This article appeared in the November 21, 2025 edition of The Film Comment Letter, our free weekly newsletter featuring original film criticism and writing. Sign up for the Letter here.

Photo by Julia Gouin. Courtesy of L’Abominable.

When Robert Altman decided to shoot The Laundromat (1985) at the Éclair film studios outside Paris, he’d had enough of Hollywood. Disillusioned with American producers (“everything’s based on commerce,” he told The New York Times), he shipped off to the place where Jean Renoir made Grand Illusion (1937) and Luis Buñuel directed That Obscure Object of Desire (1977)—a place that had long felt like the center of the film world. In addition to Renoir and Buñuel, René Clair and Costa-Gavras had made movies at Éclair, and animator Émile Cohl was on the payroll in the studio’s early days. But Éclair’s riverside campus in Épinay-sur-Seine did more than just produce films. It made cameras too, and processed and printed film at its laboratories, which handled more 35mm than anywhere else in France, including footage shot outside the company’s studios. Éclair made Jim Jarmusch’s French release prints, and Aki Kaurismäki’s.

As digital media upended film’s fortunes at the turn of the millennium, Éclair’s fortunes were upended, too. The labs, established in 1907, shuttered in 2015. That year, the company declared bankruptcy. But if you walk through the factory gates today, past Éclair’s blue and yellow lightning-bolt logo, you’ll hear the sounds of construction. Turn into the building on your left, which Éclair called “Production,” and you’ll see a screening room in the making, with a jewel box of a projection booth in the back. Head to the next room, where, until just a few years ago, camera negatives were processed in massive machines, and you’ll see it being fitted with film processors 20 times smaller—but processors all the same. When the gates open next year, this will be the new home of the artist-run film laboratory L’Abominable: the Navire Argo, evoking a ship bent on silver instead of the gold of Jason’s fleece (“argo” is a play on the French argent, for the metal that makes film sensitive to light). In addition to the screening room and the lab, the Navire Argo will contain space to archive prints, repair equipment, and teach people how to film, process, and project. Built in the ruins of film’s past, it’s a bold statement that the medium has a future.

Not long ago, places like Éclair were all over the world. There were film manufacturers like Kodak in America, Fuji in Japan, and Agfa and ORWO in the Germanies. There were also camera makers like Arri and labs like DuArt—factories that stood, invisibly, behind what we call the film “industry,” with its stars and shoots, markets and premieres. Éclair was a giant in this industrial system, and a rarity in that it did so much. The films, the labs, the cameras—all of them were here, at one point or another.

L’Abominable, which was founded in 1996, operated on the outskirts of this system for years. Modeled on the MTK lab in Grenoble and on legendary institutions like the London Film-Makers’ Co-op, it has a simple credo: photochemical film’s potential is powerful and far from exhausted, and so the medium’s tools and processes should be accessible to anyone who wants to use them. The lab takes all comers, anyone with any project, as long as that project is on film. Among the hundreds of titles that have emerged from it are Frédérique Devaux’s hand-colored, hand-processed works, including her K series (2001–2008); Camilo Restrepo’s shorts and his debut feature Los conductos (2020); and Noah Teichner’s optically printed found-footage essay Navigators (2022). L’Abominable works primarily with 16mm, not the 35mm that most commercial laboratories process. It eschews the profits-first approach of places like Éclair (although Altman saw it as a refuge from Hollywood rapacity, the French studio built its name on popular, repeatable formulas). And like other artist-run film laboratories, it is committed as much to using and teaching photochemical processes as it is, by necessity, to maintaining and repairing machines, many of which aren’t made anymore; its artists are also technicians and bricoleurs.

The digital turn was thus a bittersweet windfall for L’Abominable. George Lucas used HD video in 1999’s Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace, and a decade later, the fully digital Avatar was released. By 2012, Kodak, the world’s largest film manufacturer, had gone bankrupt. As film’s prospects began to fade, so did those of the factories making cameras, processors, and projectors. Production lines ground to a halt, machines were discarded, and companies folded or tried to adjust their business models to the digital present. Speaking with me this summer, L’Abominable co-founder Nicolas Rey (Soviets Plus Electricity, 2002; differently, Molussia, 2012) recalled finding printers and projectors in scrapyards and at auctions in these years, learning how they worked, and fixing them up. In 2011, after the lab was evicted from its first home, a basement in the northern-Paris suburb of Asnières, these machines became the mainstays of a new space in a former industrial kitchen in nearby La Courneuve. The filmmakers couldn’t have asked for a better location: the kitchen is chemistry’s domain, and the lab fell right into place. The drains and vents, co-founder Pip Chodorov wrote in Millennium Film Journal in 2014, were already exactly where they needed to be.

Éclair was still operating at this point. It hung on longer than most of the big laboratories in France, and after its bankruptcy, the city of Épinay-sur-Seine bought the site. When, around 2020, the mayor made the unlikely decision to transform it into a multiuse cultural space—and not more lucrative high-end apartments or corporate properties, as L’Abominable member Emmanuel Falguières (Nulle part avant, 2018) pointed out in my interview with him and Rey—it was another lucky turn for L’Abominable, which was being forced out of its miraculous kitchen. The filmmakers approached the city council, seeing in Éclair’s “Production” building the home for the Navire Argo, a longstanding dream. In 2022, they were promised a 35-year (in a nod to 35mm) lease on the building, rent-free, as long as they could raise the money to renovate it.

It would be easy to look at the Navire Argo taking shape in what used to be Éclair and see a nose thumbed at an industry to which many artist-run film laboratories emerged as a reaction. Yet as John Powers observes in his 2023 book Technology and the Making of Experimental Film Culture, experimental cinema’s relationship to the commercial film industry isn’t only about opposition. It’s also about connections forged by the technologies that make film possible and malleable, no matter the context or the capital involved. You can see this at work in what’s becoming the Navire Argo. Take the nearly room-sized processors that used to stand in the “Production” building. Three had to be discarded—they’re built for amounts of film beyond what the Navire Argo will ever handle, and the volume of chemicals needed to keep them running would be wastefully large. However, the fourth processor is small enough that L’Abominable filmmakers can make use of it, and will.

Machines like this are the cornerstone on which film-laboratory work has always rested. From cinema’s earliest days, most lab employees learned on the job. Some had backgrounds in chemistry or engineering, and there were some training courses, but you didn’t need a university or technical degree to do the work. For the most part, you needed to know the formulas and techniques, which you repeated across years, or a career. The same is true at L’Abominable, where learning also hinges on technology, as more experienced members of the lab teach novitiates how to use the processors, printers, and cameras. A retired Éclair color grader acknowledged these affinities in 2022, when he accompanied the newspaper Libération through the disused laboratories. He found the experience overwhelming—in his words, “like seeing a woman who’d left me”—but it also felt right to him that L’Abominable would move into the former Éclair. The knowledge that had been abandoned in the early 2000s, left on the curb with the printers and processors, was back where it belonged.

The color grader’s emotion is understandable. Today, few film factories are doing what they used to do. Cameras aren’t made anymore at the former Debrie factory in Paris’s 11th arrondissement; there’s a convenience store on the ground floor. In Binghamton, New York, you can rent a light-filled loft in the old Ansco camera plant, whose facade still proudly bears the company’s name. The same is true of Kodak’s Berlin factory, which has also been transformed into luxury apartments, surrounded by streets still named things like An der Filmfabrik (At the Film Factory) and Am Filmlager (At the Film Warehouse). The future Navire Argo is an exception. Under L’Abominable’s watch, a section of the Éclair laboratories is not only returning to its original function, but also assuming some of the multipurpose identity that made Éclair so central to the film industry in the first place. Part of this has to do with the machines that L’Abominable has amassed over the years, which already allow it to accommodate a film’s entire postproduction workflow, up to the release print and laser subtitling. When the Navire Argo is finished, its work will extend to photochemical film’s projected and archival lives.

It’s an exciting position to be in for the filmmakers, but also a precarious one. There are the finances, for one thing. Since it is open to all, the lab is organized as a nonprofit; most of its funding comes from state sources, and those aren’t guaranteed. L’Abominable has partly crowdfunded the money to build the Navire Argo, and they still need donations. Beyond this is the fragile ecosystem in which all film laboratories operate—not just artist-run ones. Because this ecosystem depends on film, it also depends on Kodak, which still makes the vast majority of the world’s motion-picture stock. The existence of film laboratories has always been inextricably tied to the fortunes, and whims, of film manufacturers. In the 1920s, Kodak attempted to buttress its monopoly by buying up U.S. laboratories, supplying them exclusively with its film, and threatening independent laboratories with unwinnable competition if they tried to buy from any other company. When a 1954 antitrust suit forced Kodak to make its processing formulas public, Powers writes, the number of independent labs in the country grew fivefold.

For filmmakers today, however, the question isn’t which company’s film to use. It’s whether to use film at all, which makes things even more uncertain. The big directors with their massive productions, like the Nolans and the Tarantinos, help keep Kodak in business and laboratories running. So do archives: in the U.S., a significant amount of lab work comes from agencies like the National Film Preservation Foundation, which is committed to restoration and preservation on film (more stable, over the long term, than digital formats). In France, the L’Abominable filmmakers are part of an effort to have photochemical film practice—all of its parts, from making film to projecting it—recognized by UNESCO as a form of intangible cultural heritage.

If the Navire Argo allows us to divine a future for film, these last two efforts might be key. Preserving films, and preserving the practice itself, are reasons enough to keep making celluloid. Yet an industry built on these pillars wouldn’t look like what brought Robert Altman to Eclair 40 years ago. Untethered from commercial cinema’s logics of volume and profit, this industry may be smaller, less vulnerable to shifts in the market, and as a result, more sustainable. L’Abominable would be happy with that. In its manifesto for the Navire Argo, the lab emphasizes that the project is about “knowledge and possibilities.” L’Abominable has been imagining these possibilities for 30 years, and in the Navire Argo, they’ll be imagined all over again in another 35. Thirty-five years is a long time, but that’s the point. The film factory is dead. Long live the film factory.

The author thanks Thomas Aschenbach, Emmanuel Falguières, Gary Griffin, Nicolas Rey, and Vincent Terlizzi for interviews and conversations crucial to this article.

Alice Lovejoy is a professor of film and media studies at the University of Minnesota, and a former member of Film Comment’s editorial staff. She is the author of Tales of Militant Chemistry: The Film Factory in a Century of War (University of California Press, 2025).