Tales of Militant Chemistry
Alice Lovejoy
Univ. of California Press, $27.95
Despite the digitalization of pictures and movies, some cinephiles and moviemakers still favor film. For instance, Christopher Nolan’s 2023 blockbuster Oppenheimer, a thriller about the theoretical physicist who oversaw the Manhattan Project to develop the first atomic bomb, was shot on Kodak’s 70 millimeter film. But few of that movie’s fans know what a significant role Kodak itself played in the Manhattan Project.
In Tales of Militant Chemistry: The Film Factory in a Century of War, media and cultural historian Alice Lovejoy unveils how some of the biggest players in the photographic film industry moonlighted in arms manufacturing in the