Atomic: Living in Dread and Promise

The documentary tells the nuclear age using archive footage alone. There is not a single newly shot frame, and on the soundtrack there is only music. What accompanies it is the score Mogwai wrote for the film. The images take in protest marches, the tension of the Cold War, Chernobyl and Fukushima. But the account does not look only at fear. The visual beauty of the atomic world is inside the film as well, and so is what x-rays and magnetic resonance opened up in medicine. The material is arranged by impression rather than in order of date. Mark Cousins builds the nuclear age as both nightmare and dream. This seventy one minute British documentary was completed in 2015.