The Atomic Cafe Video Meeting

Michael Bass

Intro

• The Documentary Form/Mode
• Rhetorical opposed to Categorical Form? Observational, Reflexive, Interactive, and Poetic Mode?
• Narrator?
• The Atomic Cafe (Rafferty, Rafferty, & Loader, 1982) and Nostalgia?
• The Atomic Cafe and Postmodernism? Hauntology? Monstrosity?
• “Fiftiesness”
• Compilation filmmaking as “pure” or “purest” and most underutilized of all film forms…
• Soviet montage (Eisenstein and Vertov in particular)
• Propaganda
• Cynical point of view?
• Is the film “hopeless”?
• Relationship to the present?

Beattie: Compilation Documentary

• Filmmaker as collector and editor
• Newsreels, TV programs, government produced films, instructional films, home movies, fiction films, etc.
• Devoid of interviews and voice-over narration (omniscient narrator, or “Voice of God”)
• Availability of, and access to, source footage
• Some topics may be changed and/or ignored if lack of footage is found…
• May need to use a generic shot, which symbolically connotes a referent and changes the tone…
• Music and sound effects
• Denotation vs. connotation?
• Juxtaposition, counterposition, and oppositional reframing
• Instructive (didactic) and agitational (like Eisenstein, Shub, and Vertov)
• Re-Presenting history...
• Authenticity through ACTUAL footage (damaged, scratched, water-marked, etc.)
• Voice-Over as fascist technique, assumes the audience are idiots, etc.

Wiener: Omniscient & Unreliable Narrators

• Today’s form of historical documentary: talking heads, historical footage, narrator (often a star)
• Voice-over as voice of meaning and explainer of the significance of the visual
• Lack of confidence in the material - film becomes “illustrated lecture”
• Atomic Cafe doesn’t need narrator
• Meaning through editing and juxtaposition
• Meaning more powerful, compelling, and memorable this way
• Atomic Cafe, instead, has “dozens of narrators,” all of which are problematic
• They all speak with the trappings of authority, but each represents “unreliable narrator”
• Most are not telling the “truth” (with a few exceptions)
• No omniscient voice to tell viewers what to think, though it doesn’t necessarily let the viewers come to their own conclusions
• “The message is: do not believe what the government says about nuclear war being winnable”
• [Is this problematic…?]
• Loader: Atomic Cafe as “compilation verite” film
• 80s context - Reagan-era nuclear arms rhetoric

Titus: Old Footage Through New Lenses

• Written in the 80s
• Interest in nuclear warfare and weapons decreased in 60s and 70s, paying more attention to the “immediate threat of Haight-Ashbury, Vietnam, and Watergate”
• 80s as rebirth of public outrage over nuclear power, warfare, and weapons
• Other 80s Atomic films
• No Place to Hide (Johnson & Bird, 1981) - narrated by Martin Sheen
• Modern viewer doesn’t know “whether to laugh or cry as he looks with a new perspective on information he accepted from a source he trusted only a few years hence”
• Propaganda films primarily sponsored by Atomic Energy Commission, Federal Civil Defense Administration, and differing branches of the Armed Forces
• Three distinct messages in these films: Education, likelihood of atomic confrontation and need to be prepared, and capitalizing on fear
• Ironically, all these films are now being used to oppose proliferation of nuclear arms...

Rizvi: Looking Back at Nuclear Paranoia

• Pilot of Nagasaki expressed he was thrilled by the whole experience toward the beginning of the film
• “The scene canonizes domination to mirror the modernist aesthetics of desublimation” (47)
• “Film Irony”: image and sound contradict each other through a process of compilation aimed at decontextualizing, and recontextualizing through expose quotation or change of immediate context of shots for the purpose of reinterpretation

Glass: Review

• Rosenbergs’ execution as metaphor for the film and that time period
• The film’s cynicism is both strong and weak point of the film
• Cynicism as the ideological cement of the film
• Audience as hip and leftist, leaning towards jaded and punk
• Associative montage
• Compilation filmmaking similar to the dream process: piecing together bits of information according to previously unconscious organizing principles
• Compilation films as “purest” and most underutilized of film forms
• Resurrection of history while simultaneously creating something fresh
• Narrative, chronological order to the film
• The film works best at a political level when it strips away the self-congratulatory veneer of military men, politicians, and religious pseudo-moralists
• “Culture of the Bomb”