Tales of Militant Chemistry: The Film Factory in a Century of War

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. (Aug.)