TY - JOUR AU - Lovejoy,, Alice AB - In 1942, soon after the USA entered World War II, the country’s War Production Board curtailed the motion picture industry’s supply of raw film stock. The first months of the war had made it clear that stock manufacturers would be unable to meet rising military demand for the material while continuing to supply the film industry at prewar levels; as a result, most of the industry was limited to seventy-five per cent of the stock it had used before the war. Since the USA supplied much of the world with film stock or its raw materials, the effects of this move rippled outwards – in 1943 Britain too imposed stock rations. Rationing was a source of acute anxiety to wartime film industries and had profound practical and aesthetic effects on filmmaking on both sides of the Atlantic.1 It also, however, precipitated a crucial change in how governments and film industries understood film stock. No longer merely the sine qua non of the entertainment industry, stock became a critical material in the US and British war economies, as the governments made efforts to marshal raw materials, labour and industry for defence production. This discursive shift, which I examine here through the intertwined cases of the Eastman Kodak Company and its UK subsidiary, Kodak Ltd, has implications for how we understand the politics – and geopolitics – of media technologies and materials. Indeed, although film base (the flexible material on which photosensitive emulsion is painted) is commonly described as a ‘support’, stock’s links to the mid-century war economy make clear that politics are not only carried on celluloid, in images and sounds, but are also embedded in the ‘support’ itself – in its raw materials, industrial processes and circulation. Moreover, while film stock as part of the war economy was crucial to the US and British governments’ ability to produce, in economist Alan Milward’s words, ‘the weapons of combat’, celluloid’s geopolitics in this period extended beyond the state (arguably the most important geopolitical entity in wartime cinema).2 Not only were the US and British stock industries linked through multinational corporations such as Kodak, but British stock manufacturers depended on foreign supplies of raw materials, one of which was film base. The British shortage can therefore be traced, in part, to northeast Tennessee, where ingredients for Kodak’s nitrate and acetate base were produced at the company’s chemical branch, Tennessee Eastman. These were sent north to Eastman Kodak’s headquarters in Rochester, New York, which processed film base and coated some of it. Base and finished stock were shipped from Rochester across the treacherous North Atlantic to Liverpool, then onwards to Harrow, on the outskirts of London, where they were readied for use in Britain and beyond. The production and allocation of raw stock also involved a network of locations beyond the USA and Britain. Some of these were the sources for film’s raw materials – gelatin, silver, cotton, wood. Others were destinations to which Kodak Ltd exported stock. Thus if British stock rationing underscored the country’s material dependency on the USA, it also, in turn, emphasized other countries’ dependency on Britain.3 Such geographic thinking would have come naturally to World War II stock manufacturers, who were keenly concerned with film and photography’s cartographic potential. This crystallized in the aerial photography research to which Eastman Kodak and Kodak Ltd devoted considerable resources between 1939 and 1945. As Eastman Kodak boasted in its annual report for 1941, developments in this field allowed flyers to ‘[map] land through haze’, carry out reconnaissance missions, even at night, and reveal camouflage.4 In this corporate discourse, as in theories of aerial photography, the optical-chemical technology’s revelatory nature is a form of power.5 Yet film stock’s situation within the war economy suggests a different sort of media geopolitics, one in which power is rooted not in vision itself but in controlling the means of visual production. Here, in contrast to aerial photography’s fast-moving, crystalline perception, film stock is thick and tangible, a material whose allocation was determined by the physical calculations of freight loads, the risk calculations of shipping losses, and by its financial value to the industries that produced it. In this sense this essay underscores the continuing relevance, during and after World War II, of what Lee Grieveson has observed in interwar media: its role in ‘the establishment and supplementation of a global, liberal political economy reliant on the orchestration of circulation’.6 Between 1939 and 1945, the US and British stock industries considered the manufacturing and distribution of their products in similar terms. By 1946, however, this logic was complicated by the emerging Cold War, with whose geopolitics and economics the industries grew increasingly entangled. In discussing film stock as a war material, this essay’s concerns are not just historical but methodological, since to make this conceptual move we must postpone the idea of films themselves (finished, distributed, screened), and consider cinema within the contexts of the chemical and optical industries. Following Jussi Parikka’s ‘geological’ approach, we must take into account film’s components (see figure 1), and we must ask what it means when these components are sourced, transformed, assembled, moved and sold.7 This framework at once emphasizes cinema’s everydayness, and allows us to understand it as technopolitical: as a cultural phenomenon whose ‘material properties’, in Gabrielle Hecht’s words, ‘shap[e] the exercise of political power’.8 Fig. 1. View largeDownload slide The raw materials of raw stock. Courtesy University of Rochester Rare Books and Special Collections (KHC, D 319, Box 194, Folder 13). Used with permission from Eastman Kodak Company. Fig. 1. View largeDownload slide The raw materials of raw stock. Courtesy University of Rochester Rare Books and Special Collections (KHC, D 319, Box 194, Folder 13). Used with permission from Eastman Kodak Company. On the eve of World War II, the Eastman Kodak Company was the world’s largest manufacturer of raw film stock, with a geographic reach far exceeding that of its competitors (most significant among them the American DuPont and the German Agfa companies).9 While Kodak’s French and German subsidiaries – Kodak-Pathé SAF, Paris, and Kodak AG, Berlin – manufactured photosensitive stock and paper, and Kodak Ltd coated film base produced in the USA, the majority of the company’s stock production took place at its headquarters in Rochester and at Tennessee Eastman’s chemical plant in the city of Kingsport.10 Kodak, however, had long produced more than film, photographic paper and chemicals. In Tennessee, for instance, the timber used to make methanol (a component of nitrate stock) also resulted in byproducts such as acetic acid and acetic anhydride. When combined with a source of cellulose, these chemicals became the cellulose acetate flakes from which both safety stock and numerous other plastic products were made – from rayon fibres to the plastic moulding compound Tenite.11 Similarly Rochester manufactured precision lenses and optical technologies (aerial photography lenses, telescopes and others) alongside cameras.12 After war broke out in 1939, these chemical and optical products became central to Eastman Kodak’s multiplying and increasingly lucrative military contracts, leading, at the end of 1941, to a thirty-eight per cent increase in sales over the previous year.13 By 1945 the company’s net profits had ballooned to $32,715,632 – forty-two per cent higher than the 1944 figure and sixty-three per cent higher than 1940.14 Eastman Kodak was not the only US stock manufacturer to earn such returns from war production: as Pap Ndiaye writes, DuPont made ‘fabulous profits’ during the war, when it produced ‘70 percent of all the explosives manufactured in the United States’.15 Materials such as the Tennessee Eastman rayon that was woven into cargo parachutes, and the Tenite that was moulded into bayonet scabbards, Jeep steering wheels and ‘Tonette’ flutes (see figure 2), are essential to understanding both the stock shortage and the industrial, chemical and optical contexts in which cinema existed and continues to exist.16 Indeed, when we view film stock through the lens of Eastman Kodak’s operations, it is one in an array of products with a common raw material basis. Some of these products emerged from research on photographic technology and chemistry: as Douglas Collins writes, the company saw business opportunities in the discovery of ‘chemical materials not directly related to the immediate business at hand’.17 Others were simply industrial byproducts, as in the case of Tennessee Eastman’s ‘Charket’, a briquette formed from charcoal dust left over from the heating processes in film base production. They were not, however, marginal to the company’s work. On the contrary, when Tennessee Eastman began producing cellulose acetate, it did so on the understanding that the material would primarily go to nonphotographic uses (in fact, as Luci Marzola has documented, the company ‘initially discouraged the sale of safety film to motion picture producers’).18 The fact that many such uses were military, coupled with the US military’s growing need for film stock, led to the War Production Board’s (WPB) designation of stock as a war material. Fig. 2. View largeDownload slide Tenite advertisement. From Tennessee Eastman Corporation, In Active Service (Kingsport, TN: Tennessee Eastman Corporation, 1942). Fig. 2. View largeDownload slide Tenite advertisement. From Tennessee Eastman Corporation, In Active Service (Kingsport, TN: Tennessee Eastman Corporation, 1942). This was a multi-phased process, beginning in October 1941. In this month, a ten per cent excise tax was levied on most photographic goods to deter civilian consumption.19 By this point Eastman Kodak and other stock manufacturers had already increased military stock production, in part to fulfil Lend-Lease agreements for European countries at war.20 Whether used for still or moving images, most of this stock was employed in ways that the company’s vice president for research and development, C. E. K. Mees, termed ‘tactical’.21 It shuttled through aerial cameras, through the Astrograph machines that allowed fighter planes to navigate by the stars, and through the (British) Airgraph and (US) V-Mail microfilm systems that photographed soldiers’ letters onto 16mm negatives, shrinking military mail to one-fiftieth of its usual bulk.22 It was processed in Kodak’s ‘flying darkrooms’ and mobile photographic trailers (see figure 3), and cut into sheets for map photographs, photolithography, and medical and industrial X-rays. As the company stated in its 1944 annual report, ‘never before has photography meant so much in war. Practically every tactical action has been preceded and concluded by photographic information and records.’23 Fig. 3. View largeDownload slide Kodak portable laboratory. Courtesy University of Rochester Rare Books and Special Collections. (KHC, D 319, Box 211, Folder 8). Used with permission from Eastman Kodak Company. Fig. 3. View largeDownload slide Kodak portable laboratory. Courtesy University of Rochester Rare Books and Special Collections. (KHC, D 319, Box 211, Folder 8). Used with permission from Eastman Kodak Company. Given these expanded military uses of stock, film manufacturing could not keep pace with continued civilian demand. Harold Hopper, Chief of the WPB’s Motion Picture and Photographic Section, described the problem in July 1942: the Army estimated requirements […] for 1943 are 122 percent greater than the entire film [raw stock] production in the nation during 1941. The cut sheet film requirements are 636 percent greater, the aero film 3,033 percent greater, the graphic arts films 153 percent greater, than the entire 1941 production.24 While the WPB did not want to curb civilian film production, which was seen as essential for ‘morale and propaganda’, there were industrial barriers to this.25 As stock manufacturers devoted ever larger numbers of their machines to aero film, fewer could manufacture motion-picture film.26 And the industry as a whole faced shortages that stemmed from the explosive properties of film stock’s core components – since, as the need for smokeless powder grew, increasingly small quantities of nitric acid and cotton linters were available to stock manufacturers. The same was true for chemicals such as dibutyl phthalate, a plasticizer. Tensions grew in the film industry, as companies like Hercules Powder – an explosives producer that also manufactured cellulose esters – fell behind in their orders, while reports rolled in of Hollywood companies hoarding raw 35mm stock in anticipation of government controls and increased excise taxes.27 The WPB’s first response to this looming supply crisis was General Limitation Order 178 of August 1942, which restricted the transfer or sale of 35mm motion-picture stock.28 The order was intended to limit commercial use of stock to seventy-five per cent of its 1941 total, but in practice only the smallest producers and distributors were subject to percentage-based cuts, while major producers and distributors of ‘entertainment’ films were granted quarterly stock allocations, as were newsreel companies.29 Stock for ‘factual pictures’ (instructional, advertising, industrial, nonfiction, and so on), in contrast, was subject to approval by the Bureau of Motion Pictures of the Office of War Information (OWI), and allocated sparingly. By September 1944 the WPB had established a quarterly limit of 25,150,000 linear feet for all ‘factual’ films produced and distributed in the USA – a mere half of that allocated to MGM and Loew’s alone per quarter.30 35mm stock manufacturing was subject to Limitation Order 233, issued in December 1942.31 This curtailed ‘non-essential production of photographic films and film base’ in anticipation of military orders growing from twelve per cent of the stock industry’s annual output in 1941 to an estimate of between forty-five and fifty per cent in 1943. The order reduced the production of film for civilian uses by a percentage of 1941 totals: amateur film gauges by forty per cent, and 35mm motion-picture film and cut-sheet film by twenty-five per cent.32 Non-military uses of components such as silver were also managed by the WPB, although the stock industry was exempt from restrictions: Conservation Order M-199, for instance, allocated supplies of foreign silver to Eastman Kodak at a regulated price.33 Nevertheless, it was not just military use of film stock that limited civilian supplies: the US stock industry’s manufacturing capacity was also affected by its involvement in a series of large-scale, and top-secret, military projects. In Kodak’s case, the two largest were managed by Tennessee Eastman. First, supported by President Roosevelt’s National Defense Research Committee (NDRC), the company helped develop a high-yield production process for the powerful anti-submarine explosive RDX that relied on acetic anhydride, a chemical that Tennessee Eastman already manufactured in great quantities.34 Then, based in part on this success of chemical engineering, General Leslie R. Groves asked Tennessee Eastman to build and operate the Y-12 electromagnetic separation plant at Oak Ridge, Tennessee. From early 1943 until August 1945, the company enriched uranium for the Manhattan Project.35 The US stock shortage was thus rooted in an intertwining of the stock industry and the war economy that was as extensive as the array of chemical and optical products produced by Kodak and other stock manufacturers. Film stock was nevertheless the initial link in the chain leading to Eastman Kodak’s involvement in the Manhattan Project. When, in 1920, the company needed a cheaper source of methanol for nitrate stock, it founded Tennessee Eastman. Two of the byproducts of methanol production – acetic acid and acetic anhydride – formed the chemical foundations for both cellulose acetate stock and RDX. And Tennessee Eastman’s RDX plant, the Holston Ordnance Works, became a blueprint for Y-12. On the other side of the continent, DuPont, too, was working for the Manhattan Project, producing plutonium at the Hanford, Washington Engineer Works – work that the company likewise undertook, as Ndiaye details, because of its expertise in chemical engineering. Film stock’s transformation into a war material, that is, hinged on its raw material components and the industrial processes that surrounded them. Kodak Ltd felt the effects of its parent company’s wartime activities acutely. After Kodak, AG and Kodak-Pathé found themselves in enemy or occupied territory, the British company was Eastman Kodak’s only functional overseas subsidiary. As a result, its Harrow plant was forced not only to cope with increasingly limited supplies from the USA and to occasionally produce stock for the US military through Reverse Lend-Lease, but also to send stock to countries historically supplied by Paris or Berlin (in addition to its traditional domains in the British Isles, the Commonwealth and Empire, Scandinavia and Egypt).36 All this was in addition to the military contracts that Kodak Ltd took on during the war. Like Eastman Kodak, Harrow manufactured Astrographs, Airgraphs (figure 4), optical tools, photographic papers, and film and photographic stock, selling much of the latter to the government.37 And in keeping with Kodak’s attention to the photographic needs of a war increasingly conducted by air, the plant was contracted to the Royal Air Force (RAF), whose cameras it repaired and whose film it developed and printed (see figure 5).38 Figs. 4 and 5. View largeDownload slide Airgraph form, 1940s. © British Library Board (KA, A 1381); Kodak advertisement, 1940s. © British Library Board (KA, A 2120). Figs. 4 and 5. View largeDownload slide Airgraph form, 1940s. © British Library Board (KA, A 1381); Kodak advertisement, 1940s. © British Library Board (KA, A 2120). Kodak Ltd, however, was more sharply affected by raw material shortages than Eastman Kodak, most of them the result of the company’s reliance on imports. The most pressing shortage was of film base itself, which British stock manufacturers purchased exclusively from the USA during the war.39 According to the Board of Trade, in 1942, Kodak Ltd imported and coated its own (Eastman Kodak) base, Ilford imported and coated DuPont base, and Austin Edwards Ltd coated base imported from New York’s Celanese Celluloid Corporation.40 Gevaert – the Belgian stock manufacturer headquartered in London after Germany invaded the Low Countries – used Ilford film base, presumably also manufactured by DuPont.41 Key components of emulsion, such as silver, were also imported.42 As a result, British stock producers depended both on their US counterparts’ diminishing supplies of film base and on their shipping capacity – not a simple matter in 1941 and 1942, when shipping space was requisitioned by the military, and merchant boats were regularly lost to enemy sinkings.43 The British stock shortage, put differently, was caused both by the US shortage and by structural aspects of Britain’s economy, which relied on the import of raw material from the Commonwealth, the Empire and elsewhere, as well as on the export of manufactured goods.44 British regulation of raw stock began in June 1940 with a Limitation of Supplies Order that restricted sales of consumer film and photographic products; by 1942, purchases of film and photographic supplies for home use were limited to twenty-five per cent of the 1938–1939 total.45 Also in June 1940 the Harrow plant was declared a controlled undertaking, indicating that it was primarily dedicated to war production.46 The formal rationing of film stock, however, only began in response to US restrictions: in the autumn of 1942, after the USA had curtailed its film industry’s supply by twenty-five per cent, the British government made the same reduction in the country’s overall stock consumption.47 These cuts were discussed for the first time at a meeting on 18 November 1942 of the Ministry of Production’s Materials Committee, at which government and military offices outlined their stock needs for the coming year. From this, the amount of stock that would be made available to commercial users was determined, as outlined in the Board of Trade’s Cinematograph Film Control Order of 19 March 1943.48 The order allocated stock to film distributors based on a reduced percentage of their prewar usage, while producers were to apply to the Board of Trade for stock licences for individual projects.49 With these restrictions, limitations on the length of credits and titles, and an expectation that a single print would serve more screenings, the country projected that it could maintain its yearly production of features.50 Just as the WPB’s Limitation Orders had done in the USA, this series of legislative orders made film stock’s position within Britain’s war economy explicit. By designating the Harrow plant a controlled undertaking, the government requisitioned civilian labour and industrial space for war production, while its restriction of civilian supplies of film stock (via controls on pricing, allocation and import) framed the material as a resource that, like the thousands of others named by the WPB and Ministry of Supply – from hooves and hides to nickel and tin – played a critical role in British and US defence. During the war, numerous restrictions of this type affected film producers, distributors and exhibitors, who were called on to ration, conserve and salvage materials that were used either in government media production or in other aspects of the war economy. In Britain, the Ministry of Supply required laboratories to salvage used hypo solution (fixer) for its silver content and old photographic film for its components.51 Paper restrictions limited the number and size of film posters, and filmgoers were asked to return used cinema tickets for repulping.52 Gasoline rationing affected the transport of film prints for distribution and producers’ plans for location shooting, cloth rationing influenced costume and set design, and a shortage in sound apparatus valves and valves for projector arc lights affected exhibitors’ ability to keep cinemas open.53 Film professionals (from directors to projectionists) were assigned to defence occupations, squeezing the industry of its labour force, and cinemas themselves sheltered people made homeless by the Blitz.54 Salvage was by no means a new development in the film industry, nor one restricted to wartime. Before the war, for instance, the Harrow laboratory had researched ever more effective ways of capturing valuable silver from wastewater and monetizing industrial byproducts (even selling celluloid ash), echoing Tennessee Eastman’s profitable diversification in the Charket.55 However, as Richard Farmer has described in his study of cinema and the Ministry of Food, wartime salvage and rationing had a distinct social and political logic, in which raw materials reinforced the relationship between civilians and the state, ‘allow[ing] for public acceptance of direct state interference in British consumer culture’.56 The same was true for the film industry, with which, after 1939, the Ministries of Supply and Information, the Board of Trade and others interacted extensively. Yet despite the austerity of the war years – the appeals to ‘make do and mend’ that were extended equally to civilians with threadbare clothing and film renters with scratched prints – the simultaneous forced contraction of the civilian market and expansion of the government/military market were to Kodak Ltd’s profit. In 1940 the company’s UK sales totalled £2,856,646, and by the war’s peak in 1944 they had reached £5,908,310. Government sales in this period increased fourfold, representing one tenth of the former figure, and one half of the latter.57 At the same time that the war economy drew stock manufacturing closer to the state, it also illuminated a complex web of inter-state relations. The British government’s calculation of its stock needs for the eighteen months from early 1943 to mid 1944 makes this clear. During this period, the Board of Trade estimated that, ‘allowing for [losses due to] sinkings’, the UK would import 140 million square feet of film base from the USA, in addition to stock sent directly to India. Once coated, over a third of this material would go to the Ministry of Aircraft Production for medical and military uses.58 The rest would be allocated to government and commercial users, both domestic and foreign. Some foreign users (such as the colonies and Egypt) had long been supplied by Kodak Ltd. But during the war the Ministry of Information (MOI) also began sending ‘emergency shipments’ of 16mm stock to the neutral countries of Sweden, Portugal and Spain. This was intended to fill gaps that the conflict had created in the global film stock trade: Portugal and Spain had formerly been supplied by Kodak-Pathé, while Kodak Ltd’s motion-picture film sales to Sweden had fallen from £33,600 in 1939 to £500 in 1941, possibly due to transport difficulties (Sweden was bordered on one side by Nazi-occupied Norway, and on the other by German ally Finland).59 Neutral countries’ positive on-screen portrayal of the Allied war effort was deemed essential propaganda, and so both British and US information agencies battled logistical challenges, such as seas patrolled by German U-boats, to arrange stock deliveries. As the OWI’s Overseas Branch reflected on its own work supplying stock, ‘by keeping a hand in this, the division has been in a position to control the quality, quantity, and type of distribution that American pictures receive in these countries’.60 Allocations of stock to foreign users also had an economic logic, since the material was expensive. While all of the stock and base that Britain imported for the military fell under the auspices of Lend-Lease, stock for government and civilian use was purchased with hard currency, an expense that the government attempted to recoup by selling finished films and raw stock alike.61 Among the buyers of the latter were the European governments exiled in London – Belgium, Czechoslovakia, Free France, the Netherlands, Norway and Poland. Small in size, and lacking territory and armies, these governments relied heavily on film propaganda to make their claims to legitimacy. Yet given their situation within London’s media ecosystem, they depended on stock allocations from the MOI to do so.62 This delicate media-geopolitical situation resulted, for the British state, both in hard currency and in political oversight over exile government activities – an oversight similar to the MOI’s over domestic production. Throughout the wartime British film industry, indeed, stock rationing was widely understood to function as a form of censorship, as the Board of Trade only granted stock licences to commercial projects approved by the MOI’s Films Division.63 Raw stock and its allocation were thus not only emblematic of the relationships that national war economies cemented between the US and British governments and their respective film industries, but also of the transnational relationships created by the Allied war economy. These relationships were mediated by economic, cultural-diplomatic and geopolitical factors. They were traced in the supply chains that brought base from Rochester to Harrow, from Harrow to the exile governments, from Britain to Sweden; they were instantiated in the meetings, phone calls and above all paperwork that rationing, as a bureaucratic manoeuvre, required. And they were highly directional. British rationing originated in the US stock industry’s profitable involvement in the war economy, which limited exports at the same moment that the Battle of the Atlantic made transatlantic shipping particularly dangerous. With German, French and Italian stock supplies cut off, smaller countries relied on the USA and Britain for the increasingly scarce material, mirroring their more general wartime dependency on these states. Raw stock’s technopolitical dimensions would shift in the first years after World War II, as war economies gave way to Eisenhower’s ‘military-industrial complex’. In April 1945, the exiled Czechoslovak Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ film officer Viktor Fischl wrote to his colleague A. Sarment of the Free French Newsreel (France Libre Actualités). It had been eight months since the Low Countries and France had been liberated, and while raw stock was growing increasingly scarce in Britain, film plants across the Channel were resuming production. Fischl asked Sarment if he would ‘inquire at the French Film Unit whether it would be possible for us to obtain from them 250,000 feet of B/W raw material’. Sarment responded apologetically: ‘it seems as if the surplus of raw stock we hopes [sic] to have in Paris has fade [sic] out, according to new requisitions’.64 If Fischl’s letter highlighted the networks that emerged in London between the exile governments, who were eager to bypass their wartime entanglement with larger countries, Sarment’s response confirmed that liberation would offer no respite from this entanglement, as the stock requisitions to which he referred had probably been made by the Psychological Warfare Division of SHAEF (Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Forces), which liberated Western Europe in 1944 and 1945. PWD-SHAEF was composed in large part of members of the British MOI and American OWI. Some of these officers were peacetime employees of their countries’ film industries; as such, they were keenly attuned to the opportunities that lay in film plants within SHAEF’s jurisdiction, for PWD’s psychological warfare activities and for their employers.65 PWD intervention in postwar European stock production began at the Kodak-Pathé plant in the Paris suburb of Vincennes, which by late 1944 was producing photographic films and paper under SHAEF supervision (see figure 6).66 A continent-wide coal shortage, however, limited the plant’s output, forcing PWD to continue to rely on US stock.67 In Belgium, PWD used stock from the Gevaert plants (which, like Kodak-Pathé, had continued to operate during the war).68 And in Italy, the United States’ Political Warfare Board impounded all of Ferrania’s stock for use in military operations, while attempting to restore the plant to its full production capacity. The coal shortage again proved a barrier, as did an Italian shortage of silver.69 Fig. 6. View largeDownload slide Liberation of Kodak-Pathé plant, Vincennes, France. Courtesy University of Rochester Rare Books and Special Collections. (KHC, D 319, Box 58, Folder 6). Used with permission from Eastman Kodak Company. Fig. 6. View largeDownload slide Liberation of Kodak-Pathé plant, Vincennes, France. Courtesy University of Rochester Rare Books and Special Collections. (KHC, D 319, Box 58, Folder 6). Used with permission from Eastman Kodak Company. Soon afterwards, another Allied force arrived in Europe’s film plants, in the form of the Combined Intelligence Objectives Subcommittee (CIOS), which scoured the ruins of the German film manufacturing and optical industries as part of its charge to ‘eliminate or control all German industry that could be used for military production’ and ‘exact reparation in kind for the destruction wrought by the Germans’. Formed in August 1944 by the British and American Combined Chiefs of Staff, CIOS was composed of military and government staff as well as ‘technical’ personnel from private industry, the latter given military ranks for the occasion. Its field teams fanned out to ‘targets’ across Germany, searching offices and plants for patents, plans, articles and formulae that would allow Allied industries to benefit from their German competitors’ knowledge in fields as diverse as rubber, chemicals, food and shipbuilding. They interrogated scientists and industry leaders, and seized technology and raw materials.70 Through CIOS’s activities, the widespread Allied attempts to seek commercial gain from the liberated European film stock industry began to collide with Germany’s sharpening divisions, harbingers of the Cold War. The fact that CIOS’s targets included Germany’s film manufacturing and optical industries did not just reflect the breadth of the organization’s operations, which included teddy-bear maker Steiff and pencil manufacturers as well as heavy industry and military laboratories. It also underscored cinema’s inextricability from the chemical and optical industries, both of which had played a major role in German war production. It was the chemical industry, for instance, that was responsible for the synthetic oil that powered the Luftwaffe and the groundbreaking ersatz rubber Buna S, and that was the primary focus of the Allies’ May 1944 bombing campaign in Germany.71 In the rubble were the sprawling chemical conglomerate IG Farben, Agfa’s parent company, as well as firms such as Zeiss-Ikon, whose expertise, like Kodak’s, extended from cameras and stock to gun-sights and periscopes. The CIOS field teams investigating these targets included personnel from relevant industries in Britain, the USA and Canada – among them Ilford, Eastman Kodak, Ansco and the Hollywood Colorfilm Corporation72 – who helped to question technicians, survey extant property, and confiscate papers, patents and materials (from stock itself to silver bullion, gelatin and developing chemicals). Some took over supervision of functioning or partly functioning plants, impounding their products.73 And as was the case with PWD’s film industry employees, these ‘experts’ were immediately useful to their civilian employers. Some, in fact, sent information directly home, bypassing the official channels (the American Field Information Agency, Technical [FIAT] and the British Intelligence Objectives Subcommittee [BIOS]) through which information on German industry was to be made public. These programmes arranged for the materials that CIOS gathered – scientific texts, technical drawings, patents, and so on – to be microfilmed in Germany and sent to the USA or Britain, where they were translated, analysed and prepared for publication in, respectively, the weekly Bibliography of Scientific and Industrial Research Reports and the BIOS reports. The reports became a critical link in the reparations process, a medium through which German loss of trade secrets translated into gains for Allied industries.74 The Bibliography of Scientific and Industrial Research Reports emphasizes the breadth of CIOS’s investigation, with reports ranging from ‘The Arriflex Motion Picture Camera’ and ‘German Photographic Film Base Industry’ to ‘Manufacture of Cellulose Triacetate, Yarn and Film’ (see figure 7). However, the reports that held the most interest for stock producers outside of Germany were those on Agfa’s signature colour process, Agfacolor, which was one of the few wartime German photographic developments that outstripped its North American, British and French counterparts. While the Western Allies had developed colour chemistry and technology before the war, their emphasis shifted to aero film after the outbreak of hostilities. Germany, in contrast, had not made the same great strides in aviation film as the British and US industries. CIOS authors attributed this to the Luftwaffe’s weaker than expected performance in the war (the large amount of aero stock that Zeiss-Ikon and Agfa had prepared had mostly gone to salvage), as well as, more speculatively, to Hitler’s personal interest in colour film.75 Whatever the reason, German research resulted in the world’s first monopack 35mm negative-positive film, which improved greatly on its precursor (small-format reversal films). Within five years of the publication of FIAT’s report on Agfacolor, the stock – which remained dominant throughout Western and Eastern Europe – was joined by Gevacolor (Gevaert, 1947), Ferraniacolor (Ferrania, 1949), Ansco Color (Ansco, 1950) and the Soviet version of Agfacolor (produced from 1945 in the Agfa Wolfen plant in the Soviet Zone of Occupation, and from 1948 in the Soviet Union).76 Fig. 7. View largeDownload slide BIOS report on the photographic industry in wartime Germany. © British Library Board (KA, A 3024) Fig. 7. View largeDownload slide BIOS report on the photographic industry in wartime Germany. © British Library Board (KA, A 3024) The case of Agfacolor underscores on one hand the stock industry’s prewar multinationalism, and how it amplified the commercial gains that some Allied stock manufacturers stood to make from the CIOS investigations. For instance, as Dudley Andrew writes, Ansco, Agfa’s US subsidiary, already had access to most of its parent company’s research on colour film, and thus was uniquely well positioned to make use of the FIAT reports (which two of its scientists, as CIOS ‘experts’, helped to draft).77 On the other hand, during the occupation of Germany the colour film industry increasingly became a flashpoint for geopolitical tensions, particularly between the Soviet Union and the Western Allies. Indeed, although CIOS’s activities were intended to prevent German rearmament and serve as reparations, they were also, as Norman Naimark writes, part of a ‘developing rivalry between the Soviet Union and the United States’, as each of the two emerging superpowers attempted to secure German military knowledge before the other.78 The Soviet Zone of Occupation, which contained the majority of Germany’s photographic firms, was the crux of this rivalry, in particular Agfa’s film factory in Wolfen, the centre for Agfacolor research and development (see figure 8).79 Agfa-Wolfen was, in fact, one of the few photographic plants in the Soviet Zone that western powers investigated fully, beginning with the United States Signal Corps in spring 1945. Western access to the factory was restricted after it came under Soviet military control in early July 1945, although in spring 1946 a team from the British Ministry of Aircraft Production, including Ilford employees, travelled to Agfa-Wolfen and Deutsche Celluloid Fabrik in Eilenburg.80 In contrast to the chaotic early days after capitulation, their work was carefully supervised by the plants’ Russian military supervisors; in Eilenberg the investigators were allowed to meet only with the plant’s commander.81 Fig. 8. View largeDownload slide Burned-out raw material store, Agfa Wolfen. © British Library Board (KA, A 3204). Fig. 8. View largeDownload slide Burned-out raw material store, Agfa Wolfen. © British Library Board (KA, A 3204). When British investigators visited Wolfen, Soviet authorities were beginning to dismantle parts of the factory, shipping its most modern equipment to Ukraine to form part of the reconstructed Film Factory no. 3 in Shostka (destroyed by the Wehrmacht during the war).82 The Soviet Union had long attempted, unsuccessfully, to develop colour technologies of its own, and as dismantling concluded in autumn 1946, Wolfen’s Soviet supervisors began asking prominent Agfa scientists, engineers and technicians to move East with the plant. Some went willingly while others were simply moved, and intelligence filtering into the FIAT offices in Berlin indicated that Wolfen scientists were worried: several of the plant’s colour film specialists had fled to Switzerland with the probable aid of the French; others had just vanished, presumably also to the West.83 In early January 1947, FIAT spirited key staff from the plant’s Scientific Colour Film Photo Laboratory Section to Germany’s western zones, planning to evacuate other employees within the month.84 As the cloak-and-dagger overtones of these evacuations make clear, by this point the Cold War was underway.85 The growing enmity between the Western Allies and the Soviet Union was nevertheless belied by the transfers at the heart of CIOS operations, through which the same knowledge about German film stock manufacturing became central to film industries on both sides of the nascent Iron Curtain. While the USA and Britain depended on microfilm to transfer this knowledge, in the Soviet case much of what was transferred was technology and material, including, in the case of Agfa-Wolfen, an entire factory. This involved the integration of western industrial practices within the Soviet economy, yet the Soviet Military Administration seemed to have few qualms about it. Valérie Pozner writes that a glowing 1947 Soviet report described the Wolfen plant as the ‘realization of a Taylorist utopia […] the opposite of the Soviet situation’.86 The transfers of material and technology on which the Soviet Military Administration depended were by no means reliable. When British investigators made their final visit to Wolfen, they discovered that breakdowns in German interzone commerce and transport meant that the plant could only produce nitrate base, since Wolfen’s supply of acetate had previously come from IG Dormagen near Cologne, now part of the British zone.87 But supply problems were also a longstanding problem for German film stock manufacturers, who, as CIOS reports noted, had suffered wartime raw material shortages more severe than those in Britain or the USA. This sparked considerable ingenuity. When cotton linters, for instance, were no longer available, a wood-based substitute was developed, first from spruce and then, after spruce supplies were cut off by military operations, from beech. When the Soviet Army advanced to the eastern part of Germany, ‘dislocat[ing] the transport system’, both substitutes became inaccessible.88 The German stock industry’s improvisation in cellulose manufacture returns this essay to its material concerns: the raw materials from which film stock was composed during the war, and the war material that it became. Such a material focus clarifies the film stock industry’s situation within the chemical industry, since stock was a product of chemical research and engineering, and the byproducts of its manufacture in turn became essential parts of that industry. Most important among these byproducts were plastics, which emerged in the 1930s and became part of a formidable industry in the late 1940s, thanks in large part to the same war economy that expanded stock manufacturers’ military research and development activities.89 Wolfen’s postwar restriction to nitrate stock, however, also underscores that the history of film stock and the war economy is as much a story of raw materials as of their movement: cellulose from Dormagen to Wolfen; finished stock from Rochester to Harrow; microfilmed letters and documents from the USA to Europe and back again. Such logistical matters were prominent factors in wartime stock-rationing policies, which took into account the ways in which the material crossed the North Atlantic, and laconically calculated the loss of shipments (which almost always entailed the loss of lives) to German torpedoes.90 They were also central to raw-stock sales – or as the WPB’s limitation order aptly phrased it, ‘transfers’ – in which stock shuttled from the Board of Trade and MOI to the London exile governments, from the OWI to neutral countries, from sellers to buyers. As Deborah Cowen writes, the field of logistics, which expanded at the same mid-century moment with which this essay is concerned, is fundamentally geopolitical. Logistics’ supply chains and transportation lines are ‘pipelines of flow’ that trace, in Cowen’s words, ‘new boundaries of belonging’, ‘new map[s] of the world’.91 Indeed, during and immediately after World War II, the production and allocation of film stock had geopolitical implications. The stock shortage, for instance, forced Britain and then the governments-in-exile into relationships of dependency, while Allied expropriation of German material and intellectual property ensured that postwar stock industries were founded, at least in part, on coercion. Supply chains’ ‘boundaries of belonging’ are a commonplace of contemporary media culture and media studies. We know that our smartphones may have processors from Korea, touchscreens from Japan, Bluetooth systems from the USA and cameras from Germany, not to mention metals and minerals from many other places.92 They are more rarely discussed with regard to World War II, whose cinema culture is best remembered for its nationalisms (bombastic in the case of Frank Capra and Leni Riefenstahl, tentative and poetic in the case of Humphrey Jennings). The film stock shortage demonstrates, however, that on a material level wartime and early Cold War media cultures were hardly models of national self-sufficiency, and instead depended deeply on relationships among states. These relationships were mediated in part through the movement and allocation of material, whether raw or finished. Fig. 9. View largeDownload slide Silver ingots stored at Kodak Park, 1945. Courtesy University of Rochester Rare Books and Special Collections (KHC, D 319, Box 199, Folder 4). Used with permission from Eastman Kodak Company. Fig. 9. View largeDownload slide Silver ingots stored at Kodak Park, 1945. Courtesy University of Rochester Rare Books and Special Collections (KHC, D 319, Box 199, Folder 4). Used with permission from Eastman Kodak Company. The geopolitics of this movement were, finally, impossible to divorce from economics. Britain never rationed stock for film exports because exports resulted in hard currency, and hard currency could be ploughed back into war production.93 The movement of microfilm across the English Channel and North Atlantic saved money and shipping space for Allied militaries, while its content – CIOS reports – resulted in profits for US and British businesses (not least the stock manufacturers who produced the microfilm itself). At times, stock’s movement represented a less straightforward form of exchange value. The very transfer of German technical knowledge, for instance, was seen as compensation for the costs of war and occupation, as were Agfacolor films, which US forces in Germany hoarded like gold.94 Yet it was a different precious metal that was at the heart of stock’s value – silver (figure 9), seven hundredths of a percentage point purer than the United States Treasury’s own.95 Acknowledgement Many thanks to Nataša Ďurovičová, Lee Grieveson, Luci Marzola, Valérie Pozner, Kirsty Sinclair Dootson, Sarah Street, Haidee Wasson and Screen’s anonymous reviewers for their very helpful comments, and to Dylan Mohr for expert research assistance. Research for this essay was funded by the University of Minnesota’s McKnight Land-Grant Professorship and Grant-in-Aid program, the Martin Miller and Hannah Norbert-Miller Visiting Fellowship at the University of London’s Institute of Modern Languages Research, and a Fulbright Research Fellowship in France. Footnotes 1 See, for example, ‘Sub-standard stock famine’, To-Day’s Cinema, vol. 58, no. 4682 (1942), and ‘“Another stock cut looms” says CEA President’, To-Day’s Cinema, vol. 60, no. 4877 (1943). On rationing's effects on filmmaking, see Sheri Biesen, Blackout: World War II and the Origins of Film Noir (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), and Antonia Lant, Blackout: Reinventing Women for Wartime British Cinema (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991). 2 Alan S. Milward, War, Economy and Society, 1939–1945 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1979), p. 19. As they had during World War I, film and photographic manufacturers profited considerably from World War II military and government contracts. See Luci Marzola, ‘Better pictures through chemistry: DuPont and the fight for the Hollywood film stock market’, The Velvet Light Trap, no. 76 (2015), pp. 3–18. On the links between cinema and the US military, see, among others, Lee Grieveson and Haidee Wasson (eds), Cinema’s Military-Industrial Complex (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2018), and Ian Jarvie, Hollywood’s Overseas Campaign (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 1992). 3 Stock shortages during World War I had also created dependencies: when the French Pathé company lost large numbers of employees to the draft (at the same time that nitrocellulose was declared an essential war material), Kodak began to sell Pathé its own US-produced stock. This was a precursor to the companies’ 1927 merger. University of Rochester River Campus Libraries, Department of Rare Books, Special Collections and Preservation, D.139 Kodak Historical Collection #003 (hereafter KHC), folder 58:6, Subseries X: National and International, ‘Kodak-Pathé’. See also Anke Mebold, ‘“Just like a public library maintained for public welfare”’, in Frank Kessler and Nanna Verhoeff (eds), Networks of Entertainment: Early Film Distribution 1895–1915 (London: John Libbey, 2007), p. 266. 4 British Library, London, Kodak Archive (hereafter KA), A 3332, ‘Kodak, Limited – London, summary of profit and loss statements for 13 periods ended 26 December, 1942’. 5 See, for example, Caren Kaplan, Aerial Aftermaths: Wartime from Above (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018); Paul Virilio, War and Cinema (New York, NY: Verso, 1989); Emma Widdis, Visions of a New Land: Soviet Film from the Revolution to the Second World War (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003). 6 Lee Grieveson, Cinema and the Wealth of Nations: Media, Capital and the Liberal World System (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2017), p. 315. 7 Jussi Parikka, A Geology of Media (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2015). 8 Gabrielle Hecht, ‘Introduction’, in Hecht (ed.), Entangled Geographies: Empire and Technopolitics in the Global Cold War (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011), p. 3. 9 National Archives and Records Administration, College Park, MD (hereafter NARA), RG 179 (Records of the War Production Board), box 175, entry 16A, folder Film L-178, ‘Hopper to Hurley, July 23, 1942, Film production capacity and estimated requirements for remainder of 1942 and the year 1943’. In addition to its three European subsidiaries, Eastman Kodak held a fifty per cent share in Kodak Australia and had a vast global network of sales offices. 10 KA, A 2866, Thirty-Eighth Annual Report of the Eastman Kodak Company for the Year Ending December 28, 1940. 11 Ibid.; KHC, folder 39:7, ‘Creative chemistry’. 12 KA, A 2866, Thirty-Eighth Annual Report of the Eastman Kodak Company for the Year Ending December 28, 1940; KA, A 2866, Thirty-Ninth Annual Report of the Eastman Kodak Company, 1941, p. 19. 13 KHC, folder 166:8, ‘Tennessee Eastman is production front for many branches of the service’; KA, A 2866, Thirty-Ninth Annual Report of the Eastman Kodak Company, 1941, p. 14. 14 KA, A 2866, Forty-Third Annual Report of the Eastman Kodak Company for the Year Ending December 29, 1945, p. 21. 15 Pap Ndiaye, Nylon and Bombs: DuPont and the March of Modern America, trans. Elborg Forster (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007), p. 152. 16 KHC, folder 166:8, ‘Tennessee Eastman is Production front for many branches of the service’; KHC, folder 101:15, ‘A history of chemistry in Kodak’. Cinema’s chemical and optical contexts suited Kodak particularly well to military manufacturing: DuPont (which, unlike Kodak, was an explosives manufacturer first and a stock manufacturer second), required few changes to production sites and practices, resulting in ‘maximal synergy between the military and civilian spheres’. Ndiaye, Nylon and Bombs, p. 152. 17 Douglas Collins, The Story of Kodak (New York, NY: H. N. Abrams, 1990), p. 339. 18 KHC, folder 39:7, ‘Creative chemistry’; Marzola, ‘Better pictures’, p. 6. As Marzola writes, Eastman Kodak argued that safety stock was ‘unnecessary in light of other fire safety precautions’. In the late 1910s and early 1920s, the company also foresaw cellulose-acetate stock’s future for motion pictures as ‘bounded by its prospective use for educational and scientific purposes’. Eastman House, Eastman Legacy Collection, ‘George Eastman to Gaumont, August 8, 1919’. I am grateful to Luci Marzola for this reference. 19 KA, A 2866, Thirty-Ninth Annual Report of the Eastman Kodak Company, 1941, p. 4. 20 The Lend-Lease Act had been passed in March 1941. 21 Collins, The Story of Kodak, p. 247. 22 Ibid., pp. 255, 247. On the range of military uses of cinema during the war, see Haidee Wasson, Portable Cinema (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, forthcoming). 23 KA, A 2866, Forty-Second Annual Report of the Eastman Kodak Company for the Year Ending December 30, 1944, p. 4. 24 NARA, RG 179, box 175, entry 16A, folder FILM L-178, ‘Hopper to Hurley, July 23, 1942, Film production capacity and estimated requirements for remainder of 1942 and the year 1943’. 25 Ibid. 26 NARA, RG 179, box 175, entry 16A, folder FILM L-178, ‘Hopper to Hurley, July 23, 1942, Proposed limitation order on 35mm motion picture film’. 27 Ibid. 28 See NARA, RG 179, box 175, entry 16A, folder FILM L-178. 29 National Archives, Kew (hereafter NA), BT 64/130, ‘Gaitskell to Palache, 30 March 1943’. The WPB gave small producers and distributors the classification ‘C’. Newsreel companies were classified ‘B’, and major producers and distributors (including all US majors, as well as Monogram and Republic Pictures) ‘A’. 30 NARA, RG 179, box 175, entry 16A, folder FILM L-178, ‘General limitation order l-178, as amended Sept. 20, 1944’. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and Loew’s, Inc. together were allocated 42,147,476 linear feet quarterly. By comparison, the smallest of the majors, United Artists, was allocated 15,086,803 feet. For newsreels the largest allocation of stock went to Movietonenews, with 12,121,701 feet quarterly; the smallest company, Time, Inc., received 2,164,195 feet. 31 This affected Agfa Ansco, DuPont, Defender Photo Supply, Eastman Kodak, Gevaert, Haloid, and Hammer Dry Plate and Film – some of them stock manufacturers, others manufacturers of stock components. NARA, RG 179, box 183, entry 16A, folder Photographic Film and Film Base, ‘Felt to Krug, December 2, 1942’. 32 Ibid. 33 NARA, RG 179, box 223, entry 16A, folder M-199, ‘Silver, Conservation Order M-199’; KA, A 2866, Forty-Third Annual Report of the Eastman Kodak Company for the Year Ending December 29, 1945, p. 8. 34 KHC, folder 166:8, ‘The origin of the Holston army ammunition plant’. RDX is credited with ending the Battle of the Atlantic. 35 KA, A 2866, Forty-Fourth Annual Report of the Eastman Kodak Company for the Year Ending December 28, 1946, p. 24. See also Robert J. Schrader’s personal history of his work as a research scientist at Oak Ridge, ‘Eastman Kodak & The Manhattan Project’, 30 September 2002, accessed 22 March 2019. 36 KA, A 2866, Forty-Second Annual Report of the Eastman Kodak Company for the Year Ending December 30, 1944, p. 34, and Forty-Third Annual Report of the Eastman Kodak Company for the Year Ending December 29, 1945, p. 11; KHC, folder 39:10, ‘The world market’. 37 KA, box 159, A 1797, ‘Kodak Harrow Research Division 50 years’. 38 KA, box 321, A 1489, ‘Chronological history of the Kodak Company in Europe’. 39 Before the war, base was imported from the USA, Belgium and Germany. While Bexford, Ltd, a subsidiary of BX Plastic Ltd, had begun experiments in base production for Ilford before 1939, these did not bear fruit until the war ended. NA, BT 64/737, Photographic Film Base. Kodak Ltd itself would not produce base until the 1960s, when it began manufacturing the polyester Estar base. KA, A 1786, ‘Factory notice: film base to be manufactured by Kodak Limited’. 40 NA, BT 64/85, ‘Materials Committee: Coated Cinematograph Film. Note of Meeting held under the auspices of the Materials Committee … on Tuesday, 18th November, 1942’. 41 Geoffrey Jones and Harm G. Schröter, eds., The Rise of Multinationals in Continental Europe (Aldershot: Edward Elgar, 1992), p. 208. 42 The Raw Materials Guide (London: HM Stationery Office, 1942), p. 54. 43 NA, BT 64/85, ‘Notes to coated cine film requirements’. 44 Milward, War, Economy and Society, p. 42. 45 KA, A 3332, ‘Kodak, Limited – London, summary of profit and loss statements for 13 periods ended 28th December 1940’; Robert J. Hercock, Silver by the Ton: The History of Ilford Limited, 1879–1979 (London: McGraw-Hill, 1979), p. 71. Other consumer goods were rationed by the same amount. Ina Zweiniger-Bargielowska, Austerity in Britain: Rationing, Controls and Consumption, 1939–1955 (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 186. 46 KA, A 647, ‘Letter from Ministry of Supply, June 10, 1940’. 47 This was not only to accommodate decreased US supplies, but also served a corporate logic for Eastman Kodak – Britain’s most important supplier of base and finished stock – by allowing Kodak Ltd to begin supplying some stock to ‘third countries formerly supplied from the USA’. NA, BT 64/130, ‘Allocation of cinematograph film stock’. 48 NA, BT 64/85, ‘Materials Committee: coated cinematograph film. Note of Meeting held under the auspices of the Materials Committee … on Tuesday, 18th November, 1942’; Statutory Rules and Orders Other than Those of a Local, Personal or Temporary Character for the Year 1943, Vol. II: Emergency Powers (Defence) (London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1944). 49 NA, BT 64/130, ‘Gaitskell to Palache, 30 March 1943’. 50 NA, BT 64/130, ‘Allocation of cinematograph film stock’. 51 ‘Ministry of Supply asks for old film’, To-Day’s Cinema, vol. 59, no. 4766 (1942), p. 1. 52 ‘New control of programs, posters and film stills’, To-Day’s Cinema, vol. 55, no. 4459 (1940), p. 1; ‘Salvage of used cinema tickets’, To-Day’s Cinema, vol. 55, no. 4447 (1940), p. 1. 53 ‘Petrol ration cut hits film transport’, To-Day’s Cinema, vol. 57, no. 4636 (1941), p. 1; ‘How the studios save 4,000,000 feet a year’, To-Day’s Cinema, vol. 55, no. 4895 (1943), p. 9; ‘Valve famine closes some cinemas’, To-Day’s Cinema, vol. 57, no. 4667 (1942), p. 3. 54 ‘Operators and reserved list: new deputation’, To-Day’s Cinema, vol. 54, no. 4376 (1940), p. 1; ‘Cinemas asked to house homeless’, To-Day’s Cinema, vol. 54, no. 4420 (1940), p. 11. See also Noa Steimatsky, ‘The Cinecittà refugee camp (1944–1950)’, October, no. 128 (2009), pp. 22–50. 55 KA, A 2776, ‘Silver Recovery Department, 25 May 1943’. 56 Richard Farmer, The Food Companions: Cinema and Consumption in Wartime Britain, 1939–45 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2011), p. 222. 57 KA, A 3332, ‘Kodak, Limited – London, summary of profit and loss statements for 13 periods ended 27th December, 1941’; KA A 332, ‘Kodak, Limited – London, accounts for 13 periods – 1944’. 58 NA, BT 64/85, ‘Notes to coated cine film requirements’. Calculations in square feet probably reflected the fact that the Board of Trade’s accounting included stock for still photography, several forms of which (such as industrial X-ray film) were cut into large sheets. 59 KA, A 3332, ‘Kodak, Limited – London, summary of profit and loss statements for 13 periods ended 26th December, 1942’. 60 NARA, RG 208 (Records of the Office of War Information), Records of the Historian Relating to the Overseas Branch, 1942–45, Overseas Branch – Motion Picture Bureau, box 2, entry 6B, ‘Overseas Motion Picture Bureau Position Request, First Quarter Fiscal Year 1945, June 6, 1944: Distribution Division’. 61 NA, BT 64/85, ‘Notes to Coated Cine Film Requirements’. 62 Archiv Ministerstva zahraničních věcí, Prague (hereafter A MZV), fond LA-O, 1939–45, Osvěta-filmy, k. 249, sl. Osvěta – filmy – různé, 1943, ‘Draft Circular: Allocation of Stock for Allied Government Films, 9 August 1943’. On exile-government media institutions in London, see also Alice Lovejoy, ‘“A treacherous tightrope”: the US Office of War Information, psychological warfare and film distribution in liberated Europe’, in Grieveson and Wasson (eds), Cinema’s Military-Industrial Complex, pp. 305–20. 63 As Nicholas Pronay and Jeremy Croft note of the Board of Trade–Ministry of Information relationship, this occurred despite the fact that ‘it was clearly understood […] that it was unconstitutional to use the powers of war materials for such [censorship] purposes’. Pronay and Croft, ‘British film censorship and propaganda policy during the Second World War’, in James Curran and Vincent Porter (eds), British Cinema History (Totowa, NJ: Barnes and Noble Books, 1983), p. 171.) 64 A MZV, fond LA 1939 – 1945, Osvěta – filmy, k. 251, ‘Fischl to Sarment, April 6, 1945’; A MZV, fond LA, 1939 – 1945, Osvěta – filmy, k. 251, ‘Sarment to Fischl’. 65 On OWI’s relationship to ‘civilian’ film industries, see Lovejoy, ‘“A treacherous tightrope”’. 66 NARA, RG 208, box 2, entry 6B, folder March ’45, ‘OB Motion Picture Bureau Outpost Report, March 1945’. 67 NARA, RG 208, box 2, entry 6B, folder March ’45, ‘USIS – Film Section’. 68 KA, A 3204, ‘Report on CIOS Trip no 313 to Leipzig Area Leaving United Kingdom on May 29th, 1945’. According to this report, Gevaert’s Brussels plant had produced film stock for Agfa throughout the war. However, its Westerloo plant produced nitrocellulose for the Luftwaffe. United States Congress, and United States Congress Senate Committee on Military Affairs, Elimination of German Resources for War (US Govt Print. Off., 1945). 69 NARA, RG 208, box 2, entry 6B, folder June, 1945, ‘29 May 1945 – AFHQ (Alexander for Barnes) to AGWAR, etc.’; NARA, RG 208, box 2, entry 6B, folder June, 1945, ‘26 May 45 – Notes on Film Committee Meeting AC Bldg, Rome’; NARA, RG 208, box 2, entry 6B, folder August, 1945, ‘Memorandum to T. L. Barnard from Louis Lober, Subject: Non-Theatrical Operations’, 28 August 1945. 70 Gimbel, Science, Technology and Reparations, pp. 7, 66. 71 Raymond Stokes, Divide and Prosper: The Heirs of I. G. Farben under Allied Authority 1945–1951 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1988), 33, 38, 42. 72 Gimbel, Science, Technology and Reparations, 105. 73 KA, A 3024, ‘Report on CIOS Trip no. 313 to Leipzig Area Leaving United Kingdom on May 29th, 1945’. 74 Gimbel, Science, Technology and Reparations, pp. 16, 91. 75 See KA A 3024, BIOS Overall Report No. 19, The Photographic Industry in Germany during the period 1939–1945 (London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1949). 76 Sarah Street, Colour Films in Britain: The Negotiation of Innovation 1900–55 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), p. 108. See also Barbara Flueckiger, ‘Timeline of historical film colors’, accessed 6 March 2019. After 1964, in East Germany, Agfacolor was known as Orwo. 77 Ansco had become an Agfa affiliate in 1928 and was seized by the US government as enemy property in 1941. See Adrian Klein, Colour Cinematography (London: Chapman and Hall, 1951), p. 26, and Dudley Andrew, ‘The post-war struggle for colour’, in Teresa de Lauretis and Stephen Heath (eds), The Cinematic Apparatus (London: Macmillan, 1980), p. 70. However, Andrew writes that Gevaert, which had worked for Agfa during the war, ‘did not have enough ready capital in 1945 to exploit the advantage in research they enjoyed’. 78 Norman Naimark, The Russians in Germany: A History of the Soviet Zone of Occupation, 1945–1949 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), p. 206. See also Paul Maddrell, Spying on Science: Western Intelligence in Divided Germany 1945–1961 (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2006). 79 Firms located in the Soviet Zone included Agfa Wolfen, IG Landsberg, Deutsche Celluloid Fabrik, Schering-Kahlbum, Zeiss-Ikon, Köbig, Haubold and Krupp-Berdorf. KA, A 3024, ‘German Photographic Film Base Industry, Final Report, No. 262’. On Wolfen’s role in the Agfa company, see Silke Fengler, Entwickelt und fixiert: zur Unternehmens- und Technikgeschichte der deutschen Fotoindustrie, dargestellt am Beispiel der Agfa AG Leverkusen und des VEB Filmfabrik Wolfen (1945–1995) (Essen: Klartext, 2009). 80 This followed a failed MAP attempt to enter the Soviet Zone in late summer 1945. KA, A 3024, ‘Further Investigation of AGFA Filmfabrik (Photographic Plant), Wolfen, BIOS Final Report No. 1355’. 81 Ibid. While the Wolfen plant’s supervisors – Kalischkin, Mumzhiev, and Iordanskij – were part of the Soviet military government, all came from the Soviet film industry, and their work was undertaken, in Silke Fengler’s words, ‘on behalf of the Soviet Ministry of Cinematography’. Fengler, Entwickelt und fixiert, p. 98. 82 Fengler, Entwickelt und fixiert, pp. 100, 99. The dismantling took place between March and May and between October and December 1946. All of the stock the plant produced was already being sent to the Soviet Union. NA, FO 1031/60, ‘Intelligence Reports from Berlin, vol. II (November 1946 to January 1947)’; ‘Rohfilm’, accessed 6 March 2019. 83 NA, FO 1031/61, ‘Special Intelligence Report No. 11 (1 September to 31 October 1947)’; ‘Rohfilm’; NA, FO 1031/61, ‘Dr F. Kleinschrod’; NA, FO 1031/59, ‘Special Intelligence Report No. 2 (1 October 1946 to 5 November 1946)’. On the history of Soviet colour film, see Valérie Pozner, La Vie en fleur. Les débuts du cinema en couleur au pays des Soviets (1930–1950) (forthcoming), and Jamie Miller, ‘Soviet cinema, 1929–41: the development of industry and infrastructure’, Europe-Asia Studies, vol. 58, no. 1 (2006), pp. 103–24. 84 NA, FO 1031/60, ‘Special Intelligence Report No. 3 (1–31 January 1947)’. 85 Stalin’s ‘Two camps’ speech was given on 9 February 1946, and a month later, Churchill gave his ‘Iron curtain’ speech. 86 Pozner, La Vie en fleur. 87 KA, A 3024, ‘Further Investigation of AGFA Filmfabrik (Photographic Plant), Wolfen, Near Leipzig, BIOS Final Report No. 1355’. 88 KA, A 3024, ‘German Photographic Film Base Industry, Final Report, No. 262’. 89 See also Ndiaye, Nylon and Bombs. 90 NA, BT 64/85, ‘Notes to Coated Cine Film Requirements’. 91 Deborah Cowen, The Deadly Life of Logistics: Mapping Violence in Global Trade (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2014), pp. 3, 1. 92 See, for instance, Sean Cubitt, Finite Media: Environmental Implications of Digital Technologies (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017); Parikka, Geology; Nicole Starosielski, ‘Thermocultures of geological media’, Cultural Politics, vol. 12, no. 3 (2016), pp. 293–309; Sy Taffel, ‘Towards an ethical electronics? Ecologies of Congolese conflict minerals’, Westminster Papers in Communication and Culture, vol. 10, no. 1 (2015), pp. 18–33. 93 Hercock, Silver by the Ton, p. 71. 94 Gimbel, Science, Technology and Reparations, p. 106. 95 Eastman Kodak’s annual report for 1946 notes that silver for the US Treasury must be 99.9 per cent pure, but ‘only silver that is at least 99.97 per cent pure is processed into the silver nitrate that goes into film emulsion’. Kodak was, in fact, the USA’s largest buyer of silver, second only to the Treasury. KA, A 2866, Forty-Fourth Annual Report of the Eastman Kodak Company for the Year Ending December 28, 1946, p. 28. On the film industry’s use of silver, see also Grieveson, Cinema and the Wealth of Nations, p. 20. © The Author(s) 2019. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of Screen. All rights reserved This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model) TI - Celluloid geopolitics: film stock and the war economy, 1939–47 JF - Screen DO - 10.1093/screen/hjz009 DA - 2019-06-01 UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/celluloid-geopolitics-film-stock-and-the-war-economy-1939-47-ZnKd0fCsmV SP - 224 VL - 60 IS - 2 DP - DeepDyve ER -