SAGE Reference

Encyclopedia of Consumption and Waste

The Social Science of Garbage
William Rathje, General Editor
Published by SAGE Reference
Produced by Golson Media

Celluloid

The first modern plastic, “celluloid” was initially developed as a synthetic replacement for
diminishing natural resources, only later becoming closely associated with the development
of motion pictures. Despite its extreme flammability, celluloid performed a crucial role, albeit
in different ways, in the popularising of both photography and the cinema. In addition,
celluloid maintains throughout its history an intimate relation with both the conservation and
consumption of animals, paradoxically promoted as “preserving” animals against
environmental devastation whilst nonetheless depending upon a medium composed of the
waste products of industrialised animal slaughter.
Marketed as a material for mass-producing cheap simulacra of apparently scarce
natural resources, principally ivory and tortoiseshell, “celluloid” was patented by John
Wesley Hyatt in 1870, who set up the Celluloid Manufacturing Company in the following
year. By 1880, Hyatt’s company issued licences to a variety of firms, producing everything
from dental plates and piano keys to jewellery, combs, and novelties, the latter being
advertised as a luxury previously only available to the wealthy. In this way, Hyatt capitalised
on the development of nitrocellulose by Christian Friedrich Schönbein in 1846, and which,
two decades later, Alexander Parkes combined with a plasticizer-solvent to produce the stable
and fully-formable forerunner of celluloid which he named Parkesine. By varying the solvent
employed, this new material was found to accurately mimic a wide range of naturally
occurring substances.
This history of material mimicry is, however, largely forgotten today, eclipsed by
the association of celluloid with the invention of the “movies.” By the early-1880s,
photographers were already experimenting with transparent sheets of celluloid coated with a
gelatine emulsion, seeking to replace the fragile and unwieldy glass plates that were currently
in use. Consistency remained a serious problem, however, and it was only with the
introduction of Carbutt’s sheet film in 1888 that celluloid could finally be relied upon to
provide a uniform thickness and unblemished surface, thereafter becoming widely-available
as a base for photographic plates. It was this base stock which was used by Thomas Alva
Edison (or rather his chief engineer W. K. L. Dickson) in the development of perforated
35mm celluloid film bands— Edison’s major contribution to the invention of cinema—for
use with his peep-show Kinetoscope. Thin and flexible, and thus allowing for its production
in long continuous rolls, celluloid made photography available to amateur hobbyists for the
first time. When, also in 1888, George Eastman introduced the Kodak system—a one-
hundred image celluloid-backed roll film which was to be returned to the manufacturers for
developing—demand immediately outstripped supply.
Celluloid quickly established itself as the only suitable material base for “living
pictures,” used not only in the Edison Kinetoscope, but also by the Lumiére brothers in their
Cinématographe and by many others. Nevertheless, it was unable to shed its explosive
origins, the nitrocellulose rendering it highly flammable and thus an unacceptable danger in
the minds of many people. This danger was cemented in the popular imagination by a fire
during the 1897 ball of the Société Charité Maternelle, in which 143 people died (although
celluloid was not in fact to blame). This hastened the imposing of safety restrictions upon the
practitioners of early cinema, pushing it out of the domestic setting common to the magic
lantern shows and into the less reputable theatres and fairgrounds. As a result, “motion
pictures” became increasingly identified with popular public entertainment, as distinct from
the domain of scientific research within which it originated.
Whilst often overlooked, celluloid maintains an intimate relation with animals
throughout its history. As Nicole Shukin persuasively argues, the popular tours of the
“disassembly” lines of the Chicago stockyards, insofar as spectators were treated to a view of
time as a linear sequence of discrete moments, in fact constituted protocinematic
technologies. More directly, celluloid and its constituents capitalised on the consumption of
animals in a variety of ways, from the initial development of nitrocellulose as a gunpowder
alternative, to the marketing of celluloid as a material for mass-producing simulacra of
commodities originally culled from the bodies of animals. Most notably, in the development
of celluloid as a photographic and cinematic medium, animals again played a crucial role,
with all of the three main figures associated with photographic motion in the late-nineteenth
century—Eadweard Muybridge, Étienne-Jules Marey, and Ottomer Anschütz—first
employing the new technology to record the movement of animals. Indeed, the promotion of
early “motion pictures” was organised around a rhetoric of wildlife conservation, figured
both by Marey’s “Photographic Gun,” and by the reemploying of such terms as “shooting”
and “snapshot.”
While “celluloid” and “film” have long since become synonymous, the term “film”
originally referred only to the coating of gelatine emulsion produced from connective tissue
and other slaughterhouse “leavings.” “Film” was thus the medium in which the movement of
animals was first captured, permitting the reconnection of discrete images. With or without
its film coating, celluloid was thus the first mimetic plasticity, at once replicating, breaking
down and reconstituting the lives of animals whilst remaining materially dependent upon
their slaughter. In other words, the strength and flexibility of celluloid which serves to
preserve animals—to “save” them by recording for public consumption that which might
otherwise be lost forever—could nonetheless take place only through the “waste” of animals
slaughtered for consumption.

See also: Commodification; Environmentalism.

Further Reading:
Rossell, Deac. Living Pictures: The Origins of the Movies. Albany: State University of New
York Press, 1998.
Shukin, Nicole. Animal Capital: Rendering Life in Biopolitical Times. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2009.

Richard Iveson
Goldsmiths College, University of London.