Alice Lovejoy, Tales of Militant Chemistry: The Film Factory in a Century of War University of California Press 256 page, 5.5 x 8.5, ISBN: 9780520402935
Alice Lovejoy
On Tales of Militant Chemistry: The Film Factory in a Century of War
Interview of
November 4, 2025
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Aaron Fraher
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In a nutshell
This book asks what happens when we take something we’re familiar with and consider it, in an unfamiliar light. The “thing” in question is film: not films, the things we watch in cinemas or on our tablets, but the strips of celluloid that you might load into a camera or project onto a screen. We usually think of film in connection with culture or art, information or entertainment, but Tales of Militant Chemistry looks at film as part of the chemical industry.
If we think of film in this way, it starts to look very different. For example, when we focus on the raw materials that are used to make film, we can see how closely this medium of image and sound is related to other chemical products that have nothing to do with images, and nothing to do with sound, but that are made from the same substances. Take gelatin. Gelatin is used in photographic emulsion—the viscous substance that lies on top of the celluloid in film, making it sensitive to light—and it’s made of animal bones and hides. But these bones and hides can be used to make other things: glue, for example, and food-grade gelatin, which is less refined than photographic gelatin. In this way, we can see how closely film is linked to practices, materials, and industries that extend beyond “cinema” or “photography.”
One of the places where these industries, materials, and practices meet is the factory. The book is rooted in two film factories that, throughout their histories, made much more than film: the Tennessee Eastman Corporation (Eastman Kodak’s primary chemical subsidiary for most of the 20th century, now known as Eastman Chemical) and Agfa’s factory in the eastern German town of Wolfen. These factories’ product lines included film, but also things like rayon and plastics, and both factories were involved in manufacturing weapons. This part of the story is at the book’s heart. On one hand, I tell the little-known story of Tennessee Eastman’s and Eastman Kodak’s deep involvement with the Manhattan Project, operating the Y-12 uranium separation plant at Oak Ridge. On the other hand, I trace Agfa’s involvement with poison gas during World War I, and, during World War II, with Nazi Germany’s system of concentration camps and forced industrial labor.
The factory also gets us to the question of how I’d like the book to be read. As I write in the introduction,
“factories are more than their products. They’re intersections of people and materials, science and politics, industry and money.”
Tales of Militant Chemistry follows all of this—people, materials, scientific knowledge, politics, money—through, and beyond, factories like Tennessee Eastman and Agfa-Wolfen, often in stories that stretch across the globe. I’d like the book to be read through these stories, and especially through the people in the stories—because they underscore the humanity and the drama (tragedy, often, but on rare occasions also comedy) that plays out in a place like the film factory.
The wide angle
This book is tied to two threads in my previous work. I studied filmmaking in college, and have long been fascinated by film as a physical medium: what it feels like, what it smells like, how it changes when we process or expose it in a certain way—questions that mostly have to do with chemistry. Second, much of my research has focused on the intersections between film and the military, and my first book explored the emergence of an experimental film culture in the socialist Czechoslovak Army’s film studio. When I came across a mention, in the archives, of Kodak’s work for the Manhattan Project, it brought these threads together.
These threads are linked to some of the larger ideas the book relates to. Thinking of film and the military, for example—not war films, but film as something that has, since its earliest years, been entwined with military industries, institutions, and cultures—emphasizes how limiting traditional definitions of “film” can be. This is an idea that film and media historians have explored over the past two decades or so, by looking at film and media practices and cultures that on first glance seem to have little to do with “entertainment” or “communication” or “art,” but play crucial roles in our world. Tales of Militant Chemistry takes this line of thinking in a slightly different direction. It postpones the idea of a finished film (again, something we might watch in a cinema) and thinks instead of how what’s often called “raw” film has shaped the world—and, in turn, how it has been shaped by the world.
Thinking of film as a “raw” substance also emphasizes its physical dimensions, which points to another set of ideas with which the book is in dialogue. These have to do with what’s often called materiality in the humanities and social sciences. Materiality is a big tent. It encompasses things like physical materials and characteristics, as well as social, political, economic, and environmental questions. In this book, I’m interested in tracing the historical relationships between these aspects of film’s materiality. In particular, the book holds that looking at things like the gelatin, cotton, silver, coal, and wood (some of film’s raw materials), and the ways they were sourced, processed, moved, and sold, reveals not just new industrial aspects of film’s history, but also a larger history of military, colonial, racial, and environmental violence. This is a history that exceeds any kind of national framework—that is, it isn’t only a Kodak history or a US history; it is a history that was always transnational, and must be narrated in this way.
A close-up
One of my favorite passages in the book comes in the third chapter, which looks at Agfa’s German factories (particularly the Wolfen factory) during the weeks and months after World War II, when they became key sources of war reparations for both the Western Allies and the Soviet Union. During this chaotic period, when German film technologies, raw materials, chemical formulas, and often scientists were being moved West and East in service of Allied goals, a rather comical meeting occurred between two Agfa employees, Bruno Uhl and Fritz Felber; Elmer W. Prince, an American military officer who had recently been (and would again become) the city manager of Morgantown, West Virginia; and Bruno Uhl’s wife, Greti. The four were discussing the transfer of silver and gelatin for film and photographic paper between former Agfa factories in the American and British occupation zones. Uhl and Felber found themselves continually having to explain to Prince what the materials were for (silver, for instance, wasn’t a form of currency; it was for photographic materials, and gelatin was for film, not food). Prince found himself confounded by these uses.
It’s a wonderful passage because it underscores how conditional the meanings behind film’s raw materials were, and still are—how these materials take on completely different kinds of value in different industrial and political contexts, which is one of the book’s larger arguments. The passage is also wonderful because the four figures’ dialogue was captured in full by a transcriptionist, giving us a rare image of how the chaos in postwar Germany played out on the level of conversational misunderstandings. There are mispronunciations and interjections, interruptions and asides. In places, it reads like Abbott and Costello’s “Who’s on First.” And it’s a testament to the importance of archivists’ work, and archival sources more generally (the book is based on research in more than two dozen archives), in reconstructing histories like these.
Lastly
We could think of this in a few ways. First, the histories traced in this book put debates about contemporary media into perspective. For instance, we know that our smartphones and computers cannot run without resources extracted through dangerous, precarious labor. These metals and minerals are finite, and they are fraught with questions of power. Cobalt for our smartphones is mined in the same province of Congo where uranium for the atomic bomb was once mined. Ukraine was recently forced to promise the US rare earths in exchange for military support. Tales of Militant Chemistry shows that these present-day events are a chapter in a longer story, one that stretches back, in part, to film, whose factories didn’t only shape cinema’s golden age; they helped create the chemical age, in which toxic waste, forced labor, and proliferating weapons were inseparable from industrial society’s dependence on mass-produced materials like film.
At the same time, the book tells a cautionary tale about the consequences of military-industrial entanglements. This comes out in the fourth chapter, which explores what happened in the early 1950s, when nuclear testing sped up rapidly around the world. In early 1951, after tests had begun in Nevada, Kodak’s Rochester, NY factory began finding tiny spots of radiation in its finished, unexposed film—spots that damaged the film to the point that it couldn’t be sold. From its experience after the Trinity test in 1945, Kodak knew that the spots must have been created by radioactive fallout, and it alerted Atomic Energy Commission. The AEC didn’t believe Kodak at first; it thought Rochester was too far away from the test site. But it was eventually convinced to send a team to investigate, and that team found that Kodak was correct. Soon, the agency had made a deal with Kodak and other photographic manufacturers to give them advance warning of nuclear tests—warnings that communities around these film factories didn’t receive.
This is a relatively well-known story, and it was the subject of heated debate in Congress in 1997, when it first came to light (Iowa senator Tom Harkin put it bluntly: “The Government protected rolls of film, but not the lives of our kids.” But Tales of Militant Chemistry draws a link between these early-1950s events and Kodak’s work for the Manhattan Project. During the war, Kodak and Tennessee Eastman operated one of the largest industrial installations at Oak Ridge; they separated uranium used in the bomb dropped over Hiroshima on August 6, 1945. Half a decade later, the same kind of weapon brought fallout across the country to Kodak’s film factories, damaging the company’s products and—as the company noted—its bottom line. The government stepped in to protect Kodak, but in many ways, it was too late, and not only for Kodak: film and atomic weapons were already tied tightly together.
