Lecture by Dr. Alice Lovejoy (University of Minnesota): “Eastman Kodak, Tennessee Eastman, and Film’s Militant Chemistry in the New South”

We often think of cinema’s politics as matters of subject and style, distribution and reception. This talk, however, locates them in film’s raw materials—in substances like silver, gelatin, cotton, and wood, on which cinema’s play of light and shadow depends. It does so through the early history of the Tennessee Eastman Corporation (Kingsport, Tennessee)—for much of the 20th century, Eastman Kodak’s primary chemical subsidiary. Following Tennessee Eastman from its post-World War I founding in a half-built government wood alcohol plant through its transformation into the home of Kodak’s cellulose acetate safety film and a major rayon manufacturer, Lovejoy explores how political, economic, racial, and environmental dynamics in the New South shaped Kodak’s and Tennessee Eastman’s histories as both film manufacturers and chemical manufacturers. Lovejoy locates this chemical history of film within a broader history of military, colonial, and environmental violence that extends from the Great War to the Cold War. 

Sponsored by the Department of Theatre and Film, the Willson Center's Interdisciplinary Modernisms Workshop, and the Department of Communication Studies. 

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.