It is renowned that since its invention in the late XIX century, totalitarian regimes have always had foresight and great regard for cinema as a means of influencing masses, both openly and more subtly, using all techniques of persuasion. Benito Mussolini defined cinematography as “the strongest weapon” to emphasize its importance as a tool for ideological control during his fascist regime. The quote used by the Italian Duce is actually from Lenin, willingly adopted by the fascist and Nazi commands because of the ability of totalitarian regimes to exchange sure-to-work methods of coercion.

As well, it is notorious the lasting history of entrenchments of chemistry with war. Homeric texts mention poisonous ointments used to make arrowheads lethal since the Trojan War. In 1516, the Italian poet Ludovico Ariosto, author of the romance epic Orlando Furioso, wrote a remarkable passage to blame the use of firearms, at that time newly invented and revolutionizing medieval warfare. He considered gunpowder as an infernal technology that nullifies dexterity favouring in battles brutality and chaos. Since then, warfare has witnessed an increasingly widespread and systematic use of chemical agents. These can be weapons in themselves, like Yperite (Mustard gas) experimented in trench warfare during WWI, Zyklon B gas found apt for the ‘final solution’ in the Nazi camps, and Napalm and Orange agent spread in the Vietnam war. Chemicals play a major role in modern war also feeding weaponry, to prepare and run more strength weapons. Examples are the key role played by the oilfields of Baku (Azerbaijan) in sustaining the victory of the Soviet army against Germany during WWII, or the many chemical passages castoff to separate fissile nuclides and produce atomic bombs.

Alice Lovejoy has little doubts: as well as propaganda, all kinds of chemical industry are well-integrated components of modern warfare, and film industry incorporates the worst aspects of both enrolments. This authoress is a media and cultural historian at the University of Minnesota; her research examines governmental and institutional media technologies; she also signed Army Film and the Avant Garde: Cinema and Experiment in the Czechoslovak Military (Indiana University Press, 2015). With Tales of a militant chemistry, centered on film’s factories, she offers an amazing perspective on the connections of the chemical sector of analogic photo-media with warfare from WWI to the nuclear era.

Focusing on enterprises that led worldwide film production since the end of the XIX century, and exploiting on a thorough reconstruction of past events, interviews, war archives, and classified documents – the Bibliography and Index sections extend over 76 pages – Lovejoy’s book shows that behind the glamour of cinema, and beyond its use as a hidden power, lied a darker truth. That synthetic world of film and fibers shared roots with the most obscene employments of technological resources in war and relied on environmental violence and colonialism from Africa to Ukraine to grab raw materials. “This is a book about film as a weapon – not in its images or sounds, but in its chemistry”, Lovejoy clarifies in the Introduction (p.2).

The manuscript is made of two parts. Part one, Building, develops in two chapters (The Film Factory, and Story of a Tree) a thoughtful historical approach to the chemical industry technical progress, along with its political involvements in the late XIX and early XX century. At the heart of this story, we find America’s Eastman Kodak and Germany’s Agfa, two giants of photographic technology whose chemical empires were part of the machinery of violence accompanying the world conflicts and cold war. Lovejoy presents an acute historical matching of their separated although similar roles for the surge of economic nationalism in USA and in Germany. Kodak and Agfa were photographic monopolies; they were also key players in militarized state economics. Their parallel histories address what emerges when industry, government, and military interests intersect and their roles converge as part of a larger agenda based on warfare; a case study of the military-industrial complex.

The Eastman Kodak Plant of Rochester (NY) is the first location focused on by Lovejoy. Founded in 1883 by George Eastman to make cameras and plates coated by photosensitive emulsions, its destiny has mirrored the second major character of the book: the rival plant of Agfa in Wolfen, near to Leipzig, East Germany – now an Industry and Film Museum. The destinies of these two factories, on the opposite sides of the Atlantic, are difficult to disentangle. In time of peace as in time of war, they made many of the same products, struggled and competed to sell them throughout the world and to make them better and faster. “AGFA began as a dye maker” – Lovejoy writes – “Its name stands for Aktien-Gesellschaft für Anilin-Fabrication (roughly, joint-stock company for aniline manufacturing), and aniline, made from coal tar, is the chemical basis of dyes. In the late nineteenth century, after chemists discovered that dyes could both tint fabric and sensitive photographic surfaces to light, Agfa entered the photographic business” (p. 5).

Chapter 2, Story of a tree, describes the involvement that brought Eastman Kodak Company in 1942 to a project that dwarfed anything it had made before: “Tennessee Eastman was a specialist in chemical engineering” – Lovejoy writes and – “(…) chemical engineering took center stage in the Manhattan Project”. “Uranium was an unfamiliar material for Tennessee Eastman, – she continues – but not for Kodak, which for years had used uranium nitrate, a salt, as a toner” (p. 66). It was eventually at the nearby Oak Ridge National Laboratory, where the Army Corps of Engineers established as part of the Manhattan Project, that uranium minerals collected from the infamous mines of Shinkolobwe (Katanga, Belgian Congo) were refined as basic constituents of atomic bombs by Eastman scientists and technicians, many of whom had spent their careers just thinking about film.

Lovejoy also describes the urge of continuing production that dominated in Kodak and Agfa plants in the middle of WWII. When the Reich was definitely defeated – she explains – Kodak raised technologically and commercially also thanks to the high-level planned seizing of the German renowned and appreciated production: “Agfa was the vanquished enemy. Its products had been pivotal to the chemistry of war, and Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin had agreed at Yalta to eliminate Germany’s military capacity” (p. 93).

Part two, Unraveling, enlarges the perspective along three chapters (Taking Stock, Fallout, and A Fine Line) drawing the uninterrupted although out-of-sight connections of film industry with war-economy. As you leaf through these pages, the glitz and glamour of Hollywood take on a darker tone when associated with war and environmental devastation. Media technology can no longer remain considered for just its cultural contribute as it shaped modern visions by ruling reality making while its manufacturing was inseparable from the military-industrial complex. Since cameras, film, and photographic chemicals depended on colonial mining and imperial logistics, control of their production chain was included in tactical preparations. In a period of scarcity, immediately after WWII, Lovejoy highlights the high number of expert technicians sent by Kodak in the occupied Germany with support by federal agencies, either to contribute to pillage of technological goods and expertise, or to serve as propaganda officers. In both cases, film industry was a primary target.

In the same chapter (Taking stock), she notes how “from autumn 1945 to summer 1946, nearly thirteen million frames of microfilms were sent to Washington” (p. 111), in a paranoid attitude towards recording and collecting secrets from the previously flourishing German industrial production. By focusing on the materials and chemicals that made filmmaking possible, an original and surprising perspective gradually emerges on the intertwined histories of knowledge, culture, and warfare strategies.

In chapter 4, Fallout, Lovejoy remarks how the sensitivity of photographic films to radionuclide emissions made them accountable as marker of radioactive contamination. She tackles this issue recalling the advent of a phenomenon named black spots or fogging, i.e. clear and indelible marks of nuclear radiation on photosensitive pellicles, first observed at Rochester plants in November 1951. The United States was speeding up its nuclear experiments project in response to Soviet Union’s first bomb test, which occurred earlier than analysts had anticipated. Rochester was thousands of miles away from Nevada U.S. testing grounds, but due to the local weather on the Ontario Lake, it became a trap for atmospheric fallout from nuclear explosions. Geologists know that lake sediments are sentinels of weather changes, and the radioactive marks accumulated on the lakebed had the same chronology of those remained onto the film surface. The Atomic Energy Commission involved by Kodak to solve the issue ended in admitting that fallout was the main cause of fogging, and accepted to give photographic industry advance warning of weapons tests – while Rochesterians were, simply, told not to worry.

The fogging observed on unexposed films in 1951 was among the early evidences of the Anthropocene era: “As fallout turned Kodak’s factories into a de facto nuclear monitoring network, spots and fogging on this emulsion became markers of the atomic age” (p. 124). While a new era of development was emerging from comedies, cartoons and documentaries worldwide developed on Kodak’s product “quietly, chemically, however, the film on which they were printed was chronicling the world that companies like Kodak helped create, – Lovejoy remarks – a world marked by the joint upheavals of the Cold war and Anthropocene” (p. 124).

In the last chapter, A Fine Line, Lovejoy explores how those early XX-century trade battles and the associated economic nationalism strategies laid the groundwork for today’s industrial policy debates. A similar tough look is necessary to unravel modernity along with its heavy stuff of visual electronics, and recognize the destructive, dangerous, and cruel aspects inherent to current technologies, yet based on critical chemical resources as it was for analog devices until digital prevailed. “We know well that our phones and computers and the batteries on which they run depend on metals and minerals that grow scarcer with each new machine and its planned obsolescence” – she concludes – “Their extraction depends on dangerous, vastly undercompensated labor, the backbone of a global economy that is still – not unlike when Kodak and AGFA built their photographic empires – shot through with violence and inequity and inseparable from war” (p. 169).

Tales of Militant Chemistry is an unusual contribution to the history of the twentieth century. Its outcomes surpass the authoress’s usual skills, more trained in filmmaking and providing international film critics as curator and editor. Examining the relationships with the military and politics of image making industry and assessing that film’s chemical plants employed the same compounds of explosives, poisons, and nuclear tools, Lovejoy reveals the film industry's dual connection to war and its surprising status as an icon of a sinful strategic enterprise, more so than many others in modernity.