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Alice Lovejoy, "Tales of Militant Chemistry: The Film Factory in a Century of War" (U California Press, 2025)
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Podcast Host (Sponsor Announcer)
Welcome to the New Books Network.
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Caleb Zakrin
I'm Caleb Zakrin, editor of the New Books Network. Today I'm speaking with Alice Lovejoy, professor of Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature at the University of Minnesota. We're discussing Alice's book, Tales of Militant the Film Factory in a Century of War. Tales of Militant Chemistry is an inventive work of history that traces how the chemical innovations behind film production contributed to the production of weapons like the atomic bomb. Alice, thanks for joining me today on the New Books Network.
- [02:13]
Alice Lovejoy
Thanks for having me. It's great to be here.
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Caleb Zakrin
I'm really thrilled to have this conversation. It's just a subject that frankly I knew so little about. Kodak as one of those companies that, you know, growing up as like a dying company, like I I think, you know, you film photography is just not something that I really experienced beyond maybe like the vintage hipster aspect of, you know, Polaroid photography and Kodak ba, You know, being a brand in that. But, you know, obviously it's one of these. One of these, you know, quote unquote, great American companies. And I think you do a really fascinating job here just of, kind of laying out the history of the company, comparing it to the German competitors and just its role in American military history. But before even jumping into the book, I was wondering if you could just tell us a little about yourself and your background.
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Alice Lovejoy
First of all, thanks for the really kind words about the book. I am a professor, as you've said, of cultural studies and comparative literature and moving image at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. And I came to this project with a background both in film criticism and in filmmaking, which I think is really important to how the book shaped up. Because when you're working in filmmaking, and I'm thinking here of photochemical filmmaking, you spend a lot of time thinking about the material, about what kind of film you're going to use, how it responds to light, you know, how to process it in particular ways. And so this is a book that's very much about film and all of its characteristics. And so I think that set this up in really interesting ways.
- [03:37]
Caleb Zakrin
Yeah, absolutely. And you write in the book that you even have a distant relative, one that you. You, you didn't know, but that was an early executive of Kodak. I was wondering if you could just share a little bit about that and your connection to the company.
- [03:50]
Alice Lovejoy
Yes, this is absolutely unexpected in the book. So Frank Lovejoy, who shares my last name, was president of the company during World War II, which is a period I focus on in the book. And he started with Kodak really early on, in the beginning of the 20th century. He was a chemical engineer. He had studied at mit, worked in Boston, and then made his way up to Rochester to make film, which is something that he hadn't studied himself but was willing to try and became a very important figure in the company's history. There aren't many Lovejoys around, and so some genealogical digging showed up that we are related sort of way back. And it puts all this in a different perspective. Of course, it puts family history in a new perspective and it also puts the company's history in a new perspective. But, you know, Kodak was such a large company. It still is a large company, but was so much larger at its peak. And I've met so many people in various places who do have relatives who used to work for it in one place or another. So you get a sense of scale when you realize just how much it seeps into so many different lives.
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Caleb Zakrin
It was truly a behemoth and constantly expanding. And you're right about how it essentially had this monopoly and it caused, because of its monopoly, caused it to expand into raw materials and other types of production. That is essentially the subject of the book. But before going into, you know, this. This aspect, you know, once it's already at the top, I was wonder if you just tell us a bit about George Eastman, the company's founder.
- [05:18]
Alice Lovejoy
Yeah. So George Eastman is somebody who, you know, like many executives, but perhaps more so than others, is very, very personally associated with Kodak, especially in its early years. So he founded the company in the late 19th century. He passed away and I believe in the early 1930s. And throughout his life time when the company existed, he was extremely invested in it, down to the level of seeking out raw materials himself, figuring out which suppliers were the best, thinking about technical processes, thinking about machines, thinking about employees. It was very much a company in which his hands were present in, you know, really almost every aspect of it. And so that is. That's part of the story. I mean, it looks at George Eastman as somebody who, on the one hand, was very anxious about competition with Germany, with the German chemical industry, with the German company agfa, and somebody who also was, in his life in general, he had sort of odd hobbies and obsessions. He had a gentleman's farm in North Carolina where he grew cotton with the help of formerly enslaved people. So in Eastman's life, you know, it intersects with many very complex and troubling parts of US History. He was a supporter of the eugenics movement, like many businessmen and reformers of his day. Again, he grew cotton at his farm in North Carolina, and he was very involved with anti union activities at Kodak as well. So you can see the traces of the person in many different aspects of the company's history of the founder.
- [06:59]
Caleb Zakrin
Really, the very early days of Kodak, they're producing, you know, this, this compound, you know, working with some very explosive compounds. And that was a huge element of it. Can you just talk about, like, the very early products that they were making and, and, and you know, how they were so dangerous and what that sort of meant for the development of early film.
- [07:20]
Alice Lovejoy
Yeah, so the product I think you're thinking of is cellulose nitrate film. And this is a kind of film that's still used today in smaller quantities, but was central to the early film industry. And cellulose nitrate film is made from nitrocellulose which is an explosive. It's the same chemical substance, you know, slightly modified for film. And so the early history of cinema is really riddled with these stories of exploding film reels, cinema fires, and also the gas produced by these fires. So when nitrate film burned, it would create a very, very thick gas that was deadly and suffocating. And so a lot of the story the book tells is about this effort to make film safe. And what did it mean to make film safe by developing a kind of film that we now call safety film that can't catch on fire as easily and that doesn't burn as violently as cellulose nitrate, because cellulose nitrate is extremely difficult to extinguish once it catches on fire.
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Caleb Zakrin
You talk about cellulose nitrate and, you know, they were finding other ways to make, you know, safer film. But yet it still seems like the appetite, there's still a strong appetite for this cheap, cheaper, more dangerous film, which obviously like this kind of story of people, you know, preferring the cheaper, dangerous product over the safer, more expensive product is kind of a tale as old as time. Can you talk a little about these efforts to, you know, produce safer film and, and what that looked like?
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Alice Lovejoy
Yes, so it was cheaper at first because there was an economy of scale because there was so much more of it being produced. And it also had real advantages over early safety film. So we're thinking here of the 1910s, more or less, when safety film starts being produced, more film manufacturers around the world, but it is not as good as nitrate film. It's brittle, it tears easily, it's not as durable. So when you think of making a film, you're going to shoot the film on film and then you're going to print it on film. And that reel of film is going to travel from cinema to cinema and, you know, be played in multiple places. And so you want something that's relatively durable, right, that's not going to tear at the sprocket holes or that's not going to get jammed in the projector. And in its early days, cellulose acetate film just wasn't as good as nitrate film. And so it was really a stop and start process of Kodak saying, listen, we, nobody's going to buy this if we, if we manufacture it, this safety film. So we're going to stop manufacturing it and we're going to say that, you know, you should buy cellulose nitrate film instead, because all it's, all we have to do to make it usable is really think about fireproofing in cinemas, but they kept working on it. Companies like Pathe and Agfa across the Atlantic also kept working on it. And early 1920s, Kodak came out with what was called the Cine Kodak system, which was a 16 millimeter camera projector pair. And 16 millimeter, for those who don't know what it is, is a smaller gauge of film. So it's a smaller strip of film. Film is usually 35 millimeters wide for a theatrical projection. So this is smaller. But it was used in home movies. You might have had a 16 millimeter projector in your classroom, things like that. And so the Cinecodec was the first format to use 16 millimeter, which meant of a sudden it was safe to bring cinema into your home. It was safe to make home movies, it was safe to make movies in, you know, your business, et cetera. There had been some smaller formats before this on 9.5 millimeter and 20, 22 and 28 millimeter, but they didn't catch on the same way 16 millimeter did.
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Caleb Zakrin
Yeah, that's, that's really interesting and interesting to think about that, that, you know, the kind of the constraints of, of having film in one's home, considering today of how easy it is to just have a million screens, you know, that, that essentially pose no, you know, physical risk. You, you talk about, about the, you know, the chemicals that were, you know, used to produce it, obviously their danger, but also, you know, that how, how they were acquired. Not only, you know, the American companies trying to, you know, like, like Kodak trying to get these raw materials, but also the German companies. So I sort of could just talk a little bit about how the raw materials were actually, you know, procured for the production of film.
- [11:29]
Alice Lovejoy
Yes. So film is made from numerous, you know, chemical and raw materials. So gelatin is used in the emulsion that goes on top of a strip of celluloid to make it photosensitive. Silver is used in emulsion, but things like cotton go into nitrocellulose and cellulose. Nitrate trees are used to make various chemicals that go into film as well. There's coal that goes into making dyes. And so a lot of these were commodities that weren't, you know, sold or made in the United States or were purchased from elsewhere. And a good example of this is gelatin, which is made of animal hides and bones and was sourced in many cases from South Asia. So from, you know, colonial context in South Asia, or silver might have been mined in the United States and the west, or cotton, of course, from the United States south and elsewhere in the world. And this is something that, again, George Eastman was very involved in, but that was something that brought Kodak and other film companies into international politics in interesting and complicated ways, because the sourcing of materials always involved, for instance, discussions about tariffs. Something that we're seeing today in a very, very clear way, that if you want to be buying German chemicals more cheaply, you're going to want to argue, like George Eastman did, at certain points, for lower tariffs on those chemicals. Or conversely, if you want to stop European companies from sending their films to the United States, you want to argue, as George Eastman also did, for higher tariffs on film coming from Europe. So unexposed film or raw film. So this is one of the points where the book really thinks about how we can think about film's politics. That doesn't have to do with what we see on the screen or hear from the screen. That has to do with how its materials were sourced and how they were processed and used.
- [13:20]
Caleb Zakrin
One thing that you also talk about too is, you know, that the sort of the post World War I experience and the impact that it had on Kodak. So how did World War I affect Kodak's business?
- [13:31]
Alice Lovejoy
World War I was a moment when the United States organic chemical industry really took off. Before then, it hadn't existed to as large a. In as large a scale as it existed in Germany. The German chemical industry was the world's largest. It was the world. It was an exporter as well. And the United States bought a lot of organic chemicals from Germany. But there was the naval blockade of Germany by Britain during the war, which stopped chemicals from going between the two countries. And for companies like Kodak, this was a disaster. It was something that really threatened to stop production altogether because they couldn't get in particular the dyes that made their film sensitive to particular colors of light blue, red, yellow, whatever. And so Kodak, being very good at photochemistry, took this opportunity to really get into making organic chemicals itself. And this happened throughout the United States at this moment, 1915 or so, when the government invested in organic chemistry to sort of prop up the local or the domestic industry when it was suddenly lost its largest source of supply. So this is the moment at which you see Kodak's research laboratory really becoming large and well developed. Really the one of the most important sites for chemical development and chemical experimentation in the United States that would persist throughout the company's history. And you see it developing things that aren't just for photochemistry. So Kodak for instance, starts making a kind of naval fuel for boats that suspends coal and oil and burns more slowly. It helps develop certain kinds of coatings, non flammable cellulose acetate coatings for airplane wings at this point too, which then becomes a major driver behind the eventual growth of non flammable safety film.
- [15:23]
Caleb Zakrin
A big part of the story then is also the creation of the Tennessee Eastman subsidiary. Can you talk about this company and how it transformed Kodak's business?
- [15:32]
Alice Lovejoy
Yes. So Tennessee Eastman, which we now know as Eastman Chemical and is headquartered in Kingsport, Tennessee, was founded in 1920 by Eastman Kodak to be a chemical subsidiary, a methanol subsidiary. Kodak needed methanol wood alcohol to make its flammable film, its cellulose nitrate film. And this was a moment right after Kodak had started to be. It was being not disassembled, but it had been given. There was a consent decree from the Department of Justice that followed an antitrust case against the company which said, you have bought too many competitors. You are obviously aiming to be a monopoly. Remember, this is the moment of Standard Oil, of US Steel. It's a moment when trusts are being dismantled, a moment of trust busting in US History. And so Kodak had been told it couldn't buy competing camera companies, it couldn't buy competing film companies, and yet it still wanted to grow. And so it took this kind of obsession by George Eastman in raw materials and in chemicals, and went in the direction of vertical integration, which means buying companies and factories that make the raw materials the company could use. Now, again, this goes back to your mention of George Eastman because he really was quite personally obsessed with these materials, where they came from, what their quality was. And so it was a fitting move for him to go into vertical integration. So buying a methanol plant in Tennessee, buying a gelatin plant in the North Shore of Boston, et cetera. So Tennessee Eastman starts off in methanol. It's got a lot of trees around it. It's in the Appalachians. It makes lumber and it makes things that can be derived from lumber, like charcoal briquettes, like, like the methanol. But pretty quickly it starts to make other products that can be made from other wood derivatives, things like acetic acid and acetic anhydride, which are two chemicals that are crucial to safety film. So by the end of the 1920s, early 1930s, Tennessee Eastman is a major codex site for producing cellulose acetate, the, the non flammable safety film that would be, you know, go into the Cine Kodak that did already at that point go into the cine codec and from there it went into making rayon. So artificial fibers, silks that were used for clothing, Right?
- [17:46]
Caleb Zakrin
Yeah. It's really interesting how you know, these, you know, different, these various knock on effects of war or blockades, you know, end up really like shaping the business and how it responds and really develops its various like product lines as a result of this kind of knock on effect. I'm also curious too, something that we haven't really discussed, which I think is a really huge part of the book is you look at the German competitors like afgha and I was wondering if you could just talk about these companies, how they compared to Kodak and what their relationship was like to the German government, for example, in the same versus maybe the slightly more contentious relationship that Kodak was having with the, with the US government.
- [18:34]
Alice Lovejoy
Yeah. So AGFA was part. And then after around 1925, it was part of the IG Farben chemical cartel which we know about because it was very, very involved with Nazi Germany's industry. And it was, you know, the cartel kind of rationalized, as they say, the chemical industry in Germany by saying, okay, these companies will take care of pharmaceuticals, these will take care of say fertilizers and Agfa, you'll take care of film and related plastics like rayon. So it was very, especially in the, in the late 20s and the 30s and through World War II, closely involved with the US government. Excuse me, with the German government, where in the case of Kodak the relationship to the US government was there. It was always, you know, strong, but it wasn't as directive. And so that's a difference in those relationships. But agfa, unlike Kodak, started in chemicals and went into film. So we just talked about Tennessee Eastman, about how it started making chemicals for film and then went into chemicals for rayon, for instance, another chemical product. But AGFA started making dyes and then it went into making film because they're related. And During World War II it was a major producer also of rayon fibers for the, for the Nazi government. Which was a moment when, you know, rayon had a very important role to play in World War II because it was another moment where trade was difficult. Right. Because of the war and because of policies of self sufficiency on the part of the German government.
- [20:08]
Caleb Zakrin
Something that you talk about that impacts Kodak quite a bit. But I think is quite interesting when just looking at what's going on in today's world with tariffs, as you look at the impact that tariffs had on Kodak's business. Obviously, you know, as was discussed before, you know, they were importing chemicals from abroad. There was, of course, because of the naval blockade and other reasons, you know, desire to change this, you know, through vertical integration. What impact did the tariffs have compared to, let's say, the naval blockade?
- [20:42]
Alice Lovejoy
The tariffs were something that really came into full view after World War I. So after World War I, Kodak has been told it can't expand anymore. Right. It doesn't have the capacity to sort of buy its competitors at home because of the antitrust suit. And at the same time, the European film industries are recovering from the war. So you have to Remember, World War II is fought in Europe. It really damages the industries in Europe. And companies like Pathet and Agfa haven't really been able to make as much film, if any film for those years of the war. But they started recovering after the war and they started exporting their film to the United States. Now, they were never able to really, really compete with Kodak just because it had such a large manufacturing capacity and already had such a large share of the market. But this is a moment when George Eastman got very anxious about his. About losing parts of his market share to in particular, Agfa. And remember, as I mentioned earlier, he's always been very sort of paranoid about Germany, not because of its politics, but because it has this really excellent chemical industry that he thinks is going to be his competitor. And so he sends an envoy to Congress to argue that putting tariffs on unexposed film, right, film that studios could use or laboratories could use for theatrical film was a matter of national, not national security, but it was a national question. It was a question of supporting a national industry which was really Kodak itself. So we see this rhetoric so clearly right now. We see all this economic nationalism playing out in the second Trump administration, this notion that tariffs are going to solve everything, that it will magically bring manufacturing back to the United States, that it will solve all sorts of political problems as well. But then as now, tariffs are a really blunt instrument. And they also overlook how deeply networked film manufacturing was in those years, just like many, many industries are networked internationally now. Every industry, really. So remember, we're thinking about gelatin that comes from hides and bones that come from different parts of the world. We're think of silver mined in different parts of the world. None of that changes, right? The film, the people who make film, the manufacturers who make film are still getting their supplies from all over the world. Yet Eastman is going in and arguing for These tariffs, which did ultimately go through. So there were high tariffs put on film that was to be imported into the United states in the 1920s on Eastman's biddings.
- [23:19]
Caleb Zakrin
Right. So there's the, you know, this, in photo technology, this, this U.S. german competition. Eventually, obviously, like, you know, the U.S. and Germans end up, end up fighting each other in, in World War II. And, and you look at World War II, what the experience was like. Obviously you've already discussed how, you know, these, these companies, the German company versus, you know, the American company, end up supporting the governments in, with, with a variety of different, different things. Can you talk a little about the German. How photocompany supported the German government and German military during World War II?
- [23:55]
Alice Lovejoy
Yeah. So Rayon is, again, a really big part of this because there's shortages of cotton, there's shortages of wool because they're not being imported or they're being used for military purposes. And so the company's rayon production, specifically it's viscose rayon production. I say that just because it's a word we still see in our clothing today. Right. It's a very common form of. Of ran becomes extremely important to the war. So, you know, it's something that is being made really alongside film in the same factories at the same time. The film that AGFA is making is really central to the propaganda work that the Nazi government is doing. In particular the color film that it develops in its factory in the East German town of Wofen. Agfa color was really the envy of the world during World War II. It was a kind of color film that did things that people hadn't been able to achieve elsewhere. And so this we have to think of as part of the war effort as well, a way in which AGFA was involved with that. And after the war, the formulas for AGVA color become really a spoil of war for the Allies.
- [24:57]
Caleb Zakrin
Right. And then you look at really the interesting ways that Kodak participated in World War II. So I was wondering if you could talk about Kodak's role and also, you know, its role in the Manhattan Project as well. This is, you know, really interesting.
- [25:13]
Alice Lovejoy
So Kodak's work in World War II was work that really built on its work in safety film, the work that Tennessee Eastman began in the 1920s. And so on the one hand, we see the company moving into explosives. In 1942, Tennessee Eastman was asked to build a major plant for manufacturing rdx, which is short for Research Department explosives, and is a kind of explosive that works really well or worked really well against submarines, which at that point in the war, in the Battle of the Atlantic, were a really big problem for the Allies, right? The North Atlantic had many, many U boats in it, and they were losing merchant ships, et cetera, to U boat attacks. So because Tennessee Eastman was very good at making the chemicals acetic acid and acetic anhydride for safety film, they were asked to use those same chemicals to make rdx, this explosive. And, you know, by the end of the year, the company was running what was then the world's largest ammunition plant in Kingsport, Tennessee, which is just something that is just amazing to think about, right, that this film company, as historian Tom Lee, who writes about the region, has put it, was, you know, the world's largest film company running the world's largest ammunition plant. So from the experience with rdx, it became clear that Tennessee was extremely good at putting up plants very quickly and starting to run them almost simultaneously, which was exactly what the Manhattan Project needed at this point in the war, right? There was no time to lose. It was a project where, famously, development and construction and production was sort of happening at the same time. And so a year after the RDX plant got up and running in Kingsport, the Tennessee Eastman and Kodak were asked if they would be interested in operating a plant at the secret city of Oak Ridge. They didn't know what kind of plant it was. They found out at a meeting that it was what would become Y12, the uranium separation plant that ran from the centrifuge process, electromagnetic separation at Oak Ridge. And they said, well, you know, we don't know anything about uranium. This is not anything we have experience in. But what the Manhattan Project was interested again, was this kind of mass production that could be done by a company that was very good at chemical engineering, which Tennessee Eastman was, and that was very good at, again, building and operating plants simultaneously. So that's how Kodak and Tennessee Eastman came to run one of the three big plants at Oak Ridge.
- [27:46]
Caleb Zakrin
So one thing that I, you know, really have not asked that much about, I'm realizing in the courses conversation is, is about the photography aspect of it and, you know, the impact that, you know, photos had. Obviously, you know, in, In World War II, you know, people were taking photos of it. You have photos, photos throughout, you know, photos taken by soldiers, photos taken of, you know, of people going about life, you know, during, during the war. And then, of course, there's also, like the photos of, of the bomb. You know, the, the, the, the way in which it's used to kind of let people Know, like, this is what's going on. You know, we take it for granted, but not everything was being photographed. So could you talk a little about just this, this, you know, what. What impact you see photography and video having on people's understanding of war?
- [28:34]
Alice Lovejoy
I think that's a great question. And, you know, we. We often trace this back to the Civil War, when photography was used widely for the first time. And Certainly World War I was a moment when the motion picture. When motion pictures start to be used as propaganda and as TR becomes much more widespread. World War II is a different order of magnitude. It's just much, much larger in terms of the amount of film that was being used. You might have safety film. Scholars have shown just how central this kind of film was for, again, military training or entertainment or propaganda. All of this was just on a much larger scale. So we have to think about the scale of production that was happening at. At Tennessee Eastman, in particular, with cellulose acetate, safety film, and with the culture around film that is emerging or the uses of film that are emerging in World War II. So that's one way to think about it. But I also think that one of the larger arguments of this book is that we have to think about war and film in a different way, too. We have to think about these substances, the substance of cellulose acetate, for instance, which became safety film, as something that was used for war in different ways. Again, it could be used for, like, plastic parts of jeeps. It could be used for musical instruments that you might have. A soldier might have carried into the field. It could be used in all sorts of different ways that stem, again, from the company's work in film. So this is about broadening out that question. It's also about thinking about how, you know, the histories of imprisonment, of forced labor that played out during the war were part of the history of film in the war. And the AGFA is a really important way to look at this because the film factory there ran on forced labor to a large degree. It ran on the labor of prisoners of war. It ran on the labor of European civilians in territories that were occupied by Germany who were forced to work in German industry. And it ran in concentration camp labor. And that's one of the things that the book traces, is the history of the role that the Ravensbruck and Buchenwald concentration camps played in sending female laborers to work making film and rayon for agfa.
- [30:56]
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- [32:28]
Caleb Zakrin
Something that you talk about that, that is really interesting as well is just, you know, with these, these bombs, you know, with the testing, they, they end up having this, you know, this impact on Kodak. They're, you know, destroying or harming some of their, their products because of the radiation which actually makes it so that, you know, the, they actually have the inside scoop on, you know, when bomb testings are going to take place. Can you talk a little about this and the relationship between Kodak and the Atomic Energy Commission?
- [32:56]
Alice Lovejoy
Yes. So in 1951, when nuclear testing begins in the Nevada desert in the United States, Kodak starts noticing what it calls black spots on its film, which are spots of, it knows pretty quickly of radiation that are appearing on film that hasn't been used yet on unexposed film. And they called the Atomic Energy Commission, they said, listen, we know that after explosions like the Trinity test, radiation traveled and it was, it damaged some of our film. They had shown this back in 1945, 1946, and the atomic Energy said, no, there's no way. Fallout can't travel that far. It's not making it all the way to Rochester, New York from Nevada. But they sent somebody out anyway. And that scientist and their team was able to determine that what Kodak was finding in his film was indeed fallout from the tests. And so Kodak was a pretty powerful actor with the atomic energy at this point. It had run the Y12 uranium separation plant. It was very involved in documenting atomic tests after the war at Bikini Atoll in the Pacific. It was developing films. It was helping develop cameras that were fast enough and sturdy enough to withstand the heat of a bomb blast or the tidal wave that a bomb blast underwater was expected to create. And so the Atomic Energy Commission understood this, right? They understood how central Kodak and other film manufacturers were to the project of building nuclear weapons in the United States. And so they made a deal with the industry, with the photographic industry, where the Atomic Energy Commission would give photographic manufacturers advance warning of weapons tests and a sense of where the winds were projected to travel and where they were projected to bring fallout. So the companies could either stop production or in the case of raw material suppliers, not ship what they were producing to the film companies on that day. So we have a story from the archives in the book of a cotton supplier for Kodak being told on the days when there's fallout, it's fine to send the products to any other company, but don't send them to Kodak, right? Because it's okay if there's. The implication is that it's okay if there's radiation in a shirt button or maybe your glasses or something like that, but it's not okay if there's radiation on film because then it's very, very visible. So this is a complicated story because the same warnings were not given to people who lived around the film factories. They were given to the film industry. People were told, this is not dangerous. This is a matter of film health. That was a word, a term that was used at the time. It's not a matter of people's health. And it was something that, you know, later turned out to be wrong, right? It wasn't just a matter of film health. It was a very serious matter of, you know, planetary health, of people's health of animals, health of environmental health. But at the same time, one of the things that the AEC did note later was that if Kodak hadn't alerted them to the fallout that was appearing in its factories, and this is something they knew about because film is so sensitive to radiation that the nuclear monitoring system, the fallout monitoring system that the country put into place would have taken longer to develop. So there's. There are some complicated and entwined history here, but at the histories here, but at the core of it, it is really a story of the complications of industrial military entwining, right? For Kodak, its history working on the atomic project, working on the bomb, working at Oak Ridge, ultimately became a financial liability for it within very few years.
- [36:38]
Caleb Zakrin
Yeah, it's so terrifying to just think of the, you know, the exposure that, that so many people were having, you know, not just in Japan where the, where the, the bombs were dropped, but like, you know, near these factories, you know, just, you know, people caught in the, in the wrong winds, you know, getting the, getting exposure to radiation without even being aware of it and you know, being at risk of things like cancer without, without knowing. It's just so scary to think about it. And I think that, you know, it's something that you get into a little bit is just, you know, I'm sure this, you know, this helps, helps lay the foundation these fears or, you know, the environmental movement and things like that, you know, the anti nuclear movement. Just this kind of unseen danger. Without asking you to necessarily give like, okay, so what happened over the last 75 years to Kodak? Because Kodak, you know, and Eastman, you know, they're still around, but they're not, they're not what they once, they once were. So, you know, how, how did they, how did Kodak kind of lose its, its, its eminence as this company that was, you know, the kind of the go to, you know, company for the engineer, you know, getting the best engineering minds in the country. You know, how did they sort of lose that mantle? Was it just the, the decline of film and they, they failed to capitalize on a shift to digital?
- [37:57]
Alice Lovejoy
That's generally the story is that they didn't think that the turn to digital would happen as quickly as it did. They actually had, as I understand it, some early digital technologies that were very good, but they didn't get them to market in time and they didn't seize on the moment. Right. They thought they had more time. And so I think that's a big part of the story is this transition to digital. Of course, film is still around. It's still making film, the company is still making film and film is still being used by photographers and cinematographers. But it is a very different kind of a company than it was, you know, 20 years ago, 30 years ago, when it was really kind of unavoidable. You see stories today, right, about, about branding being important and you. There was a story in the New York Times a couple of months ago about Kodak tote bags and T shirts, right, that might be worn, but the film itself may not be used. Right. That everything has gone digital instead.
- [38:52]
Caleb Zakrin
Right? Yeah. There's that scene from Mad Men that I think is so notable of Don Draper coming up with the Kodak moment. I think if I remember correctly, it's been about 15 years since I saw the show, but the name brand recognition of Kodak is still so impactful. There's this line that you have in it that I think is so fascinating and just interesting to think about where you just talk about how, how so many powerful directors still, like Steven Spielberg today, they still only shoot on film. And you say, bringing things full circle. Christopher Nolan's 2023 film Oppenheimer, a story about one of the men behind the Manhattan Project, was shot on Kodak 70 millimeter, the film that requires the largest amount of cellulose acetate, the slow burning substance that led Tennessee Eastman to the atomic bomb. This is just such an interesting thing. And it makes me wonder why was this not a. This could have been a really interesting component of Oppenheimer, you know, the fact or maybe a little too meta. I don't even know how they would bring it in. Bring it in. But it is really interesting to think about, you know, especially Christopher Nolan. Like Christopher Nolan is the Kodak guy. Like he's known for restoring films, you know, bringing like I went to the 2001 A Space Odyssey, 70 millimeter restoration. And this is like a very common thing, you know, so they still, they're kind of like this in film, at least this, you know, this, this very highbrow brand. But you know, for, for you thinking through that, I was wondering if you just comment on that, you know, the, the role, you know, Oppenheimer in culture and just, you know, Kodak's role in, in that film.
- [40:25]
Alice Lovejoy
Yeah, I mean, films like that. So 70 millimeter, it's shot on 65 millimeter, which uses a ton of cellulose acetate because it's really wide film. Right. So you can think of just how much film made by Kodak is going into a very, very long film like that, like Oppenheimer, which is then printed on polyester film, which is, you know, 70 millimeter polyester. And so, you know, the big films about, you know, sort of big figures like Oppenheimer really are keeping Kodak running in many ways. It's extremely important. But yeah, the story of Kodak's work for Manhattan Project isn't visible there. And I think it's an interesting twist to the story. Right. Thinking about how we got to this place from a desire to make films safe, getting to a history that is about absolute unsafety, an absolute lack of safety. Right. With the bomb and with the larger environmental and geopolitical histories, like the health histories, the histories of people dying. Right. That are caught up in it. So Oppenheimer is a great man story. Right? It's a, it's, it's. I know it's about. It's about a person and it's about a scientific project and it's about a certain kind of science. Right. The physics that went into the bomb. But if we look at a different kind of science, there are other stories to tell here. And those stories, some of them lead back to film.
- [41:51]
Caleb Zakrin
Absolutely. I'm wondering for you, too. You know, you mentioned at the very beginning that, you know, you started in, in film criticism and for, for many people that, you know, that do film criticism or are engaged in the film industry, I feel like, you know, they might not have a lot of knowledge of, you know, these companies like Kodak. And I'm wondering for you, like, do you, do you think about film and the industry differently having done this, this study? You know, what is it that you. That you think that people should understand about, you know, maybe like, the material aspects of, you know, this, you know, these art forms that we oftentimes will separate, you know, separate from.
- [42:27]
Alice Lovejoy
I think, you know, it's. It's rare these days to watch a feature film projected on celluloid. You know, most cinemas have turned to digital projection. It is. It's expensive to do it. It's expensive to make a film on film. But celluloid is out there. It's still being made. And I think that's great. You know, I think I've written a book about how it's tied up with chemical weapons and the atomic bomb. But I also don't think we're escaping any of that by turning to digital technologies. The harms are just as is, large and more widespread because digital technology is so ubiquitous.
- [43:04]
Caleb Zakrin
Right.
- [43:04]
Alice Lovejoy
And it's built on a culture of replaceability. Right. Of obsolescence that comes into play very quickly after one gets a device. So I think the question is, what do we do with an industry that we know is so harmful? And does this mean creating a more sustainable, smaller industry? Does it mean finding ways to make films that are. That are different than what we've done before? I'm not sure what the answer is, but I think the answer isn't to do away totally with celluloid because again, digital is not an answer to this. And I do still think that the moving image is important in our world. I think it's an art form and a form of Culture and communication, a mode of politics that. That plays a role in our world that other things can't. And so I don't want to see it disappear.
- [44:02]
Caleb Zakrin
Yeah, there's something about the look of film, the grain, it makes. It makes sense why people who can afford to shoot on film, why they choose to shoot on film. And I think that it actually is a really, from just a purely artistic point of view, it actually is a, you know, a great choice when filmmakers do it. Obviously, there's other things you can do in digital that, you know, you. You might not still be able to do in film. But, you know, when I hear a film, when I hear that a film has been shot on film, see, we call it film, I get excited. It's definitely something that I look forward to. So I, I think, I think the history is really interesting that you go through. But as you said too, like, you know, just there isn't really. It doesn't like digital. Digital technologies are, you know, don't have some up against them either. So I think it's such an interesting history that you've written, and I'm really excited to look to see what you write next. I'm sure you'll find another really interesting topic. So, Alice, thank you so much for being us in the New Books Network again. It was really wonderful to talk with you.
- [45:05]
Alice Lovejoy
Thank you for the excellent interview. It was great to speak with you as well.
- [45:21]
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