Abstract
No celluloid, no cinema. From Stan Brakhage scratching emulsion with his fingernail to produce his last film, to the 70mm wide-screen spectacles of Hollywood, all transactions of the cinematic institution must negotiate the humble filmstrip.1 Speculation about its replacement by digital technology may well be premature. After more than a century of investment in exhibition infrastructure, the movie projector, a fixture of the cinematic institution from Bombay to Brooklyn, seems unlikely to disappear anytime soon.2 Film history provides multiple examples of an attentiveness to plastic as technological material and cultural metaphor.3 Yet the richest exploration of this scarcely fortuitous linkage between cinema and its ineluctable material base, a work that transcends modernist selfreflexivity, though it surely implies that modernist gesture, remains Le Chant du Styrene (The Song of Styrene), a 1958 industrial documentary commissioned by the
Published Version
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