Tales of Militant Chemistry
The Film Factory in a Century of War
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- $19.99
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- $19.99
Publisher Description
The untold story of film as a chemical cousin to poison gas and nuclear weapons, shaped by centuries of violent extraction.
The history of film calls to mind unforgettable photographs, famous directors, and the glitz and hustle of the media business. But there is another tale to tell that connects film as a material to the twentieth century’s history of war, destruction, and cruelty.
This story comes into focus during World War II at the factories of Tennessee Eastman, where photographic giant Kodak produced the rudiments of movie magic. Not far away, at Oak Ridge, Kodak was also enriching uranium for the Manhattan Project—uranium mined in the Belgian Congo and destined for the bomb that fell on Hiroshima. While the world’s largest film manufacturer transformed into a formidable military contractor, across the ocean its competitor Agfa grew entangled with Nazi Germany’s machinery of war. After 1945, Kodak’s film factories stood at the front lines of a new, colder war, as their photosensitive products became harbingers of the dangers of nuclear fallout.
Following scientists, soldiers, prisoners, and spies through Kodak’s and Agfa’s global empires, Alice Lovejoy links the golden age of cinema and photography to colonialism, the military-industrial complex, radioactive dust, and toxic waste. Revelatory and chilling,Tales of Militant Chemistry shows how film became a weapon whose chemistry irrevocably shaped the world we live in today.
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This labyrinthine account from media studies scholar Lovejoy (Army Film and the Avant Garde) examines the many ways in which the mass production of film—a complex chemical process—is entangled in the wider history of heavy industry, from mining to nuclear weapons to "rayon, plastics, and cigarettes." She begins in 1889 at Kodak's factory in Rochester, N.Y., where film was made from "an admixture of animal hides and bones, trees, cotton, coal, camphor, salts and silver." Access to these raw materials allowed Kodak to expand into producing glue and food-grade gelatins. From there, Lovejoy aims to tell a story of "film as a weapon"—not "in its images or sounds, but in its chemistry"—tracing how Kodak's Tennessee factory was used to refine uranium for the Manhattan Project. A similar story played out across the Atlantic, as Kodak's German competitor Agfa produced chemical weapons during WWI and rayon for military purposes (using concentration camp labor) during WWII. Lovejoy's reckoning focuses on social history as well, as she notes that "factories are more than their products"; they are "intersections of people and materials" that "mean jobs and community." Pulling from dozens of archives and interviews, Lovejoy brings this social history to life, spotlighting figures from Michigan lumberjacks to MIT-trained engineers. Sprawling and full of unexpected turns, it's a rewarding deep dive.
