Co-sponsored by the Center for German and European Studies (CGES) and Center for Visual Culture and Performance Studies.
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, and cotton, on which cinema’s play of light and shadow depends. It does so through the case of Nazi Germany, examining the Agfa film company’s embrace of the fascist politics of autarky (material and economic self-sufficiency). Tracking political and scientific debates about the materials Agfa used to make its film, as well as the histories of labor that shaped the same film, the talk considers the links between the chemical industry, autarky, and empire. It also draws lessons about media and its geopolitics that extend from 20th century fascist Europe, to the midcentury United States, to the global present.
Alice Lovejoy is Professor of Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature and Moving Image, Media, and Sound at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities, where she also directs the Center for Austrian Studies. She is the author of Tales of Militant Chemistry: The Film Factory in a Century of War (University of California Press, 2025), the award-winning Army Film and the Avant Garde: Cinema and Experiment in the Czechoslovak Military (Indiana University Press, 2015), and co-editor of Remapping Cold War Media: Institutions, Infrastructures, Translations (Indiana University Press, 2022). Her co-edited volume on the global history of film stock is forthcoming from University of Minnesota Press.