SOLD OUT: The Nitrate Picture Show

CLICK HERE to read or download 
the 10th Nitrate Picture Show Festival Catalog

Thank you for your interest in the 10th Nitrate Picture Show, June 4–7, 2026. All passes have now SOLD OUT. 

Please contact [email protected] with any festival related questions.

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2026 Pass Prices and Benefits

JUST ANNOUNCED - darker: Live with Bill Morrison, Thursday, June 4 at 2 p.m. 

Join us for the world premiere of the standalone film darker, presented in person by filmmaker Bill Morrison at the Nitrate Picture Show. Created in collaboration with Pulitzer Prize-winning composer David Lang, darker marks the ninth collaboration between Lang and Morrison across twenty-four years of work together.

With darker, Morrison takes inspiration from Lang’s restrained and highly detailed score to create what he describes as a slowly lilting depiction of the sublime, in which actors, dancers, and acrobats reappear and disappear back into a bubbling morass of time. Morrison’s films often incorporate imagery from decomposing nitrate films, creating a haunting photochemical effect.

Originally conceived as a live film and music performance, darker is presented at the Nitrate Picture Show as the first standalone screening of the film, with a newly-prepared digital presentation incorporating a 5.1 mix of the original score. Bill Morrison will appear in person.

Free to all Nitrate Picture Show passholders. No registration is required. Single tickets for non-passholders will be sold at the Dryden Theatre Box Office immediately prior to the event on a standby line basis, pending availability. The event runtime is 70 minutes. 

Bill Morrison is an Academy Award-nominated filmmaker whose work often reframes long-forgotten moving images. The New York Times has called him “the poet laureate of lost films.” His films have premiered at the New York, Sundance, Telluride, and Venice film festivals. He is best known for Decasia (2002), Dawson City: Frozen Time (2016), and the short film Incident (2023), which received an Academy Award nomination in 2025.

SOLD OUT: Reanimating History: Preserving the Library of Congress' Paper Print Collection, Thursday, June 4 at 11:30 a.m.

Join Erin Palombi, Moving Image Archives Technician at the National Audio-Visual Conservation Center (NAVCC), for a presentation exploring the history and preservation of the Library of Congress Paper Print Collection. During the first twenty years of moviemaking, US copyright law did not accommodate the burgeoning medium of film. As early as 1893, resourceful producers registered their works as still photographs printed on paper rather than celluloid. These deposits comprise the foundational Paper Print Collection at the Library of Congress, representing some 6,500 titles. Because these materially unique artifacts of cinema history cannot be viewed without intervention, they have long been the subject of preservation work. Efforts to reanimate the paper prints, begun in the early 1940s, continue to this day. The session will introduce the origins of the collection, the challenges involved in restoring these early motion pictures to viewable form, and the ongoing work to preserve and make accessible some of the earliest surviving films in American cinema history. Only Nitrate Picture Show passholders who have reserved their spot may attend. Capacity is limited to seventy guests. The presentation is co-authored by Meghan Holly, Moving Image Archives Technician at NAVCC.

Erin Palombi is a Moving Image Archives Technician at the National Audio-Visual Conservation Center in Culpeper, Virginia. She has a master’s degree in Film and Media Studies from the L. Jeffrey Selznick School of Film Preservation and the University of Rochester, and a bachelor's degree  in German from the College of Wooster. She has completed translations and live subtitling from German for films shown at Capitol Fest, the Nitrate Picture Show, the San Francisco Silent Film Festival, and for Flicker Alley Blu-ray releases. Currently, she is thrilled to be co-writing a book about the Paper Print Collection for the Library of Congress Publishing Office.
 

SOLD OUT: Louis B. Mayer Conservation Center Nitrate Vault Tour

At the 10th Nitrate Picture Show, we are excited to offer a rare, behind-the-scenes tour of the upgraded and expanded Louis B. Mayer Conservation Center, the George Eastman Museum's esteemed nitrate vaults. Attendance is open only to Nitrate Picture Show passholders who have reserved their spot via $30 fee. Thank you for your interest; the Louis B. Mayer Conservation Center Nitrate Vault Tours have sold out.

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Photo: Tomas Flint

Located off-site in North Chili, New York, this state-of-the-art facility houses more than 24,000 reels of highly flammable nitrate film, meticulously preserved under strict temperature and humidity controls to maintain the beauty and clarity of this remarkable medium. Led by our knowledgeable Collection Manager Deborah Stoiber, tour guests will gain insight into the history and care involved in preserving nitrate film, including the unique challenges that come with such volatile yet visually captivating material. Guests have the opportunity to learn about the intricate work required to protect cinematic history, from handling protocols to the technical requirements for storage. Capacity is limited to fifteen guests per tour, and transportation to the vaults will be provided via tour bus. 

Concerts in the Historic Mansion

Join us on June 4, 2026 for a unique musical experience with acclaimed musician, conductor, and composer Andreas Benz in the historic mansion. He brings decades of formal training and teaching experience, grounded in his studies at the Stuttgart Music 

Conservatory and Pordenone Masterclasses, and his work as a music educator in Heilbronn. Known for his expertise in silent film accompaniment and vintage dance band music from the 1920s and 1930s, Benz will present two distinct concerts: a piano performance and a program on the Aeolian pipe organ. This year’s program will feature musical selections from the nitrate film era, including requests from last year’s audience as well as the greatest hits of 1926. Both concerts are free to Nitrate Picture Show passholders and all other museum guests.

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Photo: Jackie McGriff Photography

About the Nitrate Picture Show

The Nitrate Picture Show features screenings of vintage nitrate prints from international archives and the Eastman Museum’s own collection and lectures from leading archivists, inviting you to experience the art and science of film preservation, from print conservation to archival projection. Film fans who have attended our festival before will tell you that it's the rare experience of watching original nitrate prints projected in the cinema while surrounded by other enthusiasts that really makes the Nitrate Picture Show unique. 

Since the very first edition, which took place in 2015, the titles of the films have only been announced on the first day of the festival, and the last screening has traditionally been a Blind Date with Nitrate, where the title is revealed when the curtain rises and the light from the projector hits the screen. Hence, we cannot say anything about the program selected for 2025. Instead, we can name but a few titles we screened in the past. Such as tinted silent prints of Intolerance (1916, D.W. Griffith) and Die freudlose Gasse [The Joyless Street] (1925, Georg Wilhelm Pabst); original release prints of Der blaue Engel [The Blue Angel] (1930, Josef von Sternberg), L’age d’or [The Golden Age] (1930, Luis Bunuel), Liebelei (1933, Max Ophüls), Stella Dallas (1937, King Vidor), Le jour se lève [Daybreak] (1939, Marcel Carné), Walt Disney’s Pinocchio (1940), Casablanca (1942, Michael Curtiz), Meet Me in St. Louis (1944, Vincent Minnelli), Leave Her to Heaven (1945, John M. Stahl), Nightmare Alley (1947, Edmund Goulding), Ladri di biciclette [Bicycle Thieves] (1948, Vittorio de Sica), The Third Man (1949, Carol Reed), and Bakushu [Early Spring] (1951, Yasujiro Ozu); William Wyler’s personal prints of Counsellor at Law (1933) and The Good Fairy (1935) and David O. Selznick’s prints of A Star is Born (1937) and Rebecca (1940); a stunning 1945 British release print of The Wizard of Oz (1939, Victor Fleming); one of the few surviving nitrate prints of Alexander Nevsky (1938, Sergei Eisenstein) and Vredens dag [Day of Wrath] (1943, Carl Theodor Dreyer). Among other filmmakers whose works were screened at the first seven festivals are René Clair, George Cukor, Robert J. Flaherty, John Ford, Fritz Lang, David Lean, Ernst Lubitsch, Mikio Naruse, Roberto Rossellini, Douglas Sirk, Preston Sturges, Teuvo Tulio, King Vidor, and Raoul Walsh, to name just a few. We were lucky to find multiple projectable titles by Alfred Hitchcock and the legendary duo of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger. In the Nitrate Shorts section, we presented Walt Disney’s first color films, screen tests for Gone with the Wind (1939), as well as experimental works by Mary Ellen Bute, Oscar Fischinger, Len Lye, Norman McLaren, and Vsevolod Pudovkin. We set a high standard, as you can see, and now we just have to live up to it.