Guest Lecture
A Chemical History of Film: Kodak and the Manhattan Project
Prof. Alice Lovejoy (University of Minnesota)
Alice Lovejoy is a film, media, and cultural historian whose research examines governmental and institutional media in transnational perspective. Her first book, Army Film and the Avant Garde: Cinema and Experiment in the Czechoslovak Military (Indiana University Press, 2015), was named co-winner of the Modern Language Association’s 2018 Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Studies in Slavic Languages and Literatures. It was also awarded Honorable Mention for the 2016 University of Southern California Book Prize in Literary and Cultural Studies (ASEEES) and the 2017 Czechoslovak Studies Association Book Prize, and longlisted for the 2016 Kraszna-Krausz Moving Image Book Award. This book traces the emergence of an experimental film culture in the Czechoslovak Army’s film studio (1929-1969), and includes a DVD of thirteen short films produced by the Czechoslovak Ministry of Defense.
Lovejoy’s lecture presents material from her book project entitled Militant Chemistry: Film and its Raw Materials. Her book is a history of film stock from the turn of the twentieth century through the early Cold War. Following film and its components between the United States, Germany, Britain, Eastern Europe, and Francophone African colonies, the book situates the material and its manufacturing within the chemical industry, and considers its entwining with violence of various kinds—military, political, colonial, and environmental.
For more information on Prof. Alice Lovejoy, please click here.
Prof. Lovejoy’s guest lecture kicks off the new lecture series “Media, Culture, Technology.”
The talk is a Zoom online event and will take place on Tuesday, January 18, 2022 from 6:00 pm – 7:30 pm.
Everyone is welcome to attend – just follow this link to join the lecture.
Organizer: Prof. Dr. Patrick Vonderau