cinema as weapon

Cinema is, in fact, war by other means. There are few industrial materials, outside of weapons manufacture, as unstable and dangerous as nitrate film, nitrocellulose, on which silent cinema and much early sound cinema was shot until the 1950s. It began life as a weapon, an explosive and propellant known as guncotton, first used by the Confederates in the American Civil War; at the same time and on the same battlefields, the same compound – known as collodion – was being used to take some of the first war photographs, using the rearranged bodies of dead soldiers. From the very start, nitrate enmeshed documentary and fiction, the lived body and its objectification.