Formerly a welding shop for farm equipment, the unobtrusive, white cinderblock structure on four acres of land is now home to the George Eastman Museum’s world class collection of more than 26 million feet of combustible nitrate film.

“I call the building the treasure box,” says Deborah Stoiber, technical director of the Conservation Center. Under its “lid” are 12 vaults, each 1,000 cubic feet, overflowing with the stuff of great cinema.

The collections — 7,000 titles in all — include everything from an 1893 Lumiere film of monks walking up a hill in Indochina, to Alfred Hitchcock’s screen tests, a recently discovered negative of Greta Garbo in Flesh and the Devil (1926),  The Wizard of Oz (1939), Gone with the Wind (1939), Meet Me in St. Louis (1944), Tarzan films of the 1940s, and An American in Paris (1951), the youngest film in the collection. Some of the films are controversial and hard to watch, Stoiber says, like the World War II propaganda films from Nazi Germany.

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