Found this interesting piece from the BFI about the use and management of nitrate film. Nitrate film, I already knew, is an infamously flammable substance whose potential lethality first revealed itself in Paris in 1897 when a fire killed 126 people… I mean, nitrate also shrinks and decomposes, which is bad enough from a preservation angle, but this rotting can also increase the likelihood of the film going up in smoke, and once it does that it’s practically unstoppable, so it has to be very carefully handled… which not everyone does, including some people who really should have known better, but there’s generally some fairly strict rules about what to do with it and indeed who can do those things.
I won’t say, however, that I wasn’t at least slightly concerned by this statement:
When built in 1957, the projection booth in NFT1 was entirely encased in encapsulated asbestos. It still is, making it very safe from the effects of fire but difficult to update. This design helped protect the building during a nitrate fire in 1968, which was caused by an undetected nitrate print being run without safety features in place.
I mean… I’m glad the building was saved back in 1968, but I’m also concerned that the projection booth is still full of asbestos (which, I’ve just discovered, actually translates from Greek as “unquenchable”, ironically enough in this context). And that theatre is still in use, so… the asbestos-encased projection booth is still in use? Conceding that people didn’t know quite how bad asbestos was in the 50s, they did know by the 80s when the stuff was actually banned in the UK; and I know it might be “difficult to update”, but the BFI’s own page about NFT1 suggests they have in fact done that at some point since the 1950s, at which time digital projection wasn’t a thing. I’d be… slightly worried about being a projectionist in that booth; I know asbestos is much more dangerous when it’s actually floating free, which I don’t suppose it actually is here, but still.
