In this bonus episode, cohosts Jason Christian and Paul T. Klein interview the film historian Dr. Alice Lovejoy about her scholarship and her new book, Tales of Militant Chemistry: The Film Factory in a Century of War. The book examines the long and storied histories of the film manufacturing giants Kodak and Agfa and provides a materailst analysis of their involved in US and Germany imperialism around the world.

Alice Lovejoy is a media and cultural historian and comparatist whose research examines governmental and institutional media, and media technologies, in transnational perspective. Her book Tales of Militant Chemistry: The Film Factory in a Century of War (University of California Press, August 2025) is a history of film and the factories where it was made. Shifting focus between the United States, Germany, the Belgian Congo, and the Soviet Union, the book considers the military, colonial, and environmental implications of film's entanglement with the chemical industry.

Lovejoy's 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 is also at work on a project studying the intertwined histories of postwar children's television and film institutions—among them, Yugoslavia's "Film and Child" Commission, Iran's Institute for the Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults (Kanoon), East Germany's National Center for Children's Film and Television, Czechoslovakia's Center for Films for Children and Youth, and UNESCO's International Centre for Films for Children and Young People. With Mari Pajala, she co-edited Remapping Cold War Media: Institutions, Infrastructures, Translations (Indiana University Press, 2022), and she has published widely on East European, particularly Czech and Slovak, film and literature.

Lovejoy has worked as a film critic, curator, and filmmaker, including as an editor at Film Comment magazine.
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We love to give recommendations on the podcast, so here are ours for this episode:

• Alice recommends the Norwegian television series Occupied (2015–2020), created by Jo Nesbø
• Paul recommends the 2016 documentary Dawson City: Frozen Time, directed by Bill Morrison
• Jason recommends Walter Rodney's 1972 book How Europe Underdeveloped Africa

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Like and subscribe to Cold War Cinema, and don't forget to leave us a review! Want to continue the conversation? Drop us a line at any time at coldwarcinemapod@gmail.com.

To stay up to date on Cold War Cinema, follow along at coldwarcinema.com, or find us online on Bluesky @coldwarcinema.com or on X at @Cold_War_Cinema.

For more from your hosts and guest:

Follow Alice on Instagram @alice__lovejoy, or on Bluesky @alicelovejoy.bsky.social,

Follow Jason on Bluesky @JasonAChristian.bsky.social, or on Letterboxed at @exilemagic.

Follow Anthony on Bluesky @tonyjballas.bsky.social, on X @tonyjballas, or on Letterboxed @tonyjballas.

Follow Paul on Bluesky @ptklein.com, or on Letterboxed @ptklein. Paul also writes about movies at www.howotreadmovies.com

Logo by Jason Christian

Theme music by DYAD (Charles Ballas and Jeremy Averitt).

Happy listening!

On this episode, the Cold War Cinema crew is joined by director, writer, and producer Adam McKay to discuss John Frankenheimer's paranoid, psychological thriller Seconds (1966). McKay has written and directed many celebrated feature films such as Anchorman (2004), Talladega Nights (2006), Step Brothers (2008), The Big Short (2015), Vice (2018), Don't Look Up (2021), and numerous others. Prior to this, McKay was a founding member of the Upright Citizens Brigade in the early 1990s, and head writer for Saturday Night Live from 1995 to 2001. In 2019, McKay founded Hyperobject Industries, and has served as the executive producer of HBO's Succession (2019–2023), Game Theory with Bomani Jones (2022–2023), and, most recently, The Chair Company (2025) starring Tim Robinson.

Synopsis of the film: Middle-aged banker Arthur Hamilton (John Randolph) feels trapped in a life that has calcified into routine and regret. When he receives a phone call from an old friend who he thought was long dead, and a shadowy organization known simply as "the Company" offers him the ultimate second chance, he fakes his death, and undergoes radical surgery to assume a new identity. Reborn as artist Tony Wilson (Rock Hudson), he's given youth, wealth, and access to a new bohemian lifestyle on a seaside in Malibu. While his transformation at first feels intoxicating, the promise of freedom begins to fray and ultimately fracture. As Tony struggles to inhabit his new self, paranoia creeps in and the illusion of choice gives way to something far more unsettling.

Shot in stark black-and-white with disorienting lenses and claustrophobic compositions, Seconds is less a sci-fi fantasy than an existential nightmare—an unsettling meditation on identity, conformity, and the seductive lie that starting over can save us from who we are.

On this episode we discuss: McKay's work as a comedian, comedy writer, and filmmaker, his political and cinematic influences, the paranoid style of filmmaking in the 1960s, satire, the looming specter of climate apocalypse, why the world needs a Ho Chi Minh biopic, and much more.

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We love to give book or film recommendations on the podcast, so here are ours for this episode:

Adam: Jafar Panahi's It Was Just an Accident (2025) and Andrey Zvyagintsev's Leviathan (2014)

Paul: A Little Solitaire: John Frankenheimer and American Film by Murray Pomerance and R. Barton Palmer

Anthony Ballas: The Black Race by Ho Chi Minh by Dai Trang Nguyen and "Ho Chi Minh and Black Liberation" by Gerald Horne and Anthony Ballas.

Jason: John Frankenheimer's Seven Days in May (1964).

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Like and subscribe to Cold War Cinema, and don't forget to leave us a review! Want to continue the conversation? Drop us a line at any time at coldwarcinemapod@gmail.com.

To stay up to date on Cold War Cinema, follow along at coldwarcinema.com, or find us online on Bluesky @coldwarcinema.com or on X at @Cold_War_Cinema.

For more from your hosts and guest:

Follow Adam on Instagram @mr.ghostpanther, or on Bluesky @ghostpanther.bsky.social,

Follow Jason on Bluesky @JasonAChristian.bsky.social, or on Letterboxed at @exilemagic.

Follow Anthony on Bluesky @tonyjballas.bsky.social, on X @tonyjballas, or on Letterboxed @tonyjballas.

Follow Paul on Bluesky @ptklein.com, or on Letterboxed @ptklein. Paul also writes about movies at www.howotreadmovies.com

Logo by Jason Christian

Theme music by DYAD (Charles Ballas and Jeremy Averitt).

Happy listening!

The Cold War Cinema team, Jason Christian, Anthony Ballas, and Paul T. Klein, return to discuss Mikhail Kalatozov's 1959 drama Letter Never Sent.

Synopsis of the film: Four geologists descend on the Siberian Taiga. Over the course of a backbreaking summer sifting minerals in the icy, rushing waters of boreal rivers, the group–the experienced guide, Konstantin, a young couple, Andrei and Tanya, and the brooding Sergei–search for diamond deposits to enrich themselves and their country. Throughout, Konstanin writes an extended letter home to his wife Vera. Sergei, too, writes a letter, though never meant to be read, expressing his jealousy and Andrei and love for Tanya. When a massive forest fire breaks out, however, the group must work together to survive, not only the blaze, but the ravages of the elements and the fast-approaching and deadly Siberian winter…

On this episode we discuss:

• The unbelievable production of a film shot on location in the USSR taiga.
• How the film reflects the tenents of socialist realism in complex and creative ways.
• How the film shares many of the sensibilites of the western genre and pairs nicely with John Ford's The Searchers in this regard.
• The basic theoretical aspects of scientific socialism and how the filmmaker uses them to shape the film's narrative and themes.
• The allegorical use of a diamond in the Soviet context versus the same in the capitalist West.

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We love to give book or film recommendations on the podcast, so here are ours for this episode:

Paul: Two "Northwesterns": Bend of the River (Anthony Mann, 1952) and River of No Return (Otto Preminger, 1954)

Tony: Tacky's Revolt: The Story of an Atlantic Slave War by Vincent Brown

Jason: Nail in the Boot (Mikhail Kalatozov, 1931) and Socialism: Utopian and Scientific by Friedrich Engels

Also, check out this fascinating interview on the Actually Existing Socialism podcast with the scholar Sardana Nikolaeva, who studies the Indigenous peoples of the northern regions of the Soviet Union (and present-day Russia) and their connection to the diamond mines that are imagined in the film.

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Like and subscribe to Cold War Cinema, and don't forget to leave us a review! Want to continue the conversation? Drop us a line at any time at coldwarcinemapod@gmail.com.

To stay up to date on Cold War Cinema, follow along at coldwarcinema.com, or find us online on Bluesky @coldwarcinema.com or on X at @Cold_War_Cinema.

For more from your hosts and guest:

• Follow Aspen on Letterboxed at @aspenballas.
• Follow Jason on Bluesky at @JasonAChristian.bsky.social, on X at @JasonAChristian, or on Letterboxed at @exilemagic.
• Follow Anthony on Bluesky at @tonyjballas.bsky.social, on X at @tonyjballas, or on Letterboxed at @tonyjballas.
• Follow Paul on Bluesky at @ptklein.com, or on Letterboxed at @ptklein. Paul also writes about movies at www.howotreadmovies.com

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Logo by Jason Christian

Theme music by DYAD (Charles Ballas and Jeremy Averitt).

Happy listening!