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.
Professor Lovejoy's talk will be followed by a response by Rachel Hutcheson, Visiting Assistant Professor at the Rochester Institute of Technology.Please RSVP to comparativemedia@columbia.edu to receive the pre-circulated readings (and to receive access to campus, for non-Columbia affiliates).
Alice Lovejoy is Professor in the Department of Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature and the Program in Moving Image, Media, and Sound at the University of Minnesota, and a former editor at Film Comment. She is the author of Tales of Militant Chemistry: The Film Factory in a Century of War (University of California Press, 2025) as well as the award-winning Army Film and the Avant Garde (Indiana University Press, 2015). With Mari Pajala, she edited the volume Remapping Cold War Media (Indiana University Press, 2022), and her co-edited volume Film Stock: An International History of a Sensitive Medium is forthcoming from the University of Minnesota Press. Her research has been supported by, among others, Fulbright, Fulbright-Hays, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Howard Foundation, and the Cain Distinguished Fellowship at the Beckman Center for the History of Chemistry.
Rachel Lee Hutcheson is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor in the College of Art and Design at the Rochester Institute of Technology. She received her PhD in Art History from Columbia University in 2024. Her research interests include histories of perception, photography, film and video, as well as media theory. Her dissertation, “Natural Color Photography, 1890-1920,” engages with the relationship between color, color vision, and photo-filmic technology at the turn of the twentieth century. Her research has been published in Grey Room and will appear in forthcoming issues of 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century as well as PhotoResearcher. Her writing on contemporary art has also appeared in Millennium Film Journal.
This event is supported by the University Seminars at Columbia University and the Society of Fellows and Heyman Center for the Humanities.