spiritual experience.

Explosive cinema