Emmet von Stackelberg is a PhD candidate in history at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, studying the technologies of visual culture in the United States. His dissertation is a history of celluloid, the photochemical substance necessary to the making and showing of motion pictures until the middle of the 20th century. This biography of a substance braids together histories of experiment, extraction, capitalism, industry, and leisure. Reconstructing the physical, intellectual, and political work needed to make cinema possible, the project probes at the material interdependence of entertainment and industrial capitalism.