New paper: ‘Cinema’s Atmospheric A Priori: How Weather and Environment Shaped Celluloid Film Manufacturing and Raw Material Supply at Fujifilm, Daicel and Agfa’

A new peer-reviewed paper has been published in the journal Iluminace, in a themed issue on filmic matter and geographic specificity, edited by Byron Davies and Jiří Anger.

Where was the cotton for Fujifilm’s cine-film grown? Who supplied the animal parts that would end up coated on Agfa’s film as gelatin? How did climate, environment, geology, and river hydrology shape the history of celluloid film manufacturing, and thus of cinema?

This article enlists several archival collections and a range of little-known, multi-language secondary sources in the broader task of understanding cinema’s relationship with the material environment and climate, and its historical role in global trade, extractivist practices, and colonial politics.

Drawing on primary source research in the archives of film stock and chemical manufacturers Agfa-Gevaert, IG Farben, and Schering, and on the corporate histories of Fujifilm and Dainippon Celluloid, I clarify how parts of the raw material supply chain for celluloid film were structured between roughly 1920 and 1945. Methodologically, this article integrates eco-media thought with spatial approaches to show how nonhuman elements (earth, wood, air, and water) are historically implicated in the global photochemical industry. It introduces the notion of the atmospheric a priori and shifts emphasis to East Asian sites — or rather: environments — often overlooked in English-language research.

By attending both to fine-grained microhistories of individual factories as well as global transnational trade networks, the article challenges prevailing Euro- and Americentric narratives of film technology and provides a situated account of the critical role of logistics and environment in cinema’s material foundation.